By RICK BRAGG

          NEW ORLEANS -- In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where
          one-inch-thin marble headstones bow to the dirt or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives
          to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure
          he got the flowers just right.

          Cobb, 75, first pounded the dirt of the family plot as smooth as he could with the flat of his shovel,
          then, with his hands, scooped a hollow place just big enough to root a small clutch of white flowers.

          "My mother," he said, in explanation. "Mary. I like to see her grave looking good. Nothing else I can
          do for her."

          Her headstone bears other names. Here, in this obscure cemetery in a city that lists its graveyards in
          tourist guidebooks because of their beauty and history, the dead are housed not in ornate crypts but
          buried in the soil, the bones of generations -- six, eight, more -- mingling in a single hole.

          "I got a daughter in here, too," Cobb said. "She was 12, no, she was 7. Got hit by a car." He poured
          some water on the flowers, perfectly straight, and after a little while he looked up, embarrassed.

          "Now," he said, "why can't I recall that child's name?"

          Then, as if in penance, he went back to his knees and fussed some more with the little rectangle of
          dirt in Holt Cemetery, where his family, too many to recall, sleep.

          Sunday was All Saints' Day, a day to honor the dead, and in New Orleans this Roman Catholic
          holiday is embraced by Protestants, Jews, everyone, it seems. People bring food, sit in the shade
          and visit in the long, granite rows of old and new crypts, what people here call cities of the dead.
          Because the water table is only a few feet beneath the surface, it is necessary to inter most people
          above ground -- everyone except the poor, who must rest in the muck.

          Marble and granite are expensive, but dirt is just dirt. Here in Holt Cemetery, established as a
          boneyard for paupers in 1879, people like Cobb cannot change the fact that, in death as in life,
          people with money can sleep easier. But all around this ragged place on this day for the dead are
          signs of love, honor and respect, signs that rival anything the richer people do in their manicured
          cities of fresh-cut flowers on polished stone.

          If richer, older cemeteries are a record of New Orleans society, Holt Cemetery is a symbol of its
          potholed streets, its peeling shotgun houses, its un-air-conditioned churches, bingo halls, blue-collar
          social clubs and beer joints.

          Just a few steps from where Cobb, a retired truck driver, knelt by his mother and daughter,
          75-year-old Luella Marshall limped slowly away from a small but brand-new brass headstone
          inscribed with her husband's name. A young man, one of her great-nephews, held her hand,
          steadying her.

          "If my husband was the one living, I know he'd be out here today, seeing about me," said Mrs.
          Marshall, whose husband died last year from a blood clot.

          The gleaming headstone -- "Edward Marshall, U.S. Army, World War II, Born Oct. 7, 1927, Died
          June 27, 1997" -- tells only a little about him. In the hot sun of the afternoon -- the only shade here is
          from a few oaks, gnarled with age, shrouded in Spanish moss but fed by soil enriched with an untold
          bounty of bodies -- she told the things about him that mattered.

          "He was a beautiful man," Mrs. Marshall said. "He treated me like a baby. If we was ever in the
          house, we was in the same room, always together. If I washed the clothes, he'd put them on the line.
          If we cooked, he'd cook one thing and I'd cook another thing, just so we could be in the kitchen."

          Her arthritis is so bad now, she said, it is hard to tend the graves right, to make this annual trek to
          pull weeds and smooth the ground over her husband and other people she loves. But Mrs. Marshall,
          who spent her lifetime caring for other people's children and ailing loved ones as what she calls "a
          sitter," swears she will find a way to care a little while longer for the man who made life sweet.

          "As long as I can put one foot down in front of the other, I will be out here to visit my husband," she
          said.

          Her husband's marker was designed to be laid flat on the ground, but she has it propped up, so
          people can see it better.

          New Orleans, as poets and other intellectuals have often written, has seen more death than most
          other American cities, perhaps because it predates them, because disease, floods, storms and war
          have ravaged the city since its beginning, in the early 1700s.

          Holt is a relatively new cemetery, having been built in the late part of the 19th century, but here are
          thousands of graves and uncounted bodies buried one atop the other. People tending the graves said
          a family has to wait at least two years before burying someone in the same plot in the city-owned
          graveyard.

          "You can put them in, as their bones decay," said Sidney Scott, as he painstakingly used gold paint
          and a tiny brush to trace the names of a faded, weather-worn headstone. "Some people call it a
          potter's field, but that's not what it is." That would mean the people buried here were unwanted,
          forgotten, and that would be wrong, said Scott, a maintenance man at a church.

          "Momma and Daddy taught me to love," he said, when asked why he came out each year on All
          Saints' Day to make these graves look nice, to make them look remembered.

          Harry Scott, his father, died in 1958. Since then, Scott's father has been joined in that grave by a
          grandmother, two brothers and a niece. Because almost every inch of ground is used, only the
          people whose families are buried here can bury others here.

          "I think they like it," Scott said, as he finished painting in the names. He was referring to the dead.
          "At least, no one's come back and told me they didn't." He smiled at that.

          People used to do more, on All Saints' Day and the days leading up to it, said Lillie Lewis, 72, and
          her sister, Ara Dozier, 74. They came to tend the grave that holds their mother, two grandmothers, a
          brother, another brother's first wife and "two babies."

          "The Lord took them," Ms. Dozier said.

          She promised her mother, before her death, she would tend the graves on All Saints' Day.

          "Momma used to drive us here, and we'd have a picnic and stay all day," Ms. Dozier said. The
          cemetery would be crowded with people, eating, talking, enjoying life as they remembered the lives
          of the dead.

          People still do, but not as much. "They come but they don't stay," Ms. Dozier said.

          She remembered a sweet potato vine that used to grow here. She wondered if it was still there.

          Like many people here, there seemed no sadness in them. Mourning is not what All Saints' Day is
          for, people said, certainly not here, where people leave behind bingo cards and even a loved one's
          favorite beer -- emptied, of course -- on the graves.

          As the two elderly sisters walked to their cars, they joked like children.

          "She," Mrs. Lewis said of her sister, "is an old maid schoolteacher."

          "She," Ms. Dozier said of her sister, "is not right, and has been that way all her life."

          Because the burials here have far outnumbered the changes to the headstones, because it is
          impossible to tell where one grave ends and another begins, there is no telling how many people have
          been put here and forgotten. Once, stillborn babies and even body parts from surgeries were buried
          here, a less than dignified place, some people might believe, for a loved one.

          But in this place where bones and memories mingle, where people work so hard to smooth the dirt
          and get flowers to grow straight and sometimes just remember a forgotten name, the dignity is in not
          letting the weeds and complacency claim the simple plots.

          "It's one thing," said Cleveland Cobb, "I look forward to."
 
 

                     Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company