The sisters conclude their death and spectacle series with further thoughts on the dead deprived of commemoration.  From the repository of graves on New York City’s Hart Island to the erasure of historic Black cemeteries in the American South, they explore the ways in which human remains are stratified, relegated and discarded in ways that lay bare the injustice of life.

Or, in the case of Body Worlds, forever plastinated and displayed for public view—without their owners’ consent—in what Edward Rothstein described as an act of “aestheticized grotesqueness.”  What makes certain land and bodies sacred (or literally, saintly) while rendering others disposable? What can the living learn from the politics of remembering and forgetting remains? 

Sources cited include Joan Didion’s South and West, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eliza Franklin’s Lost Legacy Project for the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, Susan Sontag's "On Photography," the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, Jacqueline Goldsby’s A Spectacular Secret, Dorothea Lange’s 1956 photographs of California's Berryessa Valley, Marita Sturkin’s “The Aesthetics of Absence,” Seth Freed Wessler’s 2022 ProPublica investigation “How Authorities Erased a Historical Black Cemetery in Virginia,” Robert McFarlane’s 2019 New Yorker piece “The Invisible City Beneath Paris,” Melinda Hunt’s Hart Island Project (www.hartisland.net), Nina Bernstein’s 2016 New York Times piece “Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves,” “Young Ruin” from 99% Invisible, and NPR’s 2006 reporting on ethical concerns over Body Worlds.

Cover photo of Hart Island's common trench burials is by Jacob Riis, 1890.

In this VERY special episode, Ellie and Carrie speak with The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s Heather Gay about her brave and beautiful new memoir “Bad Mormon.” The book chronicles Heather’s journey from a devout Mormon to a disillusioned apostate to an ass-kicking mother, businesswoman and reality star. Born in the covenant—a Mormon flex—Gay grew up determined to prove she was a “good girl” worthy of a spot in the celestial kingdom. But time and time again, her big personality and even bigger ambitions conflicted with the expectations of Mormon womanhood. A BYU education, a mission in Marseille, and a temple marriage to “Mormon royalty” should have strengthened her commitment to the church and its expectations of her. But at long last, Sister Gay came to realize that the church’s love was conditional on her being someone she wasn’t. After her divorce, she found a new “community of misfits” that brought this dissonance into sharp resolve. She was done “performing reality” on the straight and narrow and ready to value her own inherent worth. And that, dear listeners, was Heather’s true destiny.

In part three of their Death and Spectacle series, Carrie and Ellie explore the inequity of American commemoration and how it deprives the marginalized, even in death. They discuss the corrupt dealings behind public works projects such as Lake Eufaula, which led to the forcible removal of native peoples and the flooding of their history. In the context of the discovery of countless children’s remains near residential schools and an official record of 9/11 fatalities that excludes the undocumented, the sisters ask – how do we choose what and who to memorialize? What makes some ground holy and others deserving of desecration or erasure? Who has the right to rest in peace?

Texts discussed include: Edmund Morgan’s “American Slavery, American Freedom,” Jefferson Cowie’s “Freedom’s Dominion,” The 1965 James Baldwin - William F. Buckley Debate, Walter Johnson’s “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850’s,“ Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “The Undocumented Americans,” Jason de Leon’s “The Land of Open Graves”, Alicia Elliott’s short story “Unearth,” and Annette Gordon Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello” and Walter Johnson’s “The Strange Story of Alexina Morrison: Race, Sex, and Resistance in Antebellum Louisiana.”