Stories in Stone (34 page)

Generally short and rectangular, the gray markers appear to have been relocated during a drunken binge.
The superintendent
got them into more or less straight lines but they lean left, right, forward, and back.
A few have succumbed to gravity and
tipped over completely.

Along one of these paths stands—or, more accurately, slumps—a slate grave marker with a three-lobed top.
To reach it, walk
through the burying ground’s wrought-iron gate, turn right on the main path, swing left around an octagonal enclosure, and
continue down the path next to the chapel to just beyond a tree with well-furrowed bark.
The slumping stone rises on the left
side of the path, next to a similarly shaped marker that has sunk half again as deep.

Originally, two slightly raised shoulders flanked the taller stone’s tympanum, or middle lobe, which takes up the middle half
of the grave marker.
Gravestone researchers refer to this shape as a headboard.
Prior to the superintendent’s beautification
project, another headboard-shaped but much smaller marker, called the footstone, stood about five or six feet away from the
headstone.
The deceased’s coffin would have lain on its “bed of death” between the two markers and faced east, so the body
could rise toward dawn at resurrection.

Carved into the tympanum is a winged skull, or death’s head, with perfect teeth, as if death had seen an orthodontist.
Atop
the grinning skull flies a winged hourglass, about half the height of the skull.
A rosette and garlands that resemble abstract
owls run down the outside quarters of the panel below the lobed shoulders.
Cut into the smooth center of the stone are the
facts: Elizabeth Pain, wife of Samuel, died November 26, 1704, age near fifty-two.
The words appear next to a heraldic shield,
or escutcheon, bearing two lions, and several one-inch-wide lines, which link together in a resemblance to the letter
A.

Elizabeth Pain’s tombstone has a notorious reputation.
In the final lines of his romance tale of morality in Puritan Boston,
The Scarlet Letter
, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “In that burial ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built .
.
.
[O]n this simple
slab of slate— as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance
of an engraved escutcheon.
It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of
our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—ON
A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”

Do those linked lines on Pain’s tombstone form the famed scarlet (
gules
means red) letter
A
on its sable background?
Was Pain the model for Hawthorne’s adulteress Hester Prynne?
Did Pain’s gravestone seed Hawthorne’s
imagination?
Many people have raised these questions.
The facts are few, the speculations many.

Elizabeth Pain’s slate tombstone, King’s Chapel Burying Ground, Boston.

Hawthorne lived in Boston twice.
The first time he lasted six months as editor of
American Magazine
.
He returned almost three years later, in March 1839, and stayed until November 1840.
Scholars know that during his time
as editor, Hawthorne often visited the Boston Athenaeum, a famed library originally located next door to King’s Chapel Burying
Ground.
A vigilant researcher and active explorer of Boston, he more than likely walked through the graveyard and saw Pain’s
gravestone.
Adding a bit of spice to the story, Pain did go to trial, not for adultery, but for murdering her child.
She was
found not guilty, but still was whipped twenty times.

Many guidebooks and Web sites report that there is no doubt that either Pain or her gravestone inspired Hawthorne, but no
one knows for sure.
Although Hawthorne did base many characters in
The Scarlet Letter
on real people, no direct, unequivocal evidence links Pain and Prynne.
Still, Pain’s gravestone offers numerous reasons to
visit it, for it exemplifies trends in stone, shape, symbolism, and language found throughout graveyards in Boston and beyond.

Slate was the stone of choice for gravestones for more than 150 years in eastern Massachusetts.
The earliest carvers used
wood, followed by local rock, often field boulders, before turning to the more abundant local slate.
Well-known quarries opened
in Cambridge, Slate Island in Boston Harbor, Harvard (twenty-five miles west of Boston), Charlestown, and Braintree (near
the Granite Railway Quarry).
¹⁶
The latter quarry produced the infamous, twelve-inch-long trilobites that Percy Raymond described as bordering on the “domain
of romance.” None of the Massachusetts quarries are active at present and in a monumental 1914 United States Geological Survey
study of slate, none are listed, but for two centuries they produced thousands of tombstones.

It is easy to see why early gravestone carvers chose slate.
They could split the slate into slabs and could cut the stone
with ease and with exquisite detail.
Who knows if the carvers knew how well slate resisted erosion, but they probably would
be surprised and pleased that you can still discern individual teeth on Elizabeth Pain’s winged skull.
Furthermore, you can
make out the remaining parts of the whorl on the broken right shoulder, even though only the top layer of slate remains, and
there is no doubt that lions populate the escutcheon.

The tripartite headboard shape of Pain’s tombstone is a classic style of gravestone from Puritan New England, akin to what
biologists call an indicator species.
Whenever you see a headboard-shaped slate grave marker, you can almost guarantee that
you are in a former stronghold of Puritans.
In addition to the bed of death connection, a tripartite shape represented the
arched doorway that the soul passed through on its way to eternity.
Variations on the theme occurred, but for the most part
the headboard remained popular to around 1800, when a neoclassical revival arrived and gravestones became taller, sleeker,
and more three-dimensional.

A winged skull also appeared widely on gravestones during the Puritan era.
Like the headboard shape, winged skulls told of
death, arguably the central preoccupation of an average Puritan’s life.
They died young.
They saw death regularly.
They heard
about death weekly from their preachers.
Placing a winged skull prominently on grave markers reminded all who visited that
their life would end soon, too.

And if Elizabeth Pain’s visitors didn’t get the point of the skull, they should at least have understood the winged hourglass.
Time flies, your time is short.
Subtlety was not a strong point of Puritanism.

Below the winged skull, Pain’s gravestone reads “Here Lyes Ye Body of .
.
.” The words refer specifically to the mortal remains;
yet another reminder that the body and not the soul was the focus for the Puritans.
Although Pain’s gravestone lacks an epitaph,
many stones had ones that emphasized rot and decay, or as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1723 in his mock epitaph, your body will
be “food for worms.”
¹⁷
No wonder modern people have such a gruesome image of the Puritans.

The imagery, slate, and wording of Pain’s tomb were the common language of burial grounds throughout the 1700s, but with the
decline of Puritanism and corresponding rise of more liberal religious viewpoints, change spread across the world of death.
Less forebidding winged faces or cherubs replaced the ominous winged skulls, followed in the early 1800s by the rise of the
urn-and-willow design, symbolic of more secular beliefs.
In addition, “In Memory of” began to supersede “Here Lyes Ye Body
of,” as the focus of death turned more toward the mourner and away from those who died.

These religion-influenced changes coincided with overcrowding and poor burial practices at Boston’s burying grounds.
The latter
problem led to grave robbers regularly poaching parts and bodies for medical studies and to diseases spreading with the malodorous
miasmas wafting from the dead.
New religious outlooks, a concern with sanitation and safety, and the rise of neoclassicism
ultimately are made manifest in the development of a new type of burial ground, the cemetery.

Boston’s elite, many of whom were helping pay for the erection of Bunker Hill Monument, established Mount Auburn Cemetery
in 1831.
Located four miles from Boston, Mount Auburn consisted of seventy-two acres of trees, dells, ponds, and wetlands.
It was beautiful, free of bad air and grave robbers, and organized so that people could purchase lots, everything the Boston
burial grounds were not.
Reflecting the new religious views, Mount Auburn was a landscape where “death would seem disrobed
of half its terrors,” or so wrote an early visitor.
¹⁸

Mount Auburn’s founders took two additional tacks in their goal of exorcising the ghosts of Boston’s old burial grounds.
First,
they banned perpendicular slab gravestones.
Instead, they wanted three-dimensional monuments, such as sarcophagi, obelisks,
mausoleums, and columns, and their allusions to antiquity.
The founders also prohibited the use of slate; they considered
it stiff, ungainly, and gloomy.
And who wanted to be reminded of those dreary Puritans?

What did the founders replace slate with?
Boston’s Brahmins preferred marble, despite its reputation for poor durability in
a cold climate.
In contrast to slate and its connection to the Puritan’s dour imagery of death, marble “suggested the purity
of heavenbound souls and the assurance of salvation provided by liberal religion.”
¹⁹
Unable to compete with purity and salvation, utilitarian slate’s reign in New England graveyards came to an end.
²⁰

In February 2008 I returned to my old elementary school for the first time in over thirty years.
Stevens was still an elegant
Georgian-style building, but a new addition to the north marred the wonderful symmetry of old.
Entering the front doors, I
discovered that the wide wood steps that once led up to the second floor were gone.
I stayed on the ground level and entered
the school’s office, what in my day had been the boiler room.
I checked in, put on my Visitor button, and headed out in search
of the blackboards of my youth.

As I got oriented, I found a stairway.
It was much as I remembered, except now I noticed how thousands of little feet had
worn a low spot in each stair about one foot from the banister.
Someone, probably a well-meaning adult, had also placed metal
nubs on the banister to prevent kids from sliding down.
At the top of the stairway the floor of the hall was still wood and
looked to be original, with some planks running twenty feet long or more.
Dark wood still framed the doorways to each classroom,
but the little cloakrooms where we hung our coats had been removed.

I stuck my head in one classroom.
The blackboard was gone.
I looked in another room.
Also empty of slate.
A teacher wandered
by and I asked her about the blackboards.
“They were all replaced when the school was remodeled in 1999,” she said.
“They
were real slate and I have about twenty small pieces of it at home.
I don’t know what I am going to do with it.”

The Seattle school district, like many across the country, has been phasing out blackboards for years.
Dust is to blame.
It’s
bad for kids because the fine particles exacerbate respiratory problems such as asthma and allergies.
It’s bad for computers
because chalk dust gets into the keyboards and other sensitive parts.
It’s bad for fashion because chalk dust gets on clothes
and in hair.

Every classroom at Stevens now has a whiteboard instead of a blackboard.
Teachers use pens instead of chalk, which gives them
the luxury of multiple colors, in contrast to earlier monochromatic eras of white chalk, or perhaps yellow.
Pens provide better
contrast and higher visibility and don’t produce all of that nasty dust that coated hair and clothes.
Nor can anyone annoy
his or her classmates by running their fingernails down the blackboard.