In my last essay, I spoke about the Weehawken police blotter and about teasing out people's narratives from its telegraphic entries. I also mentioned how people were sent to a place called Snake Hill, Hudson County's complex of buildings housing the cast-offs of society, with a penitentiary, infectious disease hospitals, an alms house and, most notoriously, burial grounds holding at least 10,000 people over its century of use, most of whom now lie under the New Jersey Turnpike and the playing fields of what is now known as Laurel Hill Park. In 2003, when the turnpike authority discovered the interments as it began building its off-ramp to the Secaucus Junction train station, it reluctantly undertook the disinterment and reburial of about 4,500 remains, the largest such effort in the history of the United States (a tale told in the 2007 documentary, Snake Hill). The story of excavating the burial ledgers and other paperwork connected to the cemeteries was another heroic story, and with that documentation, officials were able to identify about 900 people. I went out to Laurel Hill Park, the deodorized name of the former Snake Hill complex, knowing that I walked over the graves of more than half the people logged into the burial journals as having been buried there. I also knew that most likely everyone there with me that day on the playing fields and at the boat launch did not know what lay beneath them. Nor did the thousands of motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike or the hundreds of people housed in the apartments and condos now part of the Secaucus Junction site. I was not sure what I was supposed to feel. Perhaps I don't need to feel anything, that is, any regret or anger or even curiosity—after all, everything that happened there happened a long time ago, and eventually all the memories will dissolve along with the generations of people holding them. I also traveled to Maple Park Grove Cemetery in Hackensack, where the remains of those taken from Snake Hill were remaindered and a cenotaph erected, listing the names of everyone scratched into the burial registers, not just those taken from the site (though the body-bearers couldn't have made that list since according to one of the people interviewed in the documentary, very few people could be identified). So, the situation in Hackensack is that while everyone has been named, there is no way to know if any one named person is in the cemetery vault or still under the playing fields and turnpike traffic scrum in Secaucus. Even though known, still unknown. And the cenotaph is not well maintained: the inscription in marble above the incised tree are both discolored, making the words difficult to read. It's tucked off in a corner of the landscape and, at least on the day I was there, the area behind the memorial was full of trash and dead grass clippings. Ignored once again. The whole story is a maddening one of neglect and abuse, but perhaps it just bears no relevance to our struggles today (though, as I sketch it out, I have to write that phrase a little bit tongue in cheek): a county administration mired in a history of corruption, a state authority careless about the niceties of building a state-spanning project, thousands of voiceless poor people dying uneulogized in a place no different in function than a landfill, a handful of people dedicated to the truth being told and actually bringing a small part of that truth into the light. (It's quite likely that if Snake Hill happened in 2022, the story might turn out differently because of different technologies [e.g., DNA, lidar, ground penetrating radar] and more environmental oversight of the construction project—though I tend to think that the forces arrayed against the dead people would still be strong enough to keep them in the ground and out of the public memory and the bond markets.) Of course, the writerly part of me thinks that the story is a powerful one to tell, with identifiable heroes and villains, a clear moral dichotomy and a bittersweet victory. But is it? What needle would it move to tell this story? What is the dramatic conflict—not the frictional conflict of battle but the conflict of moral choices where the outcome is not ordained or even known by the chooser? (In other words, what is the gray mystery play aspect of this brightly colored landscape?) However, I can't give it up completely, and I think the story (or a story) lies not in the grand sweep of large actors but in the individual battle against the inhuman conditions. In this case, Ellen Giles, the heroine (?) of my last essay, goes to prison for one of her 90-day stints in the county jail for being drunk and disorderly. Ellen was in the county jail often enough, as my record of her shows. What did she think about when she went? Did she know people there who knew her because she had been there so often—the weird intimacy of the jailer and the jailed? Or even the jailed and the jailed? (She encounters "old friends" when she arrives who are not friends but at least recognizable.) How did she spend her days? How was the detox for her (or were there black markets in the jail that gave access to the needed substances)? Did she want to leave when her stint was up? Who kept track of her days? Did she have a cell or was it dormitory style? Panopticon? How often did the abuse happen? Hygiene (showers, periods, bathrooms)? So, Ellen, how do you feel being dragooned into the service of historical memory? What's that, you say? Let me get writing that down.