COVINGTON - Martha and Charles Haggard have company coming.
It's been a long time. Dead all these years, the couple are buried in forgotten graves beneath a weeping evergreen in Linden Grove Cemetery. The seasons come and go, the seasons run together; snow and dead leaves lie undisturbed by footprints at their headstones.
Soon human shadows might fall again on graves 241 and 242. The Haggards aren't famous; you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who remembers them anymore. But only 10 yards away is the War Between the States Veterans Monument, one of two Civil War monuments in the cemetery recently nominated to the National Register of Historic Places.
Such a designation is often good for a few more tourists, says Leah Konicki, Covington's historic preservation officer.
The plaque on the monument says the Civil War ended in 1865. A new America was born that year.
So was Martha Haggard.
A segregated world
Mrs. Haggard was born in Cynthiana, Ky., in the year Lee surrendered to Grant.
Six years later, in Kenton County, Mr. Haggard was born.
Charley and Martha grew up, met, got married, lived in No. 11 E. Ninth Street in Covington. Eventually, the Haggards' daughter and her husband lived right next door in No. 9 - the other side of the same, red-brick house.
Charley Haggard was a chef at the Covington Industrial Club. He was also Grand district deputy of the ''Colored Knights of Pythias of Kentucky,'' as the local newspaper referred to it.
The Haggards were black, and they lived in a segregated world.
For five days in the summer of 1914, the black K of P held a ''Grand Lodge and Encampment'' at the old Federal Ballpark at Second and Scott streets in Covington. It started at 3 p.m. on July 27.
''The general committee has arranged to have a program each day and night,'' a front-page newspaper story said. ''There will be good music, dancing, shoe races, pie-eating contests, fat men's races, flour and water races and a big dress parade at 6 p.m. each day.''
A short obituary
All that was long ago, though. It even seemed long way back on Jan. 30, 1918, when Charley Haggard died. Heart disease, they wrote on the death certificate.
''He was ill sometime, but death came unexpectedly,'' the obituary said.
Charley Haggard was 47. The story of his death was at least three inches long. He was, after all, ''known as a hard worker for the upbuilding of his people.''
''And he was always in the front rank of fraternal and educational societies.''
Still, his obituary ran on Page 3. Page 1 was generally reserved for news of death in the white community.
Martha Haggard would live another 28 years without her husband. She was 81 when she died of kidney failure. That was at the end of September 1946.
Back then, a 10.5-oz. can of tomato soup was 11 cents, Nazi leaders were awaiting execution for war crimes, and Bogie and Bacall were starring in The Big Sleep at the Grand.
It's not clear if the Haggards ever went to the theater. But if they did, they almost certainly would have had to sit in the section for blacks - probably the balcony.
Quiet courage
Martha Haggard was buried on a Thursday in autumn, frost on the ground. There was no mention made in the obituary column - only a small, paid death notice at the top of the classified ads.
''Beloved wife of Charles W. Haggard,'' it said, though Charley had been in the ground for 28 years.
Between the time of Charley's death and hers, the American Legion's Norman Barnes Post 70 had erected that limestone Civil War monument. The war had brought vast change, but what did it mean? The story of its aftermath lies just a few feet away from the monument, buried in graves 241 and 242.
If you visit the monuments honoring Civil War soldiers, lay flowers on the two graves beneath the big evergreen.
It's good and right to visit veterans memorials. But take care to honor the small struggles in American life as well as the large.
Courage can be quiet, and some of our best history lessons come from the abiding valor of ordinary people - people who lived in the shadows and slipped into The Big Sleep on some long-ago day when Bogie and Bacall were in love and a nation was slumbering on the racial issues that would haunt it to the end of the century.
Charley and Martha Haggard live. Here, where the struggle goes on.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.