Because slave owners, including those at Belle Meade, kept few records, the daily lives of enslaved people there are difficult to reconstruct, and information about their burial practices and grave locations is especially scarce. Before modern embalming came into wide use in the South after the Civil War, burial likely took place shortly after death. Funerals for enslaved people typically occurred at night, when many were no longer required to work, and nighttime services also allowed members of enslaved communities from nearby plantations to attend. In some parts of the South, slave owners limited funeral traditions or required their presence at services out of fear that gatherings of enslaved people might lead to rebellion, while in other areas slave funerals remained largely untouched by white customs or religion. Some burial places in the South were decorated with white seashells or pebbles, reflecting the watery underworld in the religious customs of some Central African tribes and the association of white with death in Central Africa. At Belle Meade, the exact graves of enslaved people remain uncertain because death and burial records no longer exist, if they ever did. Archaeological evidence and oral histories indicate one burial site on land now at the outskirts of Percy Warner Park, and other records suggest another beneath what is now the Belle Meade Highlands neighborhood. After Emancipation, several formerly enslaved men and women, including Susannah Carter and her family, were buried at Mount Ararat Cemetery, Nashville's first African American cemetery.
