Elmwood announced a writing contest last month, a terrific idea from fellow trustee and friend Bayard Snowden.

Anyone can enter. You’ll be writing historical fiction, 1,000 words or less, and your subject has to revolve around the circumstances of our yellow fever epidemics and actual historical figures buried at Elmwood.

Opinion: The importance of bridges

There’s money to be won and the winning writer’s story will come to life during the cemetery’s Soul of the City event in October. Details are online at www.elmwoodcemetery.org/snowden-spirit-series, but you better get on it. The deadline is July 6.

But first, writers and readers alike, meet our angels. I’ve introduced them before. If you’ve met them before, you remember. Whether anyone writes about them or not doesn’t matter to them. What made them angels was the sacrifice they made expecting no recognition at all. 

For instance, meet Emily Sutton and Annie Cook. They were prostitutes. And angels.

“The providence of her Judge, her God,” states the Elmwood monument of Emily Sutton — also infamously known as Fannie Walker — who died selflessly nursing the sick during the yellow fever epidemic of 1873.

Opinion: A pink palace by any other name won’t sound as sweet

Annie Cook was so well known that the city directory officially listed her as “madam” and her house as a “palatial resort” for “commercial affection.” In both 1873 and 1878, she closed it and turned it into a hospital, dying herself nursing the dying. For just over a hundred years her Elmwood grave was unmarked, finally reading, “A Nineteenth Century Mary Magdalene who gave her life trying to save the lives of others.”

Mattie Stephenson was jilted by her lover at the altar, loved by a city, and dead at 18. And an angel.

Within one week in 1873, Mattie arrived in Memphis heartbroken, captured the city’s heart with her dedication, and gave her life. Her monument stands over “No Man’s Land,” the area in Elmwood where some 1,500 yellow fever victims are buried in four unmarked lots, so many dying daily and the common need so great for burial that Mattie stands for them all.

Charles Parsons and Louis Schuyler were Episcopal priests. And angels, one after the other.

Father Parsons came as rector of St. Lazarus in 1876 and then Grace Church, heroically staying to serve during the 1878 epidemic and dying of the fever. With no one left in the city to administer sacraments to the dying, Father Schuyler rushed here from New Jersey to help and died within a week.

Opinion: A road trip from Memphis to Memphis

They are buried on opposite sides of a common marker.

The Episcopal nuns running St. Mary’s School in 1878 — Sisters Constance, Thecla, Ruth, and Frances — were buried together at Elmwood around a common marker at right angles to form a cross. Because they were angels.

The 1985 General Convention of the Episcopal Church designated the nuns as the Martyrs of Memphis, recognizing what they were called to do, and what they did.

The Howard Association was an organization formed to aid those stricken with yellow fever. And an order of angels. They raised money nationally to fight the epidemics here and organized a massive effort, and a third of their local membership died in that effort.

Dr. R.H. Tate was one of that order of angels, and the first Black physician to practice in Memphis, albeit tragically and briefly. He answered the call of the Howard Association in 1878 with seven other Cincinnati physicians. He died here three weeks later and is buried at Elmwood under a marker erected by the Bluff City Medical Society.

Opinion: A new course of optimism, from Sweetens Cove to Overton Park

I’ve spent peaceful moments with all of them before — those mentioned here and so many more. Certainly at Elmwood, that storied and sacred ground where so much of our history rests and resonates, but also at another place dedicated to the whole host of angels who saw us through a time of plague.

I am more than willing to share our angels with you, and I highly recommend their company.

Take a drive Downtown and take Channel 3 Drive off of Riverside. Turn off just before WREG into Martyrs Park, a quiet spot on the bluff between the bridges, the river below and always moving, the city behind and beside you, martyrs depicted in sculpture, history engraved on plaques.

As it always seems when I visit, there will probably be no one there but you. And all of them, of course.

I’m a Memphian, and you should spend a little time with our angels.