I never met Peaster Richie. Or any of his descendants (that I know of). I can’t find a passing reference to him in history books, much less a biography devoted to him.
Richie, the grandson of slaves, was one of the countless heroes of the Great Migration who made their way from places like South Carolina to places in the north like Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the early 20th century. He died in 1944, decades before I was born.
In ways we may never fully grasp, he helped create the Pittsburgh I now live in.
The same goes for Josip Maradin, a Croatian immigrant who arrived in the city in 1913 and spent 40 years working in the steel mills and living in mill towns among other immigrants.
I didn’t know either of these men, yet I have thought of them often, as the death toll from covid-19 rises, each day claiming lives like theirs. One in 800 Black Americans. Immigrants. Factory workers.
Richie and Maradin, like so many that we lose every day, lived and died, likely without a mention in the paper, much less a monument to their names.
But their lives mattered.
I discovered the graves of Richie and Maradin in March 2020. As the world began locking down, I began walking regularly in local cemeteries. At first, it was just a way to get some exercise. Then I started looking closely at the names and dates on more hidden tombstones and wondering about these people.
Richie, for example, is buried on a quiet hillside in Allegheny Cemetery, far off the main drags — a section that stands in stark contrast to the palatial memorials to the Pittsburgh elite. Here, the dead are commemorated with flat plaques embedded in the ground — some so overgrown that the names are barely visible. Mamie Black. Dezzie Ray. Olivia.
The historian in me kicked in. One name at a time, I dipped into online archives to learn what I could. I started chronicling some of the stories — mixes of research and reflection — on Instagram (@alleghenyepitaphs). Budwe Abdulla, a Syrian immigrant who owned a barbershop. Rosa Lee Broadus, an Alabama native who worked as a beautician in 1930s Homewood. Benjamin Himmel, a Jewish medical student who died of a perforated ulcer before finishing his degree.
I called it an alt-cemetery tour, Pittsburgh history one tombstone at a time. But I also think of these snippets as love letters to the dead, as odes to people like my parents and relatives who crossed borders and struggled with language and customs in a new land to make our lives better, and whose stories are too easily forgotten.
Richie’s and Maradin’s are just two of those stories.
Peaster Richie and his family arrived in Pittsburgh in 1930. They settled on Mahon Street in the Lower Hill, on a block populated by other recent migrants from the South. Peaster undoubtedly walked down Wylie Avenue. Maybe he bought meat at Lutz’s on his way home from work at Washington Electric. Maybe he even peers out at us from one of Teenie Harris’ photos of the Crawford Grill, which was just a few blocks from his home.
Josip Maradin, too, came to Pittsburgh armed with his dreams and not much else. Maradin moved into a boarding house with other Croatian immigrants. Josip knew the thundering roar of the steel mills — as a furnace charger, a ladle operator and a foundry laborer. The sounds of the mills were the sounds of his livelihood, of his dreams in this new country. But those sounds slowly quieted as Joe began to lose his hearing — little by little — until he was completely deaf, a fate for many steel workers in his day, where protections and safety were not even a thought to those who profited most. His tombstone, in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Cemetery in Millvale, tells us just his name and two years: 1889 and 1971, a hyphen standing for everything in between.
Over the past year, we have been inundated by ever-growing lists of names: the names of the hundreds of thousands who have died of covid in this country, the names of Black men and women slain by police. Say their names, we urge — rightfully. Because it is too easy to forget those names and the stories that they carry. It is too easy to forget that each person contributed to the world we share right now, to the ground on which we stand together.
It is too easy to render their names as numbers in a larger narrative and to forget the specificity, the beauty of their lives. Especially when those names do not carry the markers of value that our society too often celebrates — money, fame, power. But their stories and their contributions are equally as important. If we can begin to honor their deaths, we can also begin the more important work of honoring the lives of those who are still here.
One year after the coronavirus pandemic started, the death toll is some 540,000 and rising. How will we honor those lost over this past year? Maybe, like those who knew and grieved people like Richie and Maradin.
One name at a time, and with love.
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