Elizabeth Freeman's Silence and the Stories of Mumbet

‘Good Mother, Farewell’: Elizabeth Freeman’s Silence and the Stories of Mumbet

sari edelstein Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

ESTLED among pine trees and set apart from the rest N of the graves in the Stockbridge Cemetery in the Berk- shires, the region of western Massachusetts defined by its low- lying mountains, lies the Sedgwick family plot. Known as the “Sedgwick Pie” because of its unconventional circular shape, the plot is centered around Judge Theodore Sedgwick, who died in 1813, and his wife Pamela, their posterity spiraling out in concentric circles beyond them. The lore is that Judge Sedg- wick decreed that his descendants be buried around him with their feet facing the center so when they arose on Judgment Day, they would meet one another’s eyes first. But arguably the most noteworthy person interred in the Sedgwick plot is not a member of the family at all.1 Elizabeth Freeman is the only person buried in the Sedg- wick plot who is not a Sedgwick by blood or marriage.2 She was enslaved in Sheffield, Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century and successfully sued the Commonwealth for emancipation, thus establishing a legal precedent for the abolition

I am grateful to Holly Jackson, Megan Marshall, David Levinson, David Lambert, Betsy Klimasmith, Jill McDonough, Susan Tomlinson, Julia Dauer, and Catherine Buf- foni at the Stockbridge Library for helpful suggestions and encouragement and to the peer reviewers for their indispensable feedback. 1For a recollection of this family lore, see Jean Stein, Edie: An American Girl (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 3–4. See also Eric Goldscheider, “Stockbridge Savors Being Small,” Boston Globe, November 6, 2005. 2There is at least one pet buried in the Pie, a dog known as “our Helen.”

584 STORIES OF MUMBET 585 of slavery in Massachusetts.3 Upon achieving legal freedom, she lived with and worked for the Sedgwick family for over twenty years in Stockbridge, where she holds the status of a local hero: there is a longstanding campaign to feature her portrait on a postage stamp, an annual Mum Bett Day celebration, and a center to protect and support victims of domestic violence named in her honor. While Freeman has received less Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 attention beyond the Berkshires, appearing only in passing in a handful of scholarly studies, her national reputation has grown in recent years.4 The New York Times devoted a full page to her portrait in “The 1619 Project” on the history of US slavery; she is featured at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, at the new Museum of African American History in Washington DC, and last year, the actress Octavia Spencer optioned the rights to develop a Hollywood film based on her life.5 But Freeman never told her own story. This essay considers Freeman’s biography, first, as it was written by one of the Sedg- wicks in the early nineteenth century; then, as it circulates in contemporary children’s and young adult literature; and finally, in relation to questions about the recovery and repurposing of

3Freeman’s lawsuit was one of many “freedom suits” initiated by enslaved people in Massachusetts and other colonies in the years leading up to the Revolution. In Massachusetts alone, “from 1760 to 1779, African Americans initiated twenty freedom suits.” See Christopher Cameron, To Plead Your Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Anti-Slavery Movement (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014), 72. 4Freeman is discussed briefly in Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), Jasmine Nicole Cobb’s Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), and Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck’s Love of Free- dom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For a discussion of the legal significance of the case, see Arthur Zilversmit “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts” The William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 614–24. For an analysis of Freeman’s portrait, see Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). For discussions of Freeman in relation to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, see Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, eds., Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002). 5Dave McNary, “Octavia Spencer to Executive Produce Anti-Slavery Movie ‘Mum- bet,”’ Variety, April 2, 2018. For information on Freeman in popular culture, see this website: https://elizabethfreeman.mumbet.com 586 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY early American black lives. I want to consider how and why she ended up entombed with the Sedgwicks and to examine the ideological consequences of the narratives that have been told about her long life. The recent proliferation of children’s books on Freeman vividly demonstrates the desire for a celebratory national story, one that can be seamlessly woven into grade- school curricula that enshrine the founding ideals and ennoble Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 exceptional individuals. And yet, Freeman’s story is more complex than such accounts allow, and the instrumentalization of her life narrative raises questions about the stories told in the absence or suppression of archival material and about how narrative serves as one tool among many for the containment of black lives, even those that are celebrated.

While there are no records of her birth or early life, Freeman is believed to have been born into slavery in the town of Clav- erack in upstate New York around 1744. She was enslaved by Pieter Hogeboom, a New York farmer of Dutch ancestry, who had ten children. Pieter’s youngest daughter Hannah (Annetje) married Colonel John Ashley, a prominent judge and one of the largest land and slaveholders in Berkshire County. At some point after their marriage, Freeman was brought to the Ash- ley estate in Sheffield, Massachusetts.6 Ashley enslaved at least five people to work his grist and cider mills, his ironworks, and more than 3,000 acres of land.7 For most of the Revolutionary War, Freeman remained enslaved by the Ashleys, but in 1781, she filed a freedom suit on the grounds that slavery violated the newly ratified Massachusetts Constitution. A local lawyer and

6No records of Freeman’s move from New York to Massachusetts have been found. Some speculate that Freeman was brought to the Ashleys as an infant while others argue it was later in her life, given that she brought with her items from her mother and father. Mary Wilds, for example, makes the point that the mention of a “short gown that was my mother’s” in the will suggests that she was older when sold or sent to the Ashley household. Mary Wilds, Mumbet: The Life and Times of Elizabeth Freeman: The True Story of a Slave (Greensboro, NC: Avisson Press, 1999). 7Town of Sheffield, Massachusetts, Tax Valuation List of 1771, New England Ge- nealogical Society, Boston, MA. STORIES OF MUMBET 587 aspiring political figure, Theodore Sedgwick represented Free- man, and after they won the case, she moved into the Sedg- wick home, where for twenty-seven years, she worked as a head servant in the household and cared for Theodore Sedgwick’s seven children, who described her as a “mother” and eventually buried her in their family plot. The Sedgwick family has a long and storied past in New Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 England; their first ancestors arrived in this country inthe seventeenth century, but it was Theodore Sedgwick who established the family’s reputation. As a young lawyer in the Berkshires, Sedgwick, along with John Ashley and other local leaders, drafted the Sheffield Resolves, a petition against British tyranny and a manifesto for individual rights published in 1773, which included the line: “Mankind in a state of nature are equal, free, and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” Sedgwick’s sentences would inspire Thomas Jef- ferson’s articulation of natural rights and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence. In the years after the Revolution, Theodore Sedgwick molded himself into an iconic American statesman; he de- signed a regal Federalist house in Stockbridge, served as a US representative and senator from Massachusetts, befriended George Washington, attended the Continental Congress, and was the recipient of the last letter written by Alexander Hamil- ton. Along with his wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, who was related to the Williamses who founded Williams College in 1793, Sedgwick became the patriarch of a large family that has de- manded public attention for the last two centuries with a genealogy that includes an iconic editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick; Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s tragic muse; and Kyra Sedgwick, Hollywood actress. Sedgwicks have written memoirs, published books, and left batches of correspondence; indeed, the family is so prolific that their voluminous archive is the second-largest at the Massachusetts Historical Society, rivaled only by John Adams and his family. In the early nineteenth century, the Sedgwick name was perhaps best known through Catharine Maria Sedgwick, 588 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Theodore’s youngest daughter, and one of the most popular novelists of the antebellum period; her book sales rivaled those of James Fennimore Cooper. She knew Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville and maintained close personal friend- ships with British writer Harriet Martineau and actress Fan- nie Kemble, among other luminaries of the era.8 As one of her earliest biographers, Edward Halsey, writes, “Until Harriet Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miss Sedgwick was the only woman who was widely considered a major Amer- ican writer.”9 While Catharine Sedgwick published some of the bestselling novels of her era, it may be that her narrative of Elizabeth Freeman’s life is the work that endures most powerfully. She wrote about Freeman in multiple venues but almost all of the information that now circulates about Freeman derives from her essay, “Slavery in New England,” which appeared in Bent- ley’s Miscellany, a British periodical, in 1853, one year after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sedgwick’s essay was the first publication to capitalize on the appeal of Freeman’s life trajectory, laying the groundwork for a story that remains generative and potent to this day.10 The essay’s title, “Slavery in New England,” suggests an examination of the institution, even perhaps an abolitionist tract about the incompatibility of slavery with the region’s pro- gressive ideals, something akin to Thoreau’s “Slavery in Mas- sachusetts,” the fiery lecture he delivered the following year in response to the Fugitive Slave Law. And yet, Sedgwick’s essay begins by observing that enslaved people in the region “were not numerous enough to make the condition a great evil or

8For more on Catharine Sedgwick’s literary and personal connections with Hawthorne, see Lucinda Damon-Bach, “Inspiration or Competitions? Catharine Sedgwick’s Influence on Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 41 (2015). 9Edward Halsey, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Twayne, 1974), 21. 10The first public telling of Freeman’s story was by Henry Sedgwick in 1831 atthe Stockbridge Lyceum; his anti-slavery lecture described his relationship with Freeman in detail. Harriet Martineau subsequently published a short version of Freeman’s story as “Story of Mum Bett” in Retrospect of Western Travel in 1838. STORIES OF MUMBET 589 embarrassment.”11 She was not, it seems, particularly troubled by the immorality of slavery nor concerned about its presence in Massachusetts; after all, this was her first sustained treat- ment of the subject.12 This apologia for slavery is particularly significant, given that Massachusetts was the epicenter ofan anti-slavery revolution in this same decade. Indeed, it becomes clear early on in “Slavery in New En- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 gland” that Sedgwick’s goal is not a political one; rather, she is motivated to tell a more personal story, shaped by an investment in her family’s reputation and in her own literary career. While she explains that “slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness,” the house of Colonel Ashley was an exception to the mild version of slavery that Sedgwick apparently found characteristic of her home state. Though the colonel himself “was the gentlest, most benign of men,” his wife was a “shrew untameable.” Mistress Ashley found opportunities to exercise harsh punishments and inflict violence upon Eliza- beth Freeman and her sister. Sedgwick recalls Freeman telling her of one occasion on which Freeman blocked her mistress from assaulting her sister with a “large iron shovel red hot from clearing the oven.” When this deadly weapon hit Freeman instead, “it cut quite across the arm to the bone,” and she re- tained a “frightful scar” from the incident, which she “carried to her grave.” While Sedgwick’s narrative refers to Freeman’s sister, there is no evidence that she had a sister, and archival evidence strongly suggests that the person Freeman was try- ing to shield was actually her daughter.13 The fact that we do not know whether it was Freeman’s daughter or sister is the first indicator of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s lack of interest in

11Catharine Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley’s Miscellany 34 (1853): 417–24. 12Karen Woods Weierman refers to Sedgwick’s “cautiousness on the slavery question and her problematic relationship with the abolitionist movement.” Weierman, “‘A Slave Story I Began and Abandoned’: Sedgwick’s Antislavery Manuscript,” in Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Damon-Bach and Clements, 122–40. 13Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 417–18. There are conflicting accounts about whether this was Freeman’s daughter or sister. Sedgwick claims it was her sister, Lizzie, but others have pointed out that it would have been unlikely for her sister to also be called Elizabeth. 590 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Freeman’s family despite, or perhaps related to, her frequent assertions that Freeman was a mother to her; even the basic outlines of her Freeman’s personal life are expendable in the story Sedgwick wants to tell. Instead, it is Catharine’s father, Theodore, who assumes a starring role in this story as Freeman’s savior. Sedgwick re- counts how Freeman “chanced at the village ‘meeting house,’ Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in Sheffield, to hear the Declaration of Independence read.” So stirred by its articulation of equality, she walked “the next day to the office of Mr. Theodore Sedgwick,” then an up-and- coming lawyer eager to establish his reputation. According to Catharine, Freeman said, “I am not a dumb critter; won’t the law give me my freedom?”14 He took the case, along with another attorney, Tapping Reeve; they won the case—Brom & Bett v. John Ashley, Esq.—in August 1781. Legally manumit- ted, Freeman “immediately transferred herself to the service of her champion,” who had the “generosity as well as intelligence” to take on the case, becoming his employee.15 For the next twenty-seven years, Freeman assumed a primary role in raising the Sedgwick children, filling in for

14Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 421. While Sedgwick’s narrative set the terms for future iterations of Freeman’s biography and legal victory, certain aspects of this story remain contested as well as hazy. For example, there are competing ideas about what galvanized Freeman to file the lawsuit. Some, following Sedgwick, have claimed that Freeman was stirred by hearing patriots discuss the notion of equality and that she became aware of the contradictions between this rhetoric and her own condition. Another narrative suggests Freeman was motivated to legal action after in- terceding in the vicious beating from which she got her scar. 15Contrary to Sedgwick’s account, the case did not officially end slavery in Mas- sachusetts, though it did make slavery impossible to defend in court. In other words, enslaved people in the state were not suddenly emancipated upon the judge’s ruling. The suit served as a key precedent for future cases; it was cited in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court appellate review of Quock Walker’s freedom suit two years later, essentially affirming it as a precedent for future freedom suits. But Arthur Zil- versmit writes, “If either the Supreme Court decisions of 1781 or 1783 had in fact constituted a ‘solemn decision’ on the constitutionality of slavery, its effect was lim- ited by the fact that written records of the case did not touch on the constitutional issue” (“Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery,” 616). Similarly, Margot Minardi writes, “Slavery ended due to a combination of factors, among them growing public sentiment against slavery during the Revolutionary era, a state constitution in 1780 declaring all men free and equal, and several well-timed lawsuits brought by slaves against their masters.” Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. STORIES OF MUMBET 591 the frequently incapacitated Pamela Sedgwick, who suffered from severe depression and what neighbors referred to as “derangement.”16 A skilled midwife, Freeman presided over Catharine’s birth, nursed at least one newborn back from the brink of death, and cared for Pamela as her health declined. Catharine referred to Freeman as “‘Mother’—my nurse—my faithful friend—she who first received me into her arms.”17 Her Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 brother, Henry, also called her “our beloved Mother,” and wrote that he knew her “as familiarly as I knew either of my parents.”18 Such affectionate language suggests the intimacy that characterized the relationships between the Sedgwicks and Freeman as well as the high regard in which they held her. But Freeman’s relationships with the members of the Sedg- wick family were constituted by the terms of racial hierarchy and commerce.19 Sedgwick explains that she and her siblings referred to Freeman as “Mumbet,” a name “contracted by lisp- ing lips from Mammy Bet, to Mum-Bett, by which name she was best known.”20 The Sedgwick children thus named her Mumbet, a name that defines her role in relation to white children; it is not the name she gave herself nor is it the name her own child gave her.21 Indeed, the draft title of Sedgwick’s

16Quoted in Timothy Kenslea, The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006), 26. 17Catharine Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Jour- nal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary Kelley (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 125. 18Henry Dwight Sedgwick, “The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery: A Lec- ture.” Delivered at the Lyceum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, February 1831. 19Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Sedgwick household was not a beacon of racial equality even after Freeman’s case was won. In her memoir, Sedgwick boasts that “our house was one of the few where domestics were restricted to the kitchen table.” Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy, 52. In “Slavery in New England,” Sedgwick notes, “No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands,” 417. This was not true in her own household after slavery was ruled unconstitutional. 20Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 418. 21No archival evidence has been located regarding the father of Freeman’s child or Freeman’s marital status, though she identified as a spinster. Some have speculated that she was married to a black Revolutionary soldier who died in battle; others have 592 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY essay was “Mumbett,” which aptly captures the extent to which Sedgwick authored a character with the publication of her essay.22 “Slavery in New England” concludes with Freeman retiring and moving to a home of her own in Stockbridge. Her savings, according to Sedgwick “had been rather freely used by her only child, and her grandchildren, who, like most of their race, were Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 addicted to festive joys.”23 Here, Catharine Sedgwick not only reveals her entrenched racism but also finds fault with Free- man’s family for their reliance on Freeman’s income, an indict- ment that willfully discounts the fact that Freeman’s daughter, Betsy, was born into slavery. A month before Freeman’s death, Sedgwick describes her impeccable character: “Mumbet had a clear and nice perception of justice, and a stern love of it, an uncompromising honesty in word and deed, and conduct of high intelligence, that made her the unconscious moral teacher of the children she tenderly nursed.” And yet, amidst this list of encomiums, she includes this detail: “Her judgment and will were never subordinated by mere authority but when she went toherownlittlehome...shewasthevictimofheraffec- tions, and was weakly indulgent to her riotous and ruinous descendants.”24 Sedgwick here finds yet another opportunity to disparage Freeman’s family; she disapproves of Freeman’s affectionate mothering and expresses disdain for her biologi- cal family members even while claiming Freeman as her own mother. The Mumbet persona that Catharine Sedgwick developed in her published essay and private writings sanctifies Freeman for

suggested that Brom—the co-plaintiff of the legal case—may have been her daughter’s father. 22Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s literary engagement with Freeman extended into her fiction. For an excellent analysis of an unfinished story based on Mumbet, seeKaren Woods Weierman, “‘A Slave Story I Began and Abandoned’: Sedgwick’s Antislavery Manuscript” in Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Damon-Bach and Clements, 122–40. 23Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 424. No archival evidence has been located for how much (or whether) Freeman was paid by the Sedgwicks. 24Catharine Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine Sedgwick, ed. Mary Dewey (New York: Harpers, 1872), 41. STORIES OF MUMBET 593 her loyalty and subservience. An oft-cited anecdote concerns the role Freeman played to defend the Sedgwick household during Shays’s Rebellion, a post-revolutionary uprising spear- headed by rural farmers who claimed to be exploited by heavy taxes. When a gang of angry insurgents invaded the Sedgwick house, Freeman cunningly hid the family silver and china and protected their favorite horse. In other words, she put her life Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 on the line to defend their property.25 This characterization of Freeman as a martyr for and defender of the Sedgwicks—and the white upper class in general—resonates with Margot Minardi’s account of how many elite New England families positioned themselves in relation to free people of color. As she writes, early nineteenth- century “white-authored memoirs, obituaries, and anecdotes of freedpeople engaged white Bay Staters’ nostalgia for the ‘defer- ence politics’ of a previous generation.”26 She describes a culture that has some overlap with a patronage system, noting that “the ways in which free blacks such as Wheatley, Spear, Hall, and Freeman made history were constrained by the ways in which others made history out of them.”27 Freeman was useful to the version of history into which the Sedgwicks sought to insert themselves, a version which positions Theodore Sedgwick as a noble white patron whose conscience and “generosity” led him to represent Freeman’s case. And yet, this account strategically obscures his direct involvement with slavery. Many aristocratic New England families profited from investments in the West Indies; as historian Wendy Warren succinctly puts it, “The region in many ways

25This anecdote is recounted in “Slavery in New England,” 422–24. On Shays’s Re- bellion see Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennslvania Press, 2002), 4–12. For an interpreta- tion that sees the rebellion as the product of the economic dislocations caused by mon- etary panic and illiquidity, see Jonathan M. Chu, Stumbling toward the Constitution: The Economic Consequences of Freedom in the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 91–92. 26Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 98. 27Minardi, Making Slavery History, 100. 594 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY depended on plantation slavery—those plantations were simply offshore.”28 The Sedgwicks did not keep their involvement with slavery at an ocean’s distance though; they owned at least one slave right in the Berkshires. A bill of sale recorded in 1777 shows that Theodore Sedgwick purchased a “negro woman” named Ton, about thirty years old, from a neighbor in Sheffield, Massachusetts, named John Fellows, who was Colonel Ashley’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 son-in-law.29 In other words, just four years before he “gen- erously” took on Freeman’s freedom suit, Sedgwick was very much in the business of buying and selling people. His son, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, wrote searchingly: “No explanation of this purchase has been preserved, though it was undoubtedly made from humane motives, and probably to save the ‘chat- tel’ from a hard task master.”30 Moreover, in his capacity as US representative, he was a key architect in protecting the institution of slavery. Beyond the profits he personally drew from owning slaves, Sedgwick was also a primary author of the first Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which made it a crime for north- erners to aid or abet escaped slaves and set the precedent for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.31 Koritha Mitchell has recently described the phenomenon of “know-your-place-aggression,” giving a name to the “the backlash of violence—both literal and symbolic, physical and discursive—that essentially says, know your place!”to

28Wendy Warren, New England Bound. Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016), 12. 29The bill of sale is redacted, with the words “and a negro girl” crossed out, as if to suggest that a child (also named Bet) was also part of the deal at one point. Bill of Sale, John Fellows to Theodore Sedgwick for Ton (a slave), July 1, 1777, Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 30Henry Sedgwick, “The Sedgwicks of the Berkshires,” in Collections of the Berk- shire Historical and Scientific Society (Pittsfield, MA: Press of the Sun Print Company, 1899), 97. 31Sedgwick’s biographer calls him the “virtual author” of the Fugitive Slave Law, and Gary Nash suggests this is part of the reason Hull, and possibly Freeman, left his employ. Richard Welch Jr., Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist: A Political Biography (Mid- dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), 135. Gary Nash, Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and the Betrayal that Divided a Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 199. STORIES OF MUMBET 595 marginalized groups who achieve success.32 Freeman’s story suggests an inverse but related tactic of racial control that could be called “know-your-place-affection” or what Vicente Rafael terms “white love.” While Rafael uses “white love” to describe the imperialist strategy adopted by the US in the Philippines whereby natives would be “adopted and protected by the compassionate embrace of the United States,” this term Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 aptly conveys the particular and uneven racialized terms that constituted the Sedgwick family’s intimacy with Freeman.33 A racial disciplinary tactic, “white love” promises to obliterate social hierarchies, to obscure systemic injustice and inequality with sentiment. In other words, affective surplus is intended to compensate for economic power and legal protection. White love thus delimits the possibilities for black agency, casting its objects into the service of white domesticity, political gain, and self-appreciation and transforming complex individuals into useable symbols. As this essay will argue, the material evidence that remains of the Sedgwick family relationship with Freeman suggests that their love was bound up with a desire to contain her, premised on affective labor and constituted by radically asymmetrical social locations. A miniature watercolor portrait of Freeman painted by Susan Ann Livingston Ridley Sedgwick (Catharine’s sister-in-law) in 1811 is one example, indexing the complex position that Freeman occupied in relation to the Sedgwicks. Some have read the very existence of this portrait as proof of the family’s deep love and respect for Freeman, but beginning in the eighteenth century, enslaved people were often featured in family portraits as signs of status and prosperity.34 In this

32Koritha Mitchell, “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggres- sion: A Form of Self-Care,” African American Review 51 (2018): 253–62. 33As Rafael explains, the benevolent pose of white love made colonization and subjugation seem “absolutely distinct from the disruptive criminality of conquest.” White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) 21. 34For example, Emilie Piper and David Levinson write, “So appreciative of Free- man were the Sedgwicks that they honored her by having her portrait painted.” One Minute a Free Woman: Elizabeth Freeman and the Struggle for Freedom (Salisbury, CT: Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, 2010), 123. 596 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

Fig. 1.—The portrait of Freeman painted by Susan Ann Livingston Ridley Sedgwick (Catharine’s sister-in-law) in 1811. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. portrait, Freeman is alone; she wears a white bonnet, a blue dress, and a gold beaded necklace that was a gift from Catharine.35 She gazes from the portrait with a serious coun- tenance, one that is hard to read, almost Mona Lisa-like in its expressive ambiguity. Critic Jasmine Cobb refers to Freeman’s “side-eyed stare,” sensing a confrontational, perhaps skeptical, attitude in Freeman’s facial expression.36 The portrait captures Freeman as a well-clothed, well-loved servant, a woman sur- rounded by gold, from the gilded wood frame to the string of gold beads around her neck. But perhaps what is most significant about the portrait is what is not pictured. Freeman’s scar, the literal sign of her years

35Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom. 36Cobb, Picturing Freedom, 30. STORIES OF MUMBET 597 as an abused slave, is not visible because of the long sleeves of her dress. According to “Slavery in New England,” from the day she received the injury, Freeman never covered the wound, as she understood it to be a crucial aspect of her self- presentation. As Cobb puts it, Freeman’s preference for expos- ing the scar “ignored slavery’s customary practice of denying Black pain and White culpability.” It also suggests her disregard Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 for a culture that likely expected her to move on from slavery and gratefully embrace her newfound freedom; the scar instead represented the lasting traumas of enslavement. The scar not only registers the permanence of slavery’s many wounds, but it also immortalizes Freeman’s protective gesture, her willingness to put her own body on the line to protect a vulnerable child from white violence. She told Catharine Sedgwick: “When people said to me, before Madam—‘Why Betty! What ails your arm?’ I only answered—‘ask missis.”’37 According to this story, Freeman essentially dares white people to ask her enslaver for the details of the violence done to her, and beyond that, she articulates a defiant refusal to narrate it herself, opting instead for what Daphne Brooks calls “spectacular opacity.”38 This anecdote suggests Freeman’s acuity, specifically her awareness of the power of storytelling, andthe self-indicting narrative, and it reveals her desire to upend the racist binary that positioned her as an obeisant subordinate. Thus, one wonders whether she chose to be painted with the long sleeves of her dress hiding the scar or whether her ap- pearance in this portrait was orchestrated by the white artist to conceal racist violence. The portrait notably occludes the very bodily detail that Freeman most sought to display in favor of a genteel image, a reminder of the ways in which her body and its representation has been contained and usurped in slavery and then in art and narrative for a range of ideological purposes. Catherine Kelley raises the question of who claimed ownership of this image, suggesting that it was likely passed down from

37Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 418. 38Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Free- dom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 8. 598 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY one Sedgwick to another, making it difficult to read the portrait as anything other than what she calls a “stunning act of appro- priation, in which the possession signaled by an ivory miniature stood in for the possession of an African American woman.”39 In this sense, it evokes Margo Natalie Crawford’s reminder to consider “who frames whom and who collects whom.”40 Sur- rounded by a gold frame and adorned with gold beads, Free- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 man is eternally silent and appropriately positioned, a symbol of the Sedgwicks’ generosity, wealth, and political virtue. There is one document, however, that provides insight into Freeman’s own wishes. Freeman’s will, which she signed with an “X” on October 18, 1829, was dictated to Charles Sedgwick a few months before her death, thus interestingly even this final assertion of her agency was mediated by the Sedgwicks, both as its recorders and executors.41 After living with the Sedg- wicks for more than two decades, Freeman moved to her own home and worked as a midwife and healer in Stockbridge, earning enough money to expand her property. In fact, she eventually became the second wealthiest black landowner in the area, after Agrippa Hull; her will indicates that she owned nineteen acres as well as furniture, jewelry, and fine clothing. Freeman’s will also confirms she had a daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and it indicates that she had treasured possessions from her mother and father; she bequeathed to her daughter one black silk gown got from Philadelphia “rec’d of my father” as well as a “short gown that was my mother’s.”42

39Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 117. 40Margo Natalie Crawford, “Textual Productions of Black Aesthetics Unbound,”in Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, ed. George Hutchin- son and John K. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 198. 41Last will and testament of Elizabeth Freeman. October 18, 1829, Berkshire County, MA: Probate File Papers, 1761–1917, New England Historic Genealogical So- ciety, Boston, MA. 42While Freeman was one of the most well-known Sedgwick servants, she was not the Sedgwicks’ only famous one. Known as “Grippy” in the Sedgwick household, Agrippa Hull had served six years in the Revolutionary War under the Polish general Thaddeus Kosciuszko. Catharine Sedgwick describes Hull as a “capital sub-altern.” For more on Agrippa Hull, see Gary Nash, Friends of Liberty: Three Patriots, Two STORIES OF MUMBET 599 These details suggest Freeman did grow up, to a certain age, with her parents and that she sought to resist the na- tal alienation enforced by slavery, using her will to reconstruct her genealogy for her posterity and to ensure the generational transmission of financial stability to her descendants. Free- man sought to pass these heirlooms on to the next generation, affirming her investment in her own familial legacy andthe Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 material comforts of her offspring. Significantly, she left noth- ing to any of the Sedgwicks, a clear indication of whom she regarded as her family. In her will, she bequeaths her “gold beads”—likely those pictured in her portrait—to her great- granddaughter, Lydia Maria Van Schaack. And yet it was a member of the Sedgwick family who donated the gold beads to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1884, explaining that the bracelet symbolized “an epoch in our social and political progress.” Though it was the Sedgwicks who prompted Free- man to make the will, the fate of the gold beads leaves open the possibility that it may not have been executed according to Freeman’s wishes; she sought to pass the gold beads on to the lineal descendants who Catharine disdained.43 The gold beads were given to the Massachusetts Historical Society by William Minot, the husband of Catharine’s niece, Catharine Sedgwick Minot, who describes them in the following terms: “There can be no doubt of its genuineness, and it is a curious and interesting relic as having belonged to the first slave ever emancipated by process of law in Massachusetts, if not in the United States.”44 His emphasis on authenticity and

Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal in the New Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeuz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 43John Sedgwick writes, “To Catharine she gave her favorite necklace, the gold one that appears in the Susan Ridley Sedgwick portrait of her; Catharine turned it into a bracelet and wore it daily for the rest of her life.” But her will suggests on the contrary that these beads were bequeathed to her great-granddaughter. In My Blood: Six Gener- ations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (2006), 201. Piper and Levinson repeat Minot’s claim: “Elizabeth must have changed her mind and given the necklace to Catharine after the will was drawn in September.” One Minute a Free Woman, 174. Freeman’s will was probated in 1830. See Berkshire County Probate File Papers. 44Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Massachusetts His- torical Society, 1884–1885), 1:3. 600 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

Fig. 2.—The clasp of Freeman’s necklace-turned-bracelet, inscribed with “Mumbet” by Catharine Maria Sedgwick after Free- man’s death. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. singularity echoes the Sedgwick family’s presentation of Free- man as an exception to racial inferiority, a rare and special token. Minot further explains that sometime after Freeman’s death Catharine Sedgwick “transformed them into a bracelet,” adding a clasp, which she inscribed with the name “Mumbet,” suggesting the complex tangle of power, love, and ownership that characterized her relationship with Freeman. Sedgwick’s desire to wear a gold bracelet, engraved with the name of a de- ceased servant she regarded as a mother, suggests her desire to both possess and identify with Freeman. Ultimately, Catharine Sedgwick’s sentimental use of Freeman’s valuable property may have come at the expense of the rightful heirs, perhaps cutting against Freeman’s own plans.

Following her death in 1829, Freeman’s name occasion- ally appeared in the press, primarily as a figure of Berkshire mythology. Such stories from the end of the nineteenth century rehearse her defense of the Sedgwick house during Shays’s rebellion, describing her as “an old black servant,” a “lioness,” STORIES OF MUMBET 601 and an unusually “faithful creature.”45 But over last couple of decades, Freeman’s story has become the focus of more sub- stantial attention, serving as the basis for several books for children and young adult readers. While the books take varying degrees of liberty with Freeman’s biography and offer different levels of historical context depending on their targeted age groups, they share a set of features as a result of their reliance Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 on the same scant archival information, derived almost exclu- sively from the Sedgwicks, and on the same generic conven- tions. In other words, these narratives plot Freeman’s story into an established trajectory that moves from oppression to liberation and from solitude on the Ashley farm to solidarity with the Sedgwicks. As recovery projects, these narratives seek to res- cue Freeman’s name and story from oblivion and to produce a more inclusive version of early American history, but as such, they necessarily enter into a tradition of reiterating the existing accounts of her life.46 Given their target audience, this new wave of books suggests that Freeman has been made to serve an important pedagog- ical function and that her reputation has significantly shifted to serve contemporary needs.47 That is, where the Sedgwicks constructed Freeman as a devoted servant, twenty-first century retellings of her story cast her as a revolutionary figure and “the Rosa Parks of her time.”48 The Freeman of contemporary children’s literature serves to celebrate the inherent rightness and universality of the founding values and also functions as a trib- ute to the power of the oppressed individual to effect change

45For example, see Henry Field, “Mumbet and Agrippa: Two Berkshire Negroes of Revolutionary Days,” Springfield Republican, September 18, 1889. 46The meticulously researched biography, One Minute a Free Woman by Emilie Piper and David Levinson, is an exception to the majority of books that narrate Free- man’s life specifically for young readers. 47This literature includes Gretchen Woelfle, Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, 2014); Harold W. Felton, Mumbet: The Story of Eliz- abeth Freeman (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970); Mary Wilds, Mumbet: The Life and Times of Elizabeth Freeman (Greensboro, NC: Avisson, 1999); and Jana Laiz and Ann-Elizabeth Barnes, “A Free Woman on God’s Earth”: The True Story of Elizabeth ‘Mumbet’ Freeman, the Slave Who Won Her Freedom (South Egremont, MA: A Crow Flies Press, 2009). 48Piper and Levinson, One Minute a Free Woman, 68. 602 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in the US. These books write a black woman into the founding moment in order to situate her specifically as an icon of interracial collaboration, ascribing to her a level of agency that is wishful. Freeman’s placement in the “Declaration of Inde- pendence” gallery at the Museum of the American Revolution suggests her recruitment in this ideological agenda.49 Freeman’s status as patriotic icon is clear in the newest title Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in the expanding catalog of children’s literature on Freeman, Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence (2014) by Gretchen Woefle, a large-scale picture book, targeted at three-to-eight- year-olds. The book begins by explaining: “Colonel John Ash- ley was the richest man in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. He owned an iron mine, a forge, a sawmill, a gristmill, a general store, and three thousand acres of farm and woodland. He also owned Mumbet.” While the inclusion of Mumbet at the end of this list of Ashley’s properties makes a rhetorical splash, it reduces her to an object and presents his ownership of her as somehow total and uncontentious. Vivid illustrations depict Freeman and her daughter in crisp bluish-white dresses and neatly tied bonnets, set against the verdant Berkshires hills, praying for freedom. Eventually, Free- man overhears Ashley and several other men discussing the Massachusetts Constitution. Inspired by the notion of political equality, she decides to approach Theodore Sedgwick, to whom she announces, “I’ve got a right tobefree.”Justafew pages later, she is “free,” thanks to the courage of her white ally and her good fortune to have been enslaved in Massachusetts rather than in a southern state where she would not have had the legal grounds for such a victory.50 Woefle’s story ends with Freeman and her daughter triumphantly exiting the courtroom.

49I am grateful to one of the anonymous peer reviewers for this observation. 50For in-depth discussion of “freedom suits,” see Edlie Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Jeannine Delombard, Slavery On Trial: Law, Abolition- ism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Kelly M. Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). STORIES OF MUMBET 603 Thus, the story ends with a celebration of the American legal system—as opposed to self-liberation or violent insurrection. Aimed at eight-to-twelve-year-old readers, A Free Woman On God’s Earth (2009) by Jana Laiz and Ann-Elizabeth Barnes also represents Freeman as a bold and empowered individual, who overhears talk of natural rights and equality and asks herself, “How can I make this law work for me?” This authorial Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 emphasis on individual ambition—rather than an interest in the collective—underlies a liberal ideology that assumes justice will be upheld by the legal system if one simply has the courage to pursue it.51 The authors represent Freeman’s in- stantaneous identification with the Enlightenment discourse of natural rights as the catalyst for her visit to Theodore Sedg- wick’s office. In Woefle’s account, Sedgwick contemplates Free- man’s entreaty, pounds his desk with resolve, and tells her, “We will go to court together and test the new law.” But these accounts, which echo Catharine Sedgwick’s, do not entertain the possibility that Freeman was actually selected as a plaintiff by white lawyers interested in testing whether the new Constitu- tion would uphold slavery in Massachusetts. Indeed, more than one historian has speculated that Sedgwick took on the case to burnish his reputation in the county and that Freeman was handpicked as the ideal petitioner.52 A Free Woman On God’s Earth relies heavily on the emotional force of the family to dramatize Freeman’s story. To this

51For a related discussion of the ideological work of historical narratives for children, see Andrew Schocket’s Fighting Over the Founders. As he writes of Liberty’s Kids, a children’s series centering on the Revolution: “The message of the series is that ‘anyone with enough gumption can attain her dreams.’ That’s a nice message, but it doesn’t square with the hard reality. . . It reinforces the essentialist tenet of a free society of individuals for whom there are no structural racial, cultural, or economic constraints.” Andrew Shocket, Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 52Arthur Zilversmit writes, “It is also possible that a group of prominent residents of Berkshire county selected Elizabeth and a negro man, Brom, who was associated with her in her suit, in order to determine whether or not slavery was constitutional in Massachusetts after the adoption of the new constitution.” See Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery,” 614–24. Piper and Levinson concur, noting “Sedgwick and Ashley would have quickly recognized Elizabeth Freeman as an ideal plaintiff for a test case.” (One Minute a Free Woman, 68). 604 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY end, Laiz and Barnes construct a sentimental scene of mother- child separation, as the young Freeman tearfully parts with her family in upstate New York. A very young Freeman is told, “You’re going on a trip. . . Don’t be afraid, my dear one. Carry me with you in your heart.” And beyond this, the authors also add a romance in which Freeman falls in love with a “young man, a fellow slave, who lived nearby in another house- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 hold.” They marry, and “Bet grew in happiness . . . [and] spent as much time with her husband as possible.” Eventually, they have a child, and he enlists to fight in the Revolution. In spite of the fact that no evidence exists for either Freeman’s tear- ful separation from her parents or for her marriage, Laiz and Barnes invoke the domestic family—and its dissolution—in order to generate identification and sympathy, in the tradition of nineteenth-century anti-slavery fiction. This imagined origin story might be read in terms of what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” a kind of writing that responds to the racist silence of the archive in order to “imagine[s] what cannot be verified . . . and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”53 And yet, the fabulations in this case do less to “derange the archive” than to conceal what has been lost and to soften the violence that remains unrecorded. Indeed, what is most striking is that A Free Woman on God’s Earth suggests Freeman’s relationship with the Sedgwicks compensates for these irrevocable losses, offering her a new, reconstructed kin- ship. This new family emerges when Freeman first approaches Theodore Sedgwick, who wrestles with his conscience before nobly taking on the case: “Mr. Sedgwick sat alone at his desk thinking long and hard. . . He agreed there was an illogic to slavery” and comes to the realization that he has a “responsibil- ity” to represent Freeman. And in the years after the case, “The growing Sedgwick family, including Mumbet and Little Bet, all happily moved into the new house.” This sentimental vision of the family elides the hierarchies between the Sedgwicks and their servant and implies a correlation between Theodore

53Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12 (2008): 11. STORIES OF MUMBET 605 Sedgwick’s moral development and his acquisition of wealth. In the conclusion, the authors mistakenly note that Catharine was by Freeman’s side when she died.54 Catharine was in fact not present at Freeman’s death nor at the funeral, which was held at the Sedgwick home in Stockbridge and officiated by family friend David Dudley Field. As her brother, Charles, wrote, “I wish dear sister that you could have stood by me, and en- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 joyed with me, in looking upon the great noble face, tranquil and beautiful as it seemed to me.”55 Catharine’s absence from the funeral complicates the vision of a reciprocal, familial relationship, but perhaps what is more interesting is the very fab- rication of this detail in the conclusion of the book: the story’s reliance on interracial love and connection plainly supersedes historical fact. Recent discussions in the field of children’s literature have addressed the politics of representing slavery for young readers, particularly in picture books. Scholars, such as Ebony Edwards, argue that we must “consider the implications of narrating both the trauma and the triumph of African American history through children’s stories, especially when teaching history through literature can be challenging at any grade level.”56 Such discussions came to head in 2016 with the publication of a book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, which depicted enslaved people joyously baking a cake for the first president. Many felt such illustrations disturbingly erased the actual horrors of slavery, glorifying the unequal and abusive relationships it produced even at hallowed Mount Vernon. A media firestorm and a Twitter meme (#slaverywithasmile) followed its publication, ultimately resulting in the publisher pulling the book out of print.

54Piper and Levinson explain Catharine’s absence by noting: “Perhaps seeing her ‘second’ mother die was more than Catharine could bear, because we know she strug- gled greatly with her mother’s death.” One Minute a Free Woman, 165. 55Charles Sedgwick to Catharine Sedgwick, January 1, 1830, Box 79, Folder 2, Sedg- wick Family Papers. 56Ebony Edwards, “Much Ado About A Fine Dessert: The Cultural Politics of Rep- resenting Slavery in Children’s Literature,” Journal of Children’s Literature 24 (2016): 12. 606 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY As this controversy suggests, the stakes are high for how contemporary children’s books render slavery. Children’s literature, as Katherine Capshaw Smith puts it, has the capacity to “recoup lost heroes, fill the gaps of historical memory, subvert ethnic stereotypes, and advance revisionary versions of cultural identity.”57 Sara Schwebel similarly observes that historical novels are seen as “an effective tool for cultivating democratic citi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 zenship in a modern, multicultural nation.” That is, children’s literature, particularly as it relates to histories of racial injustice, is a powerful political site with the potential to concretize entrenched and erroneous narratives of the past or to provide young readers with more honest and largely untold accounts of history.58 On one hand, the Mumbet stories recover an inspiring black heroine who serves as a strong and powerful protago- nist. In this sense, they fulfill foundational children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims’s criteria for “culturally conscious” children’s books, which should “help Black children understand ‘how we got over.’”59 That is, they offer a narrative that in- volves overcoming difficulty and moving toward progress. And yet, other critics add that culturally conscious children’s literature need not “hesitate to present historically accurate portray- als of the horrors of the African American experience in the United States,” as Violet Harris puts it.60 These recent children’s books about Freeman are repetitions of Sedgwick’s originary “Mumbett,” and consequently, they af- firm what Joanne Pope Melish describes as “New England nationalism,” which entails a kind of amnesia about the region’s participation in slavery and instead imagines New En- gland as the apotheosis of the nation’s idealized identity and

57Katherine Capshaw Smith, “Introduction: The Landscape of Ethnic American Children’s Literature,” MELUS 27 (2002): 3–8. 58Sara Schwebel, Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), 33. 59Rudine Sims Bishop, Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Con- temporary Children’s Fiction (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1982), 49. 60Violet J. Harris, “African American Children’s Literature: The First One Hundred Years.” The Journal of Negro Education 59 (1990). STORIES OF MUMBET 607 the birthplace of freedom.61 Both reiterate Sedgwick’s claim that Massachusetts slavery was “mild” and “gentle,” and to this end, these narratives minimize the scope of the violence that characterized daily life for enslaved people. They include the episode in which Freeman intercedes to protect an enslaved girl, but this violence is repeatedly described as a kind Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 of aberration from the norm or as an anomaly, due to this particular “shrewish” mistress not as a feature of northern slavery in general. On the contrary though, the very fact of the episode indicates that violent beatings were a quotidian reality. Colonel Ashley had already been sued by one of his slaves, Zach Mullen, for abuse and abduction in a case that was eventually settled out of court. Beyond cementing the already whitewashed vision of early New England that endures in mainstream literature, the Mum- bet story, as told to children, sustains the myth of legal emancipation as a finite and satisfactory endpoint. For example, of Freeman’s perspective after the case, Laiz and Barnes write: “The world seemed full of life and color. Every day was a won- der to Bet and she felt contented and happy for the first time.” The abrupt shift from slavery to a world of pure happiness ren- ders enslavement as a kind of legal technicality. In a similar move, Woelfle’s book ends with the following sentence: “From that day on, she was Elizabeth Freeman, and for the rest of her long life, she lived free as a river and strong as a moun- tain.” Without diminishing the meaningful distinction between enslavement and legal freedom, such rosy imagery fails to account for the reality that Freeman moved to a neighboring white, wealthy household where she continued, for more than two decades, to do all the same kinds of domestic labor and care work she had done when enslaved. The near identicalness of her post-manumission life calls into question the notion that there was a radical break between these two eras of her life. Indeed, as Henry Dwight Sedg- wick, Catharine’s brother, put it: “Slavery in New-York and

61Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 6. 608 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY New-England was so masked, that but a slight difference could be perceived in the condition of slaves and hired servants.”62 While Sedgwick intends to explain away the presence of slavery in these northern regions, his statement in fact affirms that the lives of free blacks were only free in the most technical sense. That is, Freeman’s daily life itself—the routines, the work- load, her status as a subordinate to a white family—remained Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 unchanged.63 It might be useful then to reframe the trajectory of Free- man’s life in accordance with what historians have revealed about the gradually emancipating North. Jared Hardesty writes, “Rather than the traditional dichotomous conception of slavery and freedom, colonial-era slavery should be understood as a part of a continuum of unfreedom.” In other words, “freedom” did not exist in a binary relation with slavery in eighteenth- century Boston; instead, as Hardesty puts it, “African slavery existed alongside many other forms oppression, including in- dentured servitude, apprenticeship, pauper apprenticeship, and Indian slavery.”64 While Freeman certainly achieved a new status after her legal victory, it is equally important to acknowl- edge her continued dependence on the Sedgwick family and to question whether Freeman truly had options about where or how to live. As Hardesty writes, “The concept of freedom remained problematic and fraught with difficulty. Rather than being treated as equal citizens of a new republic, freed men and women experienced for the first time scientific racism,

62Henry Dwight Sedgwick, “The Practicability of the Abolition of Slavery: A Lec- ture.” Delivered at the Lyceum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, February 1831. 63We might even consider Freeman’s service to the Sedgwick in terms of what Sarah Haley has called, in the context of black women’s punishment in the Jim Crow South, “the domestic carceral sphere.” As Haley puts it, “Domestic carceral servitude rein- forced patriarchal notions of white women’s dependency and white supremacist struc- tures of racial subordination in a historical context ridden with challenges to those relations.” Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia.” Signs 39 (2013): 67. 64Jared Ross Hardesty, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 2. For a discussion about the complexity of discussing “slave agency,” see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 113–24. STORIES OF MUMBET 609 systematic discrimination, and segregation from the American body politic.”65 Indeed, ten years after her suit, Freeman’s name, along with half the members of the black community in Stockbridge, was listed on a “warning-out” notice ordering those individuals to leave town. Warning-out was a common tactic used by northern cities to diminish and control black populations as well Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 as to notify indigent residents not to expect public support.66 Freeman’s story obliges us to think more critically about the term “freedom” and about how we narrate Freeman’s life to children. In other words, after she was “free,” Freeman paid taxes but was unable to vote or send her child to school; she may have lived in fear of being sold back into slavery or simply driven out of town, and she undoubtedly experienced the demeaning quotidian assault of entrenched racism given that her employers viewed her as an exception, so they often said, to their overarching view of people of color as fundamentally inferior.67 The insistence upon Freeman’s immediate and unproblema- tized freedom after her court case denies the reality of gener- ationally durable trauma. Indeed, to claim that Freeman “felt contented and happy for the first time” is to render slavery like a pair of clothes one can replace with a different outfit. But, as Nell Irvin Painter writes, “The injuries of slavery went much deeper, into the bodies and into the psyches of the people who were its victims. In their experience, slavery meant a good deal more than lack of standing before the law and endless, unpaid labor, just as there would be a good deal more to freedom than being able to make a contract or earn a shilling.” Nonetheless, these narratives presume to represent, and to know, Freeman’s affective experience, insisting that on a transparent interiority

65Hardesty, Unfreedom, 177. 66See Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom. For more on the practice of “warning out,” see Josiah Henry Benton, Warning out in New England, 1656–1817 (Boston, W.B. Clarke Co., 1911). 67Charles Sedgwick: “There is some organ wanting in the negro skull I am sure,” Letters from Charles Sedgwick to his Family and Friends (Boston: 1870), 120. 610 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY that minimizes her emotional range and denies her a complex subjectivity.68 In their efforts to glorify and possess Mumbet as a revolutionary heroine, such narratives become enclosures themselves, not unlike the refashioned gold bracelet or the portrait. While they celebrate Freeman, these narratives also put her to use in the service of a vision of American exceptionalism and in- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 evitability. The Mumbet story authored in the Obama era im- parts to children the notion that racial inequality is something of the past. If, as Brigitte Fielder writes, “twenty-first century children’s literature about slavery has softened depictions of black peoples’ experiences of enslavement,” such “soften- ing” serves the fantasy of a post-racial United States. Freeman’s story, as told in children’s literature, also lends itself to US culture’s sanctification of individualism, even as the rehearsal of this story risks (and in fact relies on) the erasure of Freeman herself, converting her into a tool that can be wielded to prof- fer satisfaction to readers who want to believe that race does not really matter, at least not anymore.69 In one sense, it hardly seems fair to fault this body of literature for simplifying a complex historical context involving a legal case especially when even academic historians re-inscribe the Sedgwick story, sometimes circulating outright misinforma- tion about Freeman’s life. Such inaccuracies are the product of the necessary leaps one has to make in writing about subjects that are insufficiently represented in the archives, but they also reveal how white storytelling serves to contain and

68Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 22, 174. Painter writes, “Everything we know of Sojourner Truth comes through other people, mostly educated white women. . . The layers of interpre- tation between us and Sojourner Truth are simply different from those that separate us from people who document their own lives and try to supply their own meaning.” Sim- ilarly, because Freeman did not know how to read or write and because the Sedgwicks published obsessively, it is their highly strategic, self-interested account that endures and serves as the basis for the stories being told to children. Everything we know about Freeman is drawn from the Sedgwicks’ archives or from the stories of other white people who owned or employed her during her lifetime. 69Brigitte Fielder, “Black Girls, White Girls, American Girls: Slavery and Racialized Perspectives in Abolitionist and Neo-abolitionist Children’s Literature,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 36 (2017): 328. STORIES OF MUMBET 611 functionalize black lives, transforming complex individuals into icons that shore up historically specific ideologies.70 Freeman’s evolution from Mumbet, the mammy, to Mumbet, a heroine of the Revolutionary Era, tells us more about the generational transmission of certain ideas about American slavery than it does about Freeman herself, the partial nature of her freedom, or the meaning of her legacy in African American history. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

I began this essay by describing Freeman’s burial place amidst the Sedgwick family, and in closing, I want to return briefly to that space and to its status as yet another siteof enclosure, not just physically but narratively. Freeman’s stone, near the center of the Pie, is etched with an epitaph written by Catharine:71 ELIZABETH FREEMAN, also known by the name of MUMBET died Dec. 28th 1829. Her supposed age was 85 Years. She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years; she could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust, nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell. While composed primarily of plaudits to Freeman’s exceptional service and exemplary personal characteristics, this epitaph also oddly emphasizes her inability to read and write. It seems to imply a correlation between Freeman’s illiteracy and her unparalleled capacities “in her own sphere.” In other words, her illiteracy ensured her servility, the fact that she

70Arthur Zilversmit touches on the transformation of the Freeman story into folklore. See Zilversmit, “Mumbet: Folklore and Fact,” Berkshire History 1 (1971). 71Catharine claims Charles wrote it, but archival evidence suggests that she wrote it herself. In one letter, Charles specifically asks her to send it to him: “I wish youto send me the epitaph as soon as you conveniently can.” Other scholars have also found strong evidence that Catharine herself was the author. Mary Kelley, The Power of Her Sympathy, 71. 612 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “never failed to perform a duty” and never “wasted time.” Moreover, the epitaph’s inclusion of this detail serves as one final reminder that Freeman has no ability to tell her own story. Thus, even in death, Freeman is encircled by an ostentatious display of literacies, tombstones etched with lines of poetry, phrases in Greek and Latin, at least one inscription with the Harvard seal, an immortal boast of belonging in the educational Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 elite, juxtaposed with Freeman’s enforced illiteracy. Given the prodigious archive produced by the Sedgwick family—most recently, John Sedgwick’s In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family (2006)—the emphasis on Freeman’s illiteracy here is even more striking. When juxtaposed with the excessive prolixity and self- documentation of the Sedgwicks, her silence comes to seem at once purposeful and compulsory. Not unlike the many children’s books that cast Freeman’s story as an unequivocal triumph, made palatable and inspirational for children, so too does this epitaph seize the terms of Freeman’s story—telling the future how to read her life and its meanings. Indeed, we might read the epitaph itself as a form of children’s literature, a text aimed at teaching future generations how to read Free- man’s life, her relationship to this white family, how to understand their slice of history. If, as Paula Connolly writes, children’s literature “exposes what adults consider most important, what they hope to pass on to children as a way to bring about their own vision of futurity,” then the Sedgwick family’s epitaph for Freeman might be read as articulating a vision of a racialized future in which black Americans are free to serve, and even commingle with, white people, provided they do not “waste time” or learn to read and write.72 In this sense, the Sedgwicks’ affectionate embrace of Freeman might be read in terms of Christina Sharpe’s concept of “the hold,” the struc- ture of domination that held black bodies in the slave ship and continues to confine black lives in prisons. The Sedgwicks’

72Paula Connolly, Slavery in American Children’s Literature (Des Moines: Univer- sity of Iowa Press, 2013), 211. STORIES OF MUMBET 613 hold—in the guise of a hug—is nonetheless one of restraint, a love premised on subjugation and stasis.73 Moreover, this intimacy relies upon the denial and destruc- tion of the black family. The Sedgwicks’ insistence that she is their “mother” in the epitaph’s send-off replicates the propri- etary logic of slavery, as it asserts their right to name as kin- ship and sentimentalize an asymmetrical relationship that was Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 always a form of labor for Freeman, who was in fact “mother” to her own black child.74 Indeed, Elizabeth Freeman’s epitaph makes no mention of her own family, her relationships to her daughter or grandchildren, the individuals she named in her will; the only family rendered visible is the white family who claimed her. But Freeman held and holds meaning for black history as well as for white liberal national history; the cairn of memorial stones placed on top of her gravestone by visitors making the pilgrimage to pay their respects to this day suggests her enduring significance. W.E.B. Du Bois, who was born and raised in the Berkshires, claimed Freeman as an ancestor in two of his autobiographies. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois refers to his great-grandfather, Jacob, who “married Mom Bett, a rather celebrated figure in Massachusetts history. She had been freed under the Bill of Rights of 1780.”75 This genealogical counter- narrative suggests Freeman’s importance to a tradition of black activism and uplift. The Sedgwicks, though, have privileged and made accessible a single family history, ensuring that none of Freeman’s “ruinous” descendants as Catharine called them, or even the eminent DuBois, can verify that she is one of their

73Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 70. 74This Sedgwick family compulsion to romanticize their relationships to marginalized subjects persists: In 2018, John Sedgwick published a New York Times article on his family’s relationship to Elias Boudinot, a prominent member of the Cherokee Na- tion and editor of the first Native American newspaper. Sedgwick concludes his piece by declaring: “This is the lesson of America: We are all family here,” a sentiment which suggests a kind of familial imperialism, an impulse to colonize and claim others, replac- ing difference with sameness and thereby occluding hierarchies of power and histories of violence. John Sedgwick, “The Historians Versus the Genealogists,” New York Times. April 12, 2018. 75W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 111. 614 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY own. Along with the gold necklace, the Sedgwicks successfully appropriated Freeman’s most valuable asset—her story. To this day, a replica of Freeman’s portrait hangs on the wall in the Sedgwick family house in Stockbridge, and her body lies amidst her employers, where her tombstone is inscribed with their words. The gold beads she willed to her descendants are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society, where the Sedg- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/92/4/584/1793389/tneq_a_00770.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 wicks placed them. The Sedgwicks’ success at encircling her in their Pie and in their stories has made Freeman an object of interracial triumph and love, a one-dimensional figure of de- votion and courage. As children’s books heroize Freeman and museums insert her into patriotic stories of the Revolution, Freeman’s own silence is a striking reminder of what Zora Neale Hurston called the “muteness of slavery.”76 It has been more than a hundred and fifty years since Catharine Maria Sedgwick published “Slavery in New England,” which has become the ur-text for every subsequent account of Elizabeth Freeman’s life, and yet we should approach this narrative, and its enduring appeal, not as the truth about Freeman but rather as an expression of self-flattering white love and a call to consider what stories remain untold about Freeman and the lived experience of “freedom” in New England.

76Zora Neale Hurston, “Art and Such” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Crit- ical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Meridian Books, 1990), 21–26.

Sari Edelstein is associate professor of English at the Univer- sity of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of two books, Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing and Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age.