Purple Coffins and Cadillac Hearses: The Material Culture of Death and J.C. Oates (Memphis) Funeral Home, 1916-1929.

• In Event: Contesting the American Narrative: African American Burial Spaces, Death Material Culture and Public Memorial

Abstract

The J.C. Oates Funeral ledger documents two trends amidst its records of funeral purchases in Jazz Age Memphis. The first is the high mortality rates among black Memphians, especially among children. The second is a consumer death culture that had profound implications for the South’s racial hierarchies. This paper examines two core purchases: the purchase of expensive coffins, especially those in lavender, and the hearse ride to the cemetery and suggests some ways death material culture became a way to subvert the racial “logic” of the white South. In the case of lavender coffins, typically purchased by maids and housewives, purple was the color of royalty in Protestant theology. At death, black Southerners expected to be at their funerals (all Southerners believed they did not go to heaven until the final shovel of dirt covered their coffin) and those ladies expected to see themselves laid out in that lavender coffin, dressed in silk, and a queen for all to see, including those whites who might attend the funeral. Cadillac hearses were another challenge to racial segregation. In an era when street cars were segregated, the hearse ride to the cemetery was that moment where segregated facilities could be ignored with impunity. Moreover, in Tennessee, it was considered good manners for all other drivers to pull over to let the funeral procession through or for bystanders to doff their hats as it passed by. In death then, not only was the body acknowledged as important, but so, too, were the mourners who drove behind.
This research is funded by a National Institutes of Health grant and is part of a larger project that focuses on life extension practices in the South. By the 1920s, Southern Progressives believed the region’s high mortality rates had to be lowered, in part because it was expensive to die young; life extension became that group of practices that were intended, with minimal success, to lower those rates. By the 1930s, however, the New Deal made life extension a goal and in fact, made living a longer life a right any American citizen should have. With that focus, the stubborn death rates fell in Memphis and throughout the South and funeral directors visited with far less regularity.

Author

• Kristine McCusker, Middle Tennessee State University