VIDALIA — Renard Chatman is seen as a man who takes care of many plots in the Vidalia Cemetery, but more specifically, he is taking care of his daughter

“She died at 27, so I have my daughter, my grandmother, aunt, a sister and about three or four cousins buried there, so when I’m here, that is mostly on my mind,” he said.

Chatman retired from his job with the post office in 2010 and is now the president of the Vidalia Cemetery Association.

Chatman and vice president of the cemetery association Willie Dunbar, along with 10 volunteers, work hard at least twice a month to keep the cemetery in good condition.

Chatman is not one to toot his own horn, but Dunbar said he is a big reason why the cemetery is still flourishing.

“He’s one of those guys that works all the time,” Dunbar said. “He doesn’t like to quit. Sometimes we tell him to go home and relax, but he loves to work.”

The volunteers’ main job is to keep the cemetery nice and neat, which includes mowing the lawn, weeding, picking up tree limbs and occasionally digging the graves for funeral burials.

Chatman said the land in the cemetery has a lot of uneven dips in the ground, but the dips are those buried decades ago, but with no head plot to identify them.

“You cannot just dig a four-foot grave, because there’s always a possibility of interfering with another grave,” Chatman said. “This used to be a plantation cemetery, and the families didn’t get a head stone, so we have no way of identifying who it is, but all that space is full.”

Dunbar said the plots on Riverside Street are hard to maintain, especially with very little funding from the city.

“Sometimes we have to feel in there before we go in there to make sure there isn’t a grave there,” Dunbar said. “It’s a challenge, because we have to wait to see if someone is in the area already.”

The city provides equipment to lower a casket into a grave, but if the conditions are not right, the equipment doesn’t come.

“If there is a possibility that the equipment will sink in the grave, we can’t use it, so we have to do it the old fashioned way — a shovel,” Chatman said. “We usually only go in about 22 inches, but for a 4-foot grave, it is much harder.”

Sometimes, volunteering at the cemetery can get a little emotional, especially for Chatman.

Chatman worked at the post office for 37 years before retiring. In his years of service, he said he has met a lot of faces that he would later see at the graveyard.

“All of the (graveyard) is family and friends, and it’s difficult,” Chatman said. “I worked in Natchez for 37 years, and I’ve been in the public eye for 50 years, so I know basically everybody. When we have a funeral, I probably know the family.”

Chatman’s own loses help him give encouraging words to the families that come to bury a loved one.

“When I deal with the families that come by, I think about what I went through,” he said. “I know what they are going through.”