When someone dies without family or friends to pay for their burial the responsibility often falls upon the state.
"Dead Time on Hart Island" is a warm, thoughtful ghost story written by author Barbara Krasnoff and published in the current issue of Space and Time Magazine (#138). The story takes place on a real world potters field located at the west end of Long Island Sound where for decades the unwanted and forgotten dead have been stacked atop one another in long cut trenches.
Interred on Hart Island are the indigent, the stillborn, the unclaimed, and the long forgotten. When the AIDS epidemic hit New York, Hart Island embraced many of its victims. Today as the Coronavirus kills hundreds of thousands, Hart Island is in steady use. There are even remains of confederate prisoners of war nestled in that soil.
The main character of Barbara's story is an inmate at Rikers Island Penitentiary. He is part of the detail of prisoners who work the island and inter the simple wooden coffins into the earth. It also happens that he converses with the dead.
"Dead Time at Hart Island" is one of those stories that feels as much about the setting as it is about the characters and events. Understanding the island and its history give weight to the story as it lays the foundations for the heavy themes which underlie an otherwise brief and lighthearted tale.
Lucky for me there was plenty of information and pictures of the island available online and I was able to incorporate real things like buildings, machinery, and prisoner outfits into the illustration. For example, the bucket the central figure sits upon says "Harts Island" with an "s." Several of the reference photos I found included prisoners wearing jackets with this phrase hand painted on the back. I like what a little detail like that misspelling says about the attention, or lack thereof, the prison system gave to the island and it's workers.
Photos of Hart Island also informed the use of numbers in the illustration. In the real world numbered markers are scattered all over the island to denote mass grave sites. Each pit has a number as does each coffin. The coffins are stacked three or four high using the numbers to identify and catalog them.
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| Sketching to find the right feeling. |
While the numbers I chose for the illustration were random, they are anything but insignificant. At The Hart Island Project (https://www.hartisland.net/burial_records/search) you'll find a webpage where you can actually search these plot numbers and see information about the people buried there. All of the marker numbers in the illustration are also on that website. You can type them into the search and see the names and sometimes personal information, pictures, and reminiscence of the people buried in that plot.
Without The Hart Island Project, a non-profit labor of love, most of those souls buried on the island would be forgotten completely. Just numbers in a field and on a page in a dusty log book.
The main character of the story notes several times that he expects to be buried on the island when he dies.
So in the illustration the numbers on the markers, the coffin, and the character's jacket are meant to be a visual association both about this man's fate with the island and a statement about the parallel dehumanization of the discarded dead and the state prisoners who lay them to rest.
As an added statement, the one thing in the illustration that actually does have a name is the large industrialized machine; “CASE” being a real brand of power shovel.
Often I wonder if it's better to reveal secrets or leave them to be discovered on their own. In this illustration there's a character modeled after American author Dawn Powell (who was half Irish and who's remains are actually interred on Hart Island). Another character has a hint of Billy Porter in his style. There's a nativity feel to the cluster of figures in the upper half of the frame for which only my subconscious can take credit (this would've been enormously more amusing if the character's name had been Jesus). The opening notes were written by Sondheim.
The penguins are there for Barb.
