The Story of Phillip

Right now I am working on processing a manuscript collection of a historic African American funeral home in Charleston. I am going through all their records – ledgers, invoices, and documentation pertaining to the dead. A lot of the information is standard – name of deceased, address, date of death, place of burial… but some records contain a lot more information. Some records relate information about the occupation of the deceased, whether they were veterans of a war, what they died of, and the details of their funeral arrangements – how many cars were going to the funeral and whether they bought flowers.
While I go through the records, I make up stories of what their lives were like. I take all the information provided in those yellowed pages and make up a story – I try to give life to these dead pages through my imagination because I don’t think I could bear to work with these records otherwise. I look at these records, brittle and frail, and it strikes me so hard that all of these people, summarized on a single sheet of paper, are now gone forever.
If it wasn’t for these records, I would never know of their existence. Take Phillip Robert Russell, who died on June 6, 1952 at 3:35 pm. He drowned. He was a sailor for the US Navy, 23 years old. His mother’s name was Martha, his dad’s was Harry. The Navy paid for his funeral, a total of $47.95. His remains were shipped to Boston, and the only personal service done to him was putting an engraved name plate on his casket, for a total of $2.00. There were no death notices in the papers and no money was spent on flowers. These are the cold, hard facts relating to Phillip. But who was he aside from that?
In my mind, he was a vigorous, intelligent, handsome man who joined the Navy to see the world and make his mother proud. He was proud to be who he was but being that he was black, he was faced with constant discrimination. He wouldn’t back down when insulted though, and his courage made his fellow sailors afraid, because they couldn’t break him. So one day they ganged up on him and threw him overboard, because they knew he couldn’t swim. That’s what happened in my mind. But reality was surely different.
I’m sure few if any people today remember that Phillip died here. His parents are surely dead, and his siblings, if he had any, are probably in their 80s. I look at this record and there is so much about him that I want to know.
Does anybody visit his grave in Boston anymore? Does anybody know what he liked to do on his time off or the reason why he joined the navy?
The only reason anyone in fifty years will probably know of Phillip’s existence is if they come across this dusty bound ledger with frayed pages and fading ink. I guess that’s why I do what I do. When there will be nobody remaining in this world who can tell me what this young sailor looked like when he smiled, I can at least make sure that people have a miniscule record of his life, so they can, if nothing else, make up a story of what his life was like.