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Sojourner Truth
Declaring the Truth to the People
There was no church available to her, no congregation with whom to worship. As a slave, Isabella Van Wagenen was forced to make do, so she turned to the place most accessible to her: the outdoors. She wove an arbor out of willow brush on an island where two small streams converged near her master’s farm. It was here, beneath the tangle of branches and beside a gentle waterfall, that Isabella worshiped God, talking with him “as familiarly as if he had been a creature like herself.”1 She related all her troubles and suffering to God in minute detail, pausing from time to time to inquire, “Do you think that’s right, God?” and begging to be delivered from evil. At her makeshift altar beneath the willow arbor, Isabella bargained with God, promising to live a life of purity and self-sacrifice for others if he would release her from the burdens of slavery. In late fall of 1826, she heard an answer to her prayers. God instructed her to take her infant and flee her master’s farm, leaving her husband and her other four children behind.
“His Love Flowed as from a Fountain”
Born a Dutch-speaking slave in rural Ulster County, New York, Isabella Van Wagenen was sold several times before landing at the farm of John and Sally Dumont. Both her master and mistress physically and sexually abused Isabella during the sixteen years she lived with them. When she finally escaped with her infant daughter, Isabella walked five miles to the home of an antislavery couple, who took her in and paid John Dumont twenty-five dollars to cover the remainder of her contract (she was to be released under general emancipation on August 4, 1827). A month before her official emancipation, though, Isabella’s determination wavered. She decided to return to Dumont’s farm, but just as she was about to step into his carriage, she was struck with a vision from God:
God revealed himself to her, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, showing her, “in the twinkling of an eye, that he was all over”—that he pervaded the universe—“and that there was no place where God was not.” . . . All her unfulfilled promises arose before her, like a vexed sea whose waves run mountains high; and her soul, which seemed but one mass of lies, shrunk back aghast from the “awful look” of Him whom she had formerly talked to, as if he had been a being like herself.2
When Isabella recovered from this vision, she found that Dumont had departed without her.
“Oh God, I did not know you were so big,” she exclaimed aloud, and then walked back into her neighbor’s home to resume her life there. In the months that followed, Isabella began to feel the presence of a friend who “appeared to stand between herself and an insulted Deity,” like “an umbrella had been interposed between her scorching head and a burning sun.”3
“Who are you?” she repeatedly inquired of this comforting presence, until finally, “after bending both soul and body with the intensity of this desire, till breath and strength seemed failing . . . an answer came to her, saying, distinctly, ‘It is Jesus.’”4 Isabella had heard of Jesus, but until this point she had always considered him merely an important man, like Washington or Lafayette. Now she realized exactly who Jesus was and how much he loved her. His love, she said, “flowed as from a fountain.”5
Not long after her baptism in the Holy Spirit, as she later referred to this experience, Isabella moved to New York City, where she became an itinerant preacher with the Methodist Perfectionists, a community that broke from the traditional Methodist Church to pursue a more radical practice of simple living through the Holy Spirit. In the city she also fell under the spell of street corner preacher Robert Matthews, who called himself “the Prophet Matthias” and operated “the Kingdom of Matthias,” which we would now consider a cult. Isabella willingly gave him money from her savings and served as his housekeeper. Her narrative reports that she was physically abused by Matthias and hints that his wife may have sexually abused her as well. Although she freed herself from Matthias’s grip in 1835 when he was accused of murder, her experience with “the Kingdom” suggests that Isabella, although on her way to self-confidence and independence, still yearned for structure and family and grappled with her place in the world.
“Ain’t I a Woman?”
On June 1, 1843, God renamed Isabella “Sojourner,” “because I was to travel up an’ down the land, showin’ the people their sins, a’ bein’ a sign unto them.” She then asked God for a last name, “’cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people.”6 Sojourner Truth left her home at dawn that day, on Pentecost, and crossed the bridge to Long Island with the rising sun warm on her back. Recalling the fate of Lot’s wife, she refused to look over her shoulder until she felt sure the wicked city was too far behind her to be visible.
Sojourner preached at camp meetings around New England until the onset of cold weather. Then she made her way to Northampton, Massachusetts, where she joined a utopian commune called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. The association offered Sojourner an opening into the abolitionist and suffragist movements. She gave her first antislavery speech in Northampton in the fall of 1844, and in May 1845 she spoke to the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Sojourner stayed in Northampton even after the commune dissolved, and it was there that she dictated her Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which was self-published and printed on credit in 1850. She charged twenty-five cents per copy and acted as her own distributor and bookseller, using the earnings to repay the printer and pay off the three-hundred-dollar mortgage on her newly purchased house.
Sojourner’s most famous speech was made in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. The Stone Church was stifling on that late May day, packed with men and women who had come to listen to the antislavery feminist speakers. Sojourner captivated the audience with both her intimidating physical presence and her words. At nearly six feet tall, she was a statuesque figure with a deep, booming voice. She was also a skilled orator who used humor to soften her scathing critiques. “Her manner of speaking undercut the intensity of her language,” explains biographer Nell Irvin Painter. “To capture and hold her audience, she communicated her meaning on several different levels at once, accompanying sharp comments with non-verbal messages: winks and smiles provoking the ‘laughter’ so often reported. . . . The humor was shrewd, for it allowed her to get away with sharp criticism, but it permitted some of her hearers to ignore her meaning.”7
The speech, which has come to be known as “Ain’t I a Woman?,” is both history and legend, in part because of a newspaper article published in the New York Independent twelve years after the Akron conference. The article’s author, Frances Dana Gage, exaggerated and embellished Sojourner’s original performance. In fact, there is some question of whether Sojourner even uttered the rhetorical question “Ain’t I a woman?” a single time, never mind the four times included in Gage’s article. Marius Robinson, who served as secretary of the convention, printed Sojourner’s address in full shortly after she made it, and while the speech was a rousing declaration of women’s rights, it did not include the phrase that has come to symbolize Sojourner Truth.
By 1858 Sojourner was famous enough to convene a series of her own meetings in Indiana, one of which prompted an incident that further increased her fame. During the meeting a group of proslavery men challenged Sojourner’s authenticity as a woman, claiming her to be a man in disguise. The charge polarized the audience, with the proslavery advocates insisting that Sojourner step into a private room to show her breasts to a select group of women, thus proving her gender. Sojourner took the suggestion one grand step further. As she quietly disrobed before the entire packed hall, she responded with a verbal attack that shamed her critics. “In vindication of her truthfulness, she told them that she would show her breast to the whole congregation,” reported the Boston Liberator, “that it was not to her shame that she uncovered her breast before them, but to their shame.”8 As Painter notes, “Truth had turned the challenge upside down. Her skillful remaking employed the all-too-common exhibition of an undressed black body, with its resonance of the slave auction that undressed women for sale. What had been intended as degradation became a triumph of embodied rhetoric.”9
Sojourner’s fame also brought its share of harassment, threats, and prejudice. At one point, when told the building she was scheduled to preach in would be burned, she responded, “Then I will speak to the ashes.”10 But her quick wit and determination didn’t always protect her. After being physically assaulted and injured by one particularly violent mob, Sojourner was forced to walk with a cane for the rest of her life.
A Lifetime of Advocacy
Sojourner put her reputation to work during the Civil War by helping to recruit black troops for the Union Army, including her grandson, who enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. When she met President Abraham Lincoln, whom she described as kind and cordial, she spoke to him with her usual honesty and humor. “I told him that I had never heard of him before he was talked of for president,” she explained in her Narrative. “He smilingly replied, ‘I had heard of you many times before that.’”11
Sojourner continued to rally for change even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865, she advocated for the desegregation of streetcars in Washington, DC, by riding in cars designated for whites, an act that resulted in the dislocation of her arm by an angry conductor. Later in her life she argued for the right of former slaves to own land. She passionately supported the movement to secure land grants from the federal government but was ultimately unable to sway Congress.
Although she is remembered as one of the foremost leaders of the abolition movement and an early advocate of women’s rights, during her later years Sojourner broadened her interests to include prison reform, property rights, and universal suffrage. Abolition was one of the few causes Sojourner saw realized in her lifetime. The constitutional amendment barring suffrage discrimination based on sex, on the other hand, wasn’t ratified until 1920, nearly four decades after her death.
Sojourner Truth died before dawn on November 26, 1883. She claimed to have been at least 105 years old, but in reality she was closer to eighty-six. Regardless of her age, she believed strongly that it is a person’s accomplishments rather than their chronological age that determine whether a life should be considered long or short. “Some have been on earth scores of years, yet die in infancy,” she said in her Narrative.12 From her bed she uttered her last words, “Be a follower of the Lord Jesus,” to a Grand Rapids, Michigan, newspaper reporter two days before she died.13 According to her own measures and her impressive list of accomplishments, Sojourner Truth lived long, yet as her last words attest, she placed one accomplishment far above all the rest. She was a follower of her Lord Jesus indeed.14