Spreading across a low hill a few miles west of Leesville is a small country graveyard next to a little red brick church. Nestled among the roughly 1,400 burial plots there, near the top of the hill, is a simple granite marker, set flush in the ground. The two words engraved on it are maddeningly cryptic: "Unknown Negro."

For years, I have been fascinated by the marker, and last year, I tried to find out everything I could about it. There wasn't much. No one that I talked to -- even locals with long connections to the cemetery -- knew much about it. It had simply always been there.

On Saturday, I was back to attend Castor Cemetery's annual "Homecoming" in the hopes that I might learn more about the marker and the person -- or people -- buried there.

The night before the event, a new clue surfaced: My mother-in-law, who has family buried at Castor, had dug up a 30-year-old booklet about the cemetery that said the first three people buried there were Black, but that "it was unknown if they were male or female, nor adults or children."

That would put them in the era around the end of the Civil War. Were they enslaved? Recently freed? Travelers? There is no way to know.

The next morning, I sat in the small sanctuary for the ceremony, which could best be described as a cross between a church service and a family reunion. The roughly 75 people who attended ranged in age from 6 to 94 -- though most were closer to the latter -- and almost all of them had family members buried in the haphazard rows.

Through the 90-minute ceremony, people stood up to recount some aspect of the cemetery's history. Some of it was sad: A speaker read aloud the names of the folks who had been buried since the 2024 homecoming. Some of it was practical: The cemetery needs a new fence, and sometimes deals with sinkholes.

There was humor, too. One man recounted the story of his aunt, whose leg is buried in Castor. The rest of her is buried in Hicks, several miles to the east.

"At the great resurrection day, there's going to be a joining together!" he said to guffaws from the audience.

After the service, as folks moved to the fellowship hall for a potluck meal, I found 87-year-old Harles Smart. Harles' ancestors were among the founders of the cemetery, and he knows more of the local lore than anyone else.

As we trudged among the graves up the hill toward the marker, Harles told me what he knew about the Unknown Negro grave, which was very little. He was aware of the three-person theory, he said. Perhaps, he mused, they were among those who harvested sap from pine trees for turpentine, an industry that often used enslaved labor.

Harles did know who had put the granite marker down. It was him, he said, because the old concrete one had faded.

I asked when he put it there. He couldn't remember. "Sometime after 1994" was as close as he could get.

We chatted for a moment more, then headed back down the hill, through the chain link fence and into the church's fellowship hall, where we grabbed plates and sat down to eat. We didn't talk about the marker after that.

I get it. The homecoming is a happy event, a way to remember and celebrate the past, not to revive what might be uncomfortable questions. But a walk through the cemetery itself is a reminder that, like each of its roughly 1,400 inhabitants, the cemetery's history is complex and layered, with good memories and bad, inspirations and disquieting events.

It's there, scattered among the polished granite monuments and others that are faded, cracked and broken, that the full measure of its story is felt. There are graves for those who lived long, full lives and graves of infants who died after a few hours, days, weeks or months. There are Confederate graves, and even one Union soldier is buried there.

The grave of the Unknown Negro is the only one where the race of the person -- or people -- buried is mentioned.

Even so, that burial is as much a part of Castor Cemetery's history as the well-kept ones.

The markers are a silent reminder that, like other country graveyards, Castor has stories to tell. Not all of them are inspiring or funny. Some of them are dispiriting or maddening. Some remembrances spark joy; some fuel somber reflection.

Unknown, yes. But not unimportant.