The Story of Mumbet

1.

There is much of interest in the Stockbridge, Massachusetts, town cemetery, located on Main Street and still in active use. It has graves dating to the 18th century, as befitting one of the oldest settlements in western New England, today a town of fewer than 2,000 residents, known largely through the imagery of one former resident, Norman Rockwell, and the music of a nearby resident, James Taylor.

Tours of the cemetery often stop at the grave of Popewannehah “John” Konkapot, the sachem of the local band of Mohican Indians when missionaries first arrived in Stockbridge in the 1730s. Konkapot was a brilliant and charismatic leader. He led his people in a mass conversion to Christianity, though not due to any religious epiphany. Upon observing that the Indians were dying of disease while the white settlers were not, he concluded (or let’s assume desperately hoped) that the settlers’ god was a better bet than his. The Stockbridge Indians fought alongside the colonists during the American Revolution and were the first Indians to receive American citizenship.

But neither this history nor the white man’s god saved the Stockbridge Indians from being tricked out of their land and sent off first to Upstate New York and eventually to northern Wisconsin, where their descendants are members of a federally recognized tribe, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. They live today on a reservation carved out of the Menominee Indian reservation by an 1856 treaty.

Chief Konkapot is remembered throughout the Berkshires. There is a Konkapot River, a 22-mile-long tributary of the Housatonic; a Konkapot Falls; a Konkapot Road; and a Konkapot Drive. On the village green in the town of Lee—also part of the land the Stockbridge Indians “sold” to the settlers—Konkapot’s likeness adorns a fountain, designed by the sculptor Daniel Chester French, more famous for his monumental figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. And then there is Konkapot’s headstone in the Stockbridge Cemetery, which reads,

HERE LIES
JOHN KONKAPOT
GOD, BE AS GOOD TO HIM AS HE
WOULD BE TO YOU IF HE WERE
GOD AND YOU WERE
JOHN KONKAPOT

2.

Fifteen years ago, my husband, Eugene Fidell, and I, were looking for a weekend getaway when we bought a house in Stockbridge. Eventually, we made it our legal residence. Our real estate agent had not emphasized that the town’s cemetery served as the back yard for the houses across the street, but once we realized how close we were, and how interesting the old gravestones looked, we began to investigate.

However, it was not Konkapot’s grave that first caught our eye. Rather, it was the extraordinary collection of headstones separated by a grove of trees from the rest of the cemetery. The stones, 144 of them, are arranged in concentric circles radiating from two central monuments. The taller monument marks the grave of the Honorable Theodore Sedgwick, who died on January 24, 1813, at the age of 66. The smaller one marks the grave of his second wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, who died six years earlier at the age of 54. The concentric circles of headstones mark the graves of their relatives and descendants, the line extending into the 21st century. (Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s tragic muse and probably the most famous modern Sedgwick, is not among the group. When she died in 1971 at the age of 28, she was buried in Santa Barbara, California.)

We learned later that this is the so-called Sedgwick Pie, and that the Pie is the property of the Sedgwick family, not the town of Stockbridge, as is the case with the rest of the cemetery. The popular explanation for the circular shape is that when Judgment Day comes and the dead are raised, the Sedgwicks, who once represented a kind of New England nobility, will have to look only at other Sedgwicks.

One grave in particular drew our attention, not because the stone itself was markedly different from the rest but because it alone was adorned with small rocks and a few flowers, obviously placed there by visitors. With some effort, we made out the faded carving:

ELIZABETH FREEMAN
Known by the name of
MUMBET
Died Dec. 28, 1829.
Her supposed age
was 85 Years.
She was born a slave and
She remained a slave for nearly
thirty years. She could nei-
ther read nor write yet in
her own sphere she had no
superior nor equal. She nei-
ther wasted time nor property.
She never violated a trust nor
failed to perform a duty.
In every situation of domes-
tic trial, she was the most effi-
cient helper and the tenderest
friend. Good mother, farewell.What was this headstone doing here? Who was Mumbet, and under what circumstances had she been freed from slavery, some 80 years before the Emancipation Proclamation? And could there really have been slavery right here in the Berkshires?

Every time we strolled through the cemetery, we would notice new rocks placed on Mumbet’s headstone: People evidently knew Mumbet’s story and came in some numbers and with some regularity to pay their respects. But we had never heard of Mumbet and could scarcely imagine the trajectory that brought her to this remarkable resting place. Clearly, some investigation was called for.