A GREEN-WOOD PAIR

IT’S been way too long since I have been in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn: September 2020 in fact. I came to know it very well in the 2010s, when I conducted several tours there, and I strolled around more frequently than that. The pandemic happened, I got out of the habit, and then I had a hernia and couldn’t walk much for a year, and here we are in November and I have wasted much of the good fall weather, and it has mostly rained on the weekends anyway. I intend to catch up on my cemeteries including Green-Wood, though, before I have to be put in one myself. Today, All Souls Day, I’ll show you a pair from the southwest end of the park near 5th Avenue that only make the more comprehensive guidebooks.

First is DeRobigne Bennett (1818-1882), who preceded Richard Dawkins and Madalyn Murray O’Hair as perhaps the most prominent anti-religionist in the public imagination, publishing The Truthseeker as well as several books describing his anti-church leanings. After his death, the Pittsburgh Daily Post, learning that several of his writings were to appear on the shaft marking his plot in Green-Wood, mounted a public campaign against it, to no avail. The monument also is decorated with a quill pen laying atop a sword. His stone has his bas-relief portrait, as well as some of his pronouncements.

Do-Hum-Me (1825-1843) was the daughter of a chief of the Sac Indian tribe. Her eighteenth year proved eventful: she married, performed at P.T. Barnum’s circus, and tragically, died after catching influenza. In 1843 she arrived in Princeton, NJ with her father, who was involved in treaty negotiations; met Cow-Hick-Kee, a representative of the Iowa tribe, and the two married and briefly became the toast of New York society. 

Showman P.T. Barnum hired Do-Hum-Me and other Native Americans to do war and wedding dances at his American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street. But she perished at the tender age of 18 and the fledgling Green-Wood Cemetery, anxious for business, donated a burial plot. She was buried in her wedding dress. In 2005 her monument was restored with the effort of Isaac Feliciano, whose wife Rosa perished in the 9-11 attacks at the World Trade Center.

I’ll be visiting more dead the next few years before I’m dead myself.

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11/1/23