This is the time of year when I feel most restless: the remnant of winter after the cheer of the holidays and fresh snow have worn away and before the buds have opened on trees and blooms on flowers. I crave color in this in-between-the-seasons moment (and in typing those words I think of Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who longed for snatches of color as she moved closer to the end of her life). When I lived in Chicago for a year in the early 2000s, the sky always felt heaviest and grayest in March. It seemed to press down on me like an enclosure. I learned to cope by splurging on bright yellow daffodils and tulips plucked from the local grocery store. This year, I did something that I did not know would feel like a balm. I went to the cemetery.
I had planned for my students to visit Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., which is the first cemetery of its kind built in the United States. When the burial ground was constructed in 1831, it had then the rare quality of a beautiful park-like design. Mount Auburn is as much an arboretum and garden as it is a place of rest for the dead. The students, the teaching fellow, and I arrived at the cemetery in the afternoon on a mid-March day when the sky was blessedly blue unlike its predecessors, but the air was still carrying winter’s chill. We had come to see a unique thing: the only funerary sculpture known to have been made by the famous nineteenth-century Afro-Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Some of you will know of Edmonia from your areas of study or special interest in art or history; others will recall that she inspired a Google doodle several years ago and now has a stamp bearing her likeness. Our class went to see her work in person because we are studying intersections of African American and Native American histories.
If truth be told, I was dragging that day and that week, as we inched our way toward a desperately needed spring break. But being out in the open air among the trees, no matter how leafless, seemed to jolt all of us into a heightened state of aliveness. The students were more playful, and even I felt more energetic as we made our way uphill along a winding path with our guide, the education director at the cemetery. When we arrived at the site of the century-old sculpture, we heard about how Edmonia Lewis had been commissioned to craft it. Harriot Kezia Hunt, a white female physician, abolitionist, and feminist who had been rejected from Harvard Medical School twice due to her sex, personally enlisted Lewis to make the piece in 1870. Two years later in 1872, the funerary monument was placed. In 1875, the good doctor was buried beside it. A quantity of marble in Edmonia Lewis’s hands had transformed into Hygeia, the mythological Greek goddess of health. The inscription preserved on paper in the cemetery archives, but illegible on the memorial now, read:
The Lord is our lawgiver/Great peace have they/Which love thy law
The Sisters Physician, 1855
A student asked our guide what Hygeia had held in her extended, but now missing, right hand. The guide supposed it might have been a scepter. The students debated whether they would rather have had the partial hand and mystery implement refashioned in a modern restoration or whether they would want to see the figure left at peace in her brokenness. There seemed to be a preference for a statue that showed time’s passage amid the winds of change.
The talk of restoration led our guide to wonder aloud if the tree above the sculpture was helpful or harmful, as the tree’s canopy shaded Hygeia from the sun but also dropped debris onto the surface of time-worn stone.
I cannot probe the mind of Hygeia or her maker, but I think I would rather be in the company of a tree, even if togetherness comes with consequences.
Merry Women’s History Month.
(With thanks to Mount Auburn curator and education director Meg Winslow and Jessica Bussmann, for generously sharing documents, expertise, and time. For more on this history see: Melissa Banta with Meg L. Winslow, The Art of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cemetery, Friends of Mount Auburn, 2015.)
In 2021, a co-instructor and I worked with undergraduates and the Cambridge Black History Project to develop a walking tour of African American Women in Cambridge in the 19th century. The final stop on this tour was Mount Auburn Cemetery, where two of the women on the tour (Mary Walker and Harriet Jacobs) are buried. You can take the tour virtually here: https://www.theclio.com/tour/1958
More from the land of trees and goddesses . . .
In Auburn, New York, on the farm of Harriet Tubman, a tree casts its afternoon shadow against Tubman’s former brick home. In the background, notice Tubman’s red barn. (Photo: February 2023)
In Auburn New York, at the Fort Hill Cemetery, an evergreen planted by Harriet Tubman’s descendants watches over her final resting place, which has been lovingly decorated with natural objects by visitors. (Photo: February 2023)