Kongo graves are an intimate point of contact with the spirits of the dead. Personal gifts and statues, such as these wooden figures, are left at the graves of ancestors—those who persevered in life and who in death can lend strength to their descendants.

African American communities sometimes mark graves in ways similar to Kongo people—with sea shells, pottery, glassware, lanterns, and clocks. “You put all the things they used last like dishes and the medicine bottle. The spirits need these same as a man. Then the spirit rests and doesn’t wander about,” Ben Washington, Eulonia, Georgia, 1940.