The Keeper of the Peace : Jean Sanders Struggles to Keep Cemetery a ‘Place of Reverence’ Amid Violence

In Jean Sanders’ office, a prayer or two share wall space with a warning about bounced checks. Sanders is on the phone. “Good afternoon. Angeles Abbey,� she says, in a voice that is not the least bit unctuous.

A mortuary is calling. Sanders, who has fielded hundreds of these calls, duly notes the name of the deceased. Then she asks, “Is this gang-related? What does his body look like? Is he shot or not?�

The death is gang-related. She always asks, she says, because “so often, we’ll have two services here on the same day, one from one side, one from another. And we’re a small cemetery.�

She does not want trouble in Angeles Abbey Memorial Park: “This is a place of peace, but it’s hard to find tranquillity here these days, with the graffiti, the vandalism. . . .�

The stained glass windows of the once-splendid domed mausoleum--a structure said to have been fashioned after the Taj Mahal--have been smashed. Recently, gang members defaced its marble vaults.

Sanders shakes her head. It just doesn’t seem that this should be happening in “a place of reverence.� But the Compton neighborhood has changed in the decade since Sanders arrived at the park to sell plots and markers.

That she stayed, quickly working her way up to vice president and general manager--a rarity for a black woman in the funeral industry--was perhaps foreordained. She is the daughter and granddaughter of men who were in the business of burying.

“When I was 10 or 11,� Sanders recalls, “I’d drive the hearse for the funeral home where Dad worked. In those days people bought insurance because they knew they were going to die. They’d pay pennies into this plan.

“When they died, all you had to do was figure out the amount of money they had and order the appropriate casket. I started doing that when I was 9 or 10.�

That was in Arkadelphia, Ark., where she was born in December, 1945--and where blacks and whites were separate and unequal. Sanders’ Uncle Mel ran the black theater. Her mortician grandfather’s clients were buried in the black cemetery.

When Sanders was 6, her mother died of a heart attack. “It was a very traumatizing experience.� She and the other two youngest of the five siblings were reared largely by grandparents.

Upon graduation from a segregated high school in 1964, becoming a funeral director was “the farthest thing from my mind,� she says. “The only thing I wanted to do was to leave Arkansas, where I felt smothered.�

By then, her father, Grover Johnson, was in Los Angeles, working for a funeral home; she followed him here. (Johnson, 79, is still a funeral director, with House of Winston on Vermont Avenue.)

Sanders studied business administration at Santa Monica College and, while taking UCLA Extension classes, worked in the extension registrar’s office.

She never earned that degree: “I became a ‘60s child. . . . Who needed a degree?� Now, she plans to get it.

With a failed marriage and two children to support, she joined the County Department of Mental Health, working with battered and abused children. A client tragedy--the beating death of a 5-year-old boy--�devastated� her and, in a roundabout way, led her to the funeral business.

She needed a change, needed to regroup. Through a friend, she heard of the opening at Angeles Abbey.

Now state-licensed as a cemetery broker, Sanders, 46, also serves on the eight-member state cemetery board. But the industry was not always welcoming to a black woman. “Even though I had left Arkansas,� Sanders says, “there were still forms of racism and sexism.�

She says, “Women are better with our empathy and caring and follow-through. It might be a little intimidating to those whose follow-through is the dollar sign.�

To gain the respect of her peers, Sanders joined in digging graves. “It’d been a long time since I’d been on a tractor, and the only kind of tractor I’d been on was a turning plow. But I wanted to let the guys know I wasn’t afraid.�

With a staff of only eight, including her son, Darris, 22, who is learning the business, she still has to dig a grave now and then. These days, she rarely works in the crematorium, but she monitors it through closed-circuit TV in her office.

“It keeps everybody honest,� she explains. If a family claims, for example, that a valuable is missing from a body, “I have it on tape that it wasn’t done here.�

Bereaved families stopping by the park might be surprised to find that the person in charge is not a gray-haired man with an overly solicitous Digger O’Dell manner.

Sanders is warm, friendly and hardly somber. (On this day, she is wearing a purple jacket, yellow blouse, vivid floral print skirt and big faux jewelry. Her nails are painted pink.)

Her job, as she sees it, is to help people through their grief. She knows that a slain gang member’s mother is apt to deify him. “After death, everybody’s virtually clean. They place them on a pedestal, even though they were the worst of the worst. It’s sad. They never told them they loved them.�

Jean Sanders is thinking about something she’d told the interviewer a few weeks back. Even though a large part of her job is to console families, she’d said, she could never truly share their grief. It would be presumptuous to tell the bereaved, “I know just how you feel.�

But now, she said, she does know. “I’m the person sitting on the other side of the desk.�

On May 30, her husband of 13 years, Wesley Sanders, 59, died of cancer. Now she knew “the shallowness, the hollowness you feel inside . . . the wondering if you’ve done everything you could have done to preserve this life. What else could you have done to make it better?�

On June 6, Sanders, Compton’s city treasurer, was buried at Angeles Abbey Memorial Park. She planned the service, to the last detail, as she has hundreds of others. For him, she selected the finest casket, of cherrywood.

Sanders says, “I told him I don’t believe in people being dressed up in caskets with no place to go.� So he was dressed in a suit for the viewing but, as they had agreed, he was interred in pajamas and a smoking jacket.

“Someday, I’ll be right there with him,� says Sanders, who has reserved an adjacent crypt.

She has a few wishes of her own, when that time comes. If she died first, she used to tell him, “Make sure I have no rollers and no girdle. I want to be in a nightgown. If I’m old, make it flannel. The younger I am, the frillier you can make it.�

Sometimes, when the security alarm goes off at night, Sanders, who lives nearby, will put her dogs in her car before driving to the cemetery to check things out.

“It’s been a struggle,� she says. “It’s very hurtful to see a cemetery so abused. When I took over, it was just deplorable.�

Sanders shakes her head. It just doesn’t seem that this should be happening, but the neighborhood has changed.

For a time, concurs William H. Smith Jr., president of Harrison-Ross Mortuaries, which owns the park, the problems were “overwhelming. Every time you’d do something, somebody would deface it again.� But under Sanders, whom he describes as “a pretty enthusiastic cemeterian,� he has seen it coming back.

Locked gates and curls of razor wire are only partial deterrents to vandals. Not long ago, a new chain-link fence was installed and, Sanders says, “they came that same evening and cut it.�

Neighbors expressed their displeasure at having the park locked and fenced. Sanders smiles as she recalls one of the most vociferous: A prostitute who liked to take a shortcut through the park on her way to work.

But, Sanders says, it’s not the dead that she fears. “It’s the things going on all around us. The person you have to be afraid of is the one who’s living and breathing.�

Once, she remembers, the park with its Moorish and Byzantine buildings was “very, very beautiful. Now, people choose it because of its closeness, and for economic reasons. We dropped our prices drastically to accommodate people in the area.�

Angeles Abbey is almost out of space for in-ground burials and, like other cemeteries, is trying to educate African-Americans (who, with Latinos, are the majority of clients) about cremation.

“Back to the earth was a teaching, a tradition with black people,� she says. “I can remember my grandmother saying, ‘Put me in the dirt.’ �

As the area has changed ethnically, funerals have changed. At one time, there was a spate of satanic rituals. “In the morning,� she recalls, “there’d be a dead duck at the gate.�

Then there were the Gypsy funerals. “They believe in a true celebration. They’d roast a pig and bring it to the funeral. They had their feast and burned incense and danced.�

At some services for Asians, mourners may collect money and place it in the casket, for the deceased to have on the way to the next life.

Sometimes, she must deal with the bizarre. One family was convinced that their loved one was not really dead. “They sat in my chapel for six hours, waiting for the woman to rise.�

Some grievers simply need someone to talk to. “They tell me things they were never able to tell anyone else. Some ladies even tell me about their husbands’ sexual activities,� Sanders says.

On days when rival gangs bury their dead at Angeles Abbey, police are present. But there has never been a major incident. “That’s the one day we don’t have to worry about anyone hanging around,� Sanders says. “They do what they have to do in a hurry.�

She prays that the truce between factions of the Crips and Bloods, the most notorious black gangs in the city, will last. She is haunted by the deaths of these young men, by their drug-distorted view of the value of human life, by their foolish bravado.

At every chance, she says, “I talk to them, tell them how beautiful and talented they are.�

One week--on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday--she buried three ninth-graders. Gangs were responsible for all three killings; one was an innocent victim on his way to a store to buy a soda.

Sometimes Sanders asks gang members, “What difference does it make if he’s a blue and he’s a red and he’s a green? All of you are going into the same grave.�