Jean Stein - Edie

An American Biography

JEAN STEIN

EDITED WITH
GEORGE PLIMPTON

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Epub ISBN 9781407053295

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Published by Pimlico 2006

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Copyright Jean Stein and George Plimpton 1982

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First published in Great Britain in 1982 by Jonathan Cape

First Pimlico edition 1992

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At the back of the book, among the Addenda,
are a Sedgwick family tree, an afterword,
acknowledgments, and biographical notes.

PIMLICO

EDIE

Jean Stein has worked as an editor for a number of magazines, including the Paris Review, Grand Street and Esquire. She is the co-author, with George Plimpton, of American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy.

George Plimpton was an author, an actor and a literary patron. In 1953 he co-founded the Paris Review and his books include Out of My League, Paper Lion, Mad Ducks and Bears, One More July, Shadow Box, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair, Truman Capote and The Bogey Man. He died in September 2003.

JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR. Have you ever seen the old graveyard up there in Stockbridge? In one corner is the familys burial place; its called the Sedgwick Pie. The Pie is rather handsome. In the center Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the first of die Stockbridge Sedgwicks and a great-great-great-grandfather of Edies and of mine, is buried under his tombstone, a high rising obelisk, and his wife Pamela is beside him. They are like the king and queen on a chessboard, and all around them like a pie are more modest stones, put in layers, back and round in a circle. The descendants of Judge Sedgwick, from generation unto generation, are all buried with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in toward their ancestor. The legend is that on Judgment Day when they arise and face the Judge, they wIll have to see no one but Sedgwicks.

Judge Sedgwick moved to Stockbridge right after the Revolution. Im afraid he is going to smite me down if I go on talking this way, but he certainly did ingratiate himself with the movers and shakers of his day. He was a political ally of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and he became Speaker of the House of Representatives. He wasnt a signer of the Declaration of Independence but he was in with all those people. Theres a picture in the old Sedgwick house of Martha Washingtons first reception and Judge Sedgwick and Pamela are in this picture. Poor woman, halfway through her life she went mad.

As a child I heard that her condition was due to having been left alone in Stockbridge through many winters while the Judge was politicking in New York and Philadelphia and Washington. Pamela Sedgwick may have been one of the first American wives to be the martyr of her husbands political ambitions. The epitaph on her grave is sad testimony:

SHE LONG ENDURED AND WITH PATIENCE SUPPORTED
UNPARALLELED SUFFERINGS:
A BRIGHT EXAMPLE
OF
CHRISTIAN PATIENCE AND RESIGNATION

Anybody who is a descendant of the Judge may be buried in the Pie. But at the Judges feet lies a woman named Elizabeth Freeman, known to the family as Mumbet. She is supposed to have been the first freed slave in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The story goes that she happened to hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud at a town meeting. I recall reports that Mumbets owner treated her cruelly, that he beat her up with a warming pan, that sort of thing. She ran away and sought out Judge Sedgwick and said, Sir, I heard that we are all born equal and every one of us has the right to be free and Judge Sedgwick was so impressed that he argued for her freedom. Mumbet stayed with him in gratitude for the rest of her life. An odd detail is that close by Mumbets grave another grave is marked with the bronze figure of a dog that lies beneath it. I never learned precisely who owned that dog or whether the Judge had not also set it free.

Lying next to Mumbet is Judge Sedgwicks daughter, Catharine. She was a spinster and a novelist in the early 1800s and the author of A New England Tale which was widely read at the time. Catharine used to give literary parties in the Old HouseIve heard that Hawthorne and Melville came to tea. Despite her literary propensities, Catharine Sedgwick remained intensely loyal to her many brothers and sisters and to Stockbridge. Someone is supposed to have told her that she spoke of Stockbridge as if it were Heaven, to which Catharine replied, I expect no very violent transition.

Catharines brother Charles lies next to her in the Pie. He was an addled man who wandered about giving speeches to his livestock, especially to a favorite cow. One of his servants is thought to have said: Ah, Id rather be Mr. Sedgwick than anybody else in the wide world, and next to that Id rather be Mr. Sedgwicks cow!

The Sedgwick Pie, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

SAUCIE SEDGWICK Although Judge Sedgwick lived in Boston toward the end of his life when he was Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the family was always based in Stockbridge, where the Judge had built the Sedgwick mansion just after the Revolution. It has always been the Old House to the family, and a real haven and home. They lived rather quietly, always well educated and fairly well off, brought up to think of themselves as neither rich nor poor.

JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR. Its important to think of the Sedgwicks not as Bostonians but as from Western Massachusettswhat the Kennedys call the Western