He grew up in Georgia, Macon and Rockmart. His father was a Tech alum, an insurance agent and a smalltime farmer; his mother, an Agnes Scott graduate, helped her husband with his business. David was sent up to the Darlington School in Rome, then graduated with a degree in industrial management from Georgia Tech in 1963. He met agirl in college—Barbara, another Scottie—and, once he'd paid his duestoUncle Sam, he came back home and married her. Barbara found ajob up in Chattanooga, and he enrolled in the accounting program at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; they bought a little white house in Chattanooga's Shepherd Hills neighborhood, settled in, never left. They bought the house for the closets—Barbara required closets—but the backyard was nice, too, a green lawn stretching out then ascending in a series of terraces, like an amphitheater. David kept it tidy tended to the whole swath of it right up to the chain-link fence that marked the back property line. Every so often he'd climb the stair-stepped slope and do battle with the ivy and weeds that never stopped seeping through the fence from the wooded lot beyond. Standing in his dining room, looking out his big picture window and up at that beautiful backyard, he could see points of a wrought-iron gate and gray crests of tombstones among the dark tangle ofvines and trees at the top ofthe hill.
He knew about the cemetery when he and Barbara bought the house—knew it was up there, at least. The neighbors didn't talk about it much, but he picked up things here and there: It was an African-American cemetery, founded in the 1890s and named Pleasant Garden, effectively abandoned for years. Some of the most prominent members of Chattanooga's post-Reconstruction black community had been buried there, and some of the poorest. There had been money troubles among the owners'families years ago, and someone's great-grandsomething had come into possession ofthe place but didn't seem to want to bother with it anymore. By the time the Youngs moved in, bungalows and cottages like their own lined the cemetery on three sides, dozens of tidy lawns abutting its dark tangle. In time, David began to work his way up the hill, hacking at the reaching fingers of brush and vine, chopping and whacking and uprooting. At first it was retaliation, a prolonged defensive strike to maintain the sovereignty of his own land. But then he pressed farther and farther into the cemetery, farther from his little white house, and it became something else. He was carving out his own paths, dragging away his own debris, uncovering earth— and graves—that hadn't seen the light of day for decades. The place was a wreck, what little he could see of it. Cracked and crumbling tombstones lay scattered around as if they had been back-swiped by a god's impudent
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