Her Parents' Graves

I traveled to Boston to view Plath-related sites and saw Otto's grave in Winthrop Cemetery and Aurelia Plath's in Wellesley's Woodlawn Cemetery. Both cemeteries are well-kept, tree-shaded, quiet and bewildering. Winthrop Cemetery has three terrace-like sections separated by streets and Otto is buried in the bottom-most terrace, the one not yet filled, which abuts a golf course. At Otto's grave I was alone. What came to mind was "He died like any man." There's no mythic aura unless you bring your own.

It's right off the path as Sylvia said. See it for yourself (video, 21 seconds).

At Aurelia Plath's grave in Wellesley I left a thank-you note near Aurelia's "flush marker," that is, a stone flush with the ground, not even a 3-D brick like Otto's. I used Findagrave.com's coordinates and map to find the Schober plot where Aurelia is buried at her parents' feet. Crabgrass partly obscures Aurelia's marker. Only garden tools could clean it up. I brought the thank-you note thinking gratitude is all any mother really wants. (I don't know what fathers want.) I weighted the note with a stray chunk of marble, and had my picture taken there for social media.

Woodlawn Cemetery, Wellesley, 2024

I had prepared to travel on to Linden, New Jersey and photograph the grave of Aurelia's African-American uncle Christopher Nicholson, buried in Rosedale-Rosehill Cemetery there. Burials in Manhattan are unlawful, so its dead end up in the boroughs or New Jersey. Phoned the cemetery, learned Nicholson has no marker and the only info is the date he was buried: October 31, 1956. The Manhattan death record says Nicholson was 70. In fact he was 73, but apparently he had no one close enough to know that, least of all his niece and great-niece Aurelia and Sylvia.

I didn't go to New Jersey.

Neither parent's gravestone has a quotation or says "beloved" or anything, and neither had any tributes such as plastic flowers, coins, or little flags. I should have brought and planted American flags on all three graves.

Because how these three people became family, Sylvia Plath's family, is a very American story.

Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: More

The Nicholsons rented 116R North New Jersey Ave., Atlantic City, in 1915. The storefront and rear extension are additions; more typical houses c. 1910 sit to its right and left. [1]

Their marriage lasted 20 years -- from the wedding in Boston in 1906 to sometime after 1925, when the husband, a waiter, was last listed in the Atlantic City directory. In 1928 the wife was still using his surname, "Nicholson" -- in various papers rendered as "Nichols," "Nicholason," and "Nicholas." Husband Christopher J. Nicholson also gave his birth year as 1881, 1882, and 1883, making his later years yet harder to trace.

Something led Nicholson to leave his wife, nee Anna Greenwood, on her own in Atlantic City -- where their four children had died in 1918, of influenza, all four names carved on a single gravestone. Perhaps he sought a better job or a marital separation. Anna remained in Atlantic City, working as a domestic.

Anna was Sylvia Plath's blood relative, the Viennese great-aunt who had married a black American. I have learned that more than any other U.S. city, fin de siecle Boston saw unskilled white immigrant females like Anna marry African-American men employed in skilled occupations. For young women from Europe not yet seized by the very American horror at "miscegenation" (word coined in 1863) it was a step up.

Christopher Nicholson's 1942 draft registration card -- the next obtainable document -- shows him in New York City, working downtown and lodging in Harlem. Anna, under her maiden name, had remarried in New York in 1932, to a white British ironworker formerly employed in Atlantic City. They'd moved to England.

U.S. federal census takers missed Nicholson in both 1930 and 1940. Nicholson filed for Social Security benefits on 23 August 1948, giving what is probably his real birthday: 21 August 1883. [2] The 1950 federal census shows him retired, at the same address as in 1942; his marital status is "separated." I found no divorce in New York legal records, only a civil suit Nicholson filed in the Bronx, in 1953, against one Dominick DeLillo, the nature of which I don't know.

Nicholson's death record still eludes me.* Nicholson's niece Aurelia Plath never mentioned any Nicholsons in letters or papers we have access to.

It weighed on me that I had told Anna's story and not Christopher's. Now I have told all I know.

[1] This is the only Nicholson family address still standing. The 1915 New Jersey census shows a racially integrated neighborhood.

[2] Nicholson's 1918 draft registration card gives his birthday as 4 July 1881. It was common for men to claim to the draft board that they were older. Otto Plath's brother did the same.

*Update, July 2024: The New York City death record says Nicholson died in Manhattan on 26 October 1956. He was buried on 31 October in Rosehill-Rosedale Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. The cemetery confirmed that his grave has no marker.