Sojourner Truth
By the time Sojourner Truth arrived in Florence, Massachusetts, she had been through hell and back. She was forty-six years old and she had come north to join the Northampton Association for Education and Industry on the bank of the Mill River, to live among freedom fighters and make silk in protest of slavery. She would figure the rest out as she went. It was 1843, and she had been bought and sold as a slave three times, then released unto the scattershot mill towns of Ulster County. She had successfully sued for the freedom of her son; defected from a doomsday church in Kingston; scraped by as a domestic laborer in New York City; escaped a cult leader in Westchester county; walked across Long Island and Connecticut, preaching the gospel and giving testimony at camp meetings with little more than a bindle stick; and she had just—that past Pentecost—changed her name from Isabella Baumfree to Sojourner Truth. It was time for a big change, though the size and shape of such change was constantly growing. She had a calling. Her name was the first step. Women were going to be at the moral frontlines, she knew that much. At those camp meetings, there had been mostly women, white women, and Truth knew that God worked more violently and strangely than they could ever know by themselves.
The Northampton Association of Education and Industry was a cooperatively owned and operated silk factory in Western Massachusetts. (They also dabbled in beet sugar.) Every laborer owned a share of the company, and their output was modest if not ideological during the century of cotton and cane. The whole outfit was a rangy collection of properties stitched together by the Mill River, including a four-story factory, a sawmill, a dam and waterpower site, and a variety of outbuildings and slipshod dwellings. There were certainly lots of utopian social-justice collectives at the time, but historian Christopher Clark asserts that the NAEI was unique in that the fusion of abolitionism and equal rights for women were the bedrock of its existence, unlike others that may have included those pursuits as aspects of, though not central to, their mission. For NAEI, the justification was theological. Even their promotional materials espoused that the organization was founded “upon principles . . . the best calculated to fulfill the designs of God in placing man in this life.” Truth remembers her time there as providing her with an “equality of feeling,” “liberty of thought and speech,” and “largeness of soul”—a sense of self and agency.
At night, they ate communal meals and often hosted guests, especially, when they could, esteemed public intellectuals in the realms of their social justice mission. Truth and Frederick Douglass met for the first time at NAEI, and historian Nell Irvin Painter notes in “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known” that Douglass, in his letters about Truth, distinguishes himself from her by casting her as “salt of the earth” (as opposed to his own “refinement”). Then there are anecdotes in The History of Florence about Truth ridiculing him openly, poking holes in his arguments. She had a dry sense of humor. “Three thirds of the people are wrong,” NAEI member Frances Judd recalls her saying, maybe over dinner. Someone points out to her that that means everyone, and she says, well, shit, “I am sorry, as I hoped there were a few left.”
Truth was born in the Catskills region of New York in 1797. Even in her sprawling autobiography, there is much she refuses to disclose, things she saw during those thirty years in slavery. Among the few things she’s willing to describe: a baby thrown to its death against a parlor wall, and a young man she loved tortured until he promised to stay away from her. She knows that her audience—mostly white progressives, whom James Baldwin later calls his “innocent countrymen” in his essay “My Dungeon Shook”—could not even begin to understand the rest. She says as much in her book, though it comes to us in the third person; The Narrative of Sojourner Truth was written down by her friend Olive Gilbert at Truth’s dictation.
Were she to tell all that happened to her as a slave—all that she knows is “God’s truth”—it would seem to others, especially the uninitiated, so unaccountable, so unreasonable, and what is usually called so unnatural, (though it may be questioned whether people do not always act naturally,) they would not easily believe it. “Why, no!” she says, “they’d call me a liar! they would, indeed! and I do not wish to say anything to destroy my own character for veracity, though what I say is strictly true.”
Because she was illiterate, there were always others doing the writing for her, like Olive or, later, the stenographers at her talks. Truth even acquiesced to an interview with Harriet Beecher Stowe, which turned into the ridiculous feature “African Sybil” published in The Atlantic, wherein Truth is depicted as “simple, quaint, unlearned,” speaking in Southern dialect and tidy parables invented almost out of whole cloth. When she found out about it, Truth dictated a letter to the editor saying, essentially, uh, I’m American, not African, and I never call anyone “Honey.” This tension is at the center of Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol: that Truth is “known for words she did not say” or that we are not sure she said.
Everything we know about Truth, at least us laypeople and schoolchildren—the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in Akron, the bared breast in Indiana, the meeting with Abe Lincoln—happened in the years after her time at the NAEI. The NAEI seems to be where she gathered her powers, where her theology and sense of purpose crystalized. Truth and Gilbert worked together on The Narrative for a good year or so while Truth labored as a laundress alongside the Mill River. At the time, she did not predict that the book, as well as the professional tintypes she would go on to make, would end up being the literal currency that would allow her to eventually go off on her own, buy a house, and book public speaking events about abolition, women’s rights, and the Holy Spirit’s role in it all. She just went on working with her friend by lamplight on this long book in a clean cool room at the back of the mills, listening to the rush of the waterfall as it crashed, endlessly, through the dam.
There’s a memorial for Truth on the corner of Pine and Park Streets in Florence, Massachusetts. The committee that erected the memorial first gathered in 1993 in response to news of the Rodney King beating that had happened some three thousand miles away. Now was the hour to respond. What would their intervention into the history of American racism look like, and how should it appear in their particular community? It took almost ten years before they raised enough funds for a statue and for Florence to cough up a small bit of land for it to sit on, and even though no one from the Rodney King riots on the other side of the country knows it’s here—hell, no one from this town seems to know—it is an intervention. The committee cast Truth in bronze in a little traffic circle, taller than any man, with plaques about how she helped make silk to challenge the slave production of cotton, and how she said that Jesus came from a woman and God—“Man had nothing to do with it,” so I guess, yes, that is something like truth and reconciliation.
She’s tall. Her hands are strong, copper-colored, vivid, showing veins. There are flowers everywhere, lilies, a rest home next door that appears to be for elderly vets, but what do I know. There’s an old guy in olive drab sitting on a folding chair, looking at me. I’m sitting here, on the bench in the memorial’s little garden, imagining her walking from Long Island to Connecticut, preaching—and my grandma is dying.
I get a call from my cousin Galen while I’m in a strip-mall parking lot with a Chinese restaurant, the Pine Street Café, a laundromat, Sam’s Deli. He is crying. A Pakistani woman serves me in a convenience store. She has no idea what I mean when I ask if I can leave my car in the lot while I go look at the memorial. What memorial?
I listen to my mom’s voicemail: “Oh, honey . . . Should you come out to Seattle?” She wants things to be simple; she wants to protect my time at my writing residency. “Absolutely not. Unless you want to.”
I take a walking tour using my phone. Florence is dusty and empty today. Nearly vacant old mills, beautiful old homes, little original Colonials with modest details crowding around the river. Some are restored, others are slouching. Part of the old silk mill now holds Innovative Mental Health Services and cooperatively owned sustainable energy development. My phone map tells me that these particular buildings were run by a guy who employed fugitive slaves. The main silk mill where Truth laundered and worked as an equal among white men now holds an art collective and a record store. Two bored twenty-somethings sit on a threadbare sofa on the loading dock. I get only as far as site No. 3 on my walking tour: the steep falls that powered the NAEI’s mills. I stand behind a fence attached to a small power plant and look down into the river. I’m shocked to find it’s full of people: teenagers on floaties, homeless dudes drinking beer, an old, very skinny man with a full beard, tanned from exposure, apparently hallucinating and jabbing his arms in front of him.
I walk in the hot sun, through brush and dog shit to the messy banks, and change into my swimsuit underneath my dress. A guy my age with a cigarette hanging from his mouth offers me a floaty that looks like a pizza slice, but I decline, eyeing my backpack holding my computer. I wait until he’s out of sight, until there’s no one around, and then I jump straight into the cold water—it stinks, sort of like mildew, but it feels good. I float on my back. The smokestack on Sojourner’s old mill across the street casts a late-afternoon shadow.
I’m thinking of my grandma—skin and bones, skin and bones, even when I saw her in May. She is scared, she is fighting, I am doing the elementary backstroke: chicken, airplane, soldier. I have asked Sojourner to come meet her, save her, help her, or some woman from beyond with a lot of strength, who’s a mother, who knows not to be afraid. Or not a mother—I think she could use Flannery, too, at this time, since she’s the one who brought her to me (or the other way around, who knows?). Are we still friends? She’s saying this to a sulking me, a long time ago, holding my hand by the turtle pond at the zoo.
I’m sitting on smooth moonrock now at the base of the falls where it is sweeter and cleaner and greener. I swim in the dark punchbowl and brace myself on a rockslide for a rest. Sitting in the shadow of the old mills where they made silk and sugar beets to combat the tyranny of cane and cotton. It was faith in action, and it only lasted a few years, but so what? Did they swim here? Were there as many trees then as there are now? Is this truth and reconciliation? How do you represent the palimpsest of a life, in a life, at its end?
It’s not that Truth and my grandma have anything in common; it’s just that these things are happening at the same time. It occurs to me that Emily Dickinson’s garden is nearby, somewhere off near Amherst, where there are daisies, foxglove, ephedra, plums, lilies, artichokes, peace roses—
My grandma’s peace roses. My cousin Galen and I stayed with her in May for five days. I’d wake up to her moaning, screaming, cursing, and when I’d race downstairs she’d be sitting silently, hooked up to her new oxygen machine, pointing with her new walker at a package of cheese she’d dropped. “Dammit—can you, can you get that for me. Jeez.” One of these times in the early morning, she asked in her new pained way if I could go outside and cut two of the roses from the bush growing over the driveway. There they were, awash in the most beautiful colors, like tie-dye, cultivated for the sixty years they’d lived at that house. I cut them and put them in a jelly jar on the kitchen table, and over the next few days she would smell them and smile, turn the glass. Then she asked me to pick a giant asparagus from the garden, and an artichoke, and we boiled them at breakfast in a single pot and ate them with butter and salt. And then I left for the airport. That was the last time I saw her.
I park behind an old church converted into a Veterans of Foreign Wars center. No one seems to know that there’s a life-sized statue of Sojourner Truth down the road, or why I might be wandering the quiet, hot streets of Florence on this summer day.
I walk to Truth’s old house. It’s empty. The stone path up to the front porch has been scratched away, leaving just loose dirt. The ceiling of the sitting porch is still painted light blue, the way they sometimes did in the nineteenth century to mimic the sky. The house is a plain white Folk Victorian–style building, looking a bit rickety, with spindly posts and jigsaw eves. Leaves in the gutter. There is an orange sign in the bottom-floor window announcing a building permit.
She bought this house the same year she gave the “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in Akron, in 1851. She eventually sold it and bought two more, one after the other, each in Michigan. She died in a house she owned, surrounded by her daughters, whom she’d found by then or who had found her, I’m not sure.
After she was freed, in 1827, her family already forcibly scattered, her parents separated by slavery and dead, her children out of reach, she lived in the country and then the city. She won two landmark court cases—one for her son who had been illegally sold from New York into the still-ongoing Alabama slave trade, and another where an employer had accused her of poisoning her family. She tried to reconnect with her kids and get them gainful employment, got her son sent off on a longshoreman outfit and then never saw him again. For years, she quested after a spiritual home: She was a part of the African Methodist church in Kingston, and then the Millerites—don’t even get her started. She thought seriously of donning those white robes with them and standing on the hill, waiting for morning to bring Christ’s one-thousand-year reign. Later she lived in Matthias Kingdom, a Westchester County commune, which was helmed, like most (all?) of them, by a predatory asshole posing as the Messiah, and she had to flee.
In the Narrative, it says:
She left the city on the morning of the 1st of June, 1843, crossing over to Brooklyn, L. I.; and taking the rising sun for her only compass and guide, she “remembered Lot’s wife,” and hoping to avoid her fate, she resolved not to look back till she felt sure the wicked city from which she was fleeing was left too far behind to be visible in the distance; and when she first ventured to look back, she could just discern the blue cloud of smoke that hung over it, and she thanked the Lord that she was thus far removed from what seemed to her a second Sodom . . . Her mission was not merely to travel east, but to “lecture,” as she designated it; “testifying of the hope that was in her”—exhorting the people to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin, the nature and origin of which she explained to them in accordance with her own most curious and original views. Through her life, and all its chequered changes, she has ever clung fast to her first permanent impressions on religious subjects.
Truth believed that the Holy Spirit was the “premier means of enlightenment” and that biblical literacy “stills the voices in one’s head,” so she was, in a way, against interpretation. What she called for was an encounter—an encounter with her, an encounter with the living God, an encounter with text. You show up. You listen. You figure out the rest as you go.
White women, who were the majority of attendees at the revival and camp meetings where Truth spoke, would listen to her testimony, all that she’d suffered and all that God meant to her for it, and how she feared for her children’s lives and salvation, how her whole family had been shredded. The white women would dab their eyes—yes, we love God like you, we love our families like you, we are one. But they really had no idea what she was talking about. The white tears at the camp meeting suggested that, says Naomi Greyser in “Affective Geographies: Sojourner Truth’s Narrative, Feminism and the Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism,” “they regard Truth as affirming their understanding of family rather than complicating it by bringing up the issue of slavery.”
It is not enough to feel like you know. You don’t.
Still driving all around the Berkshires. Grandpa on the phone says, “We’ve got a really sick grandma over here.” He tells me to hold on and then I listen to him hobble with his two canes to the front porch. “I don’t want to wake her. She’s just fallen to sleep. I’ve been holding her hand for the last two hours, waiting for her to nod off. She’s got a million things going through her head—and she’s so sensitive to her environment, she wants to know what’s going on at all times: ‘Who is that?’ ‘What are you moving around?’ ‘What’s going on over there?’ But she’s also thinking, ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘Why is God doing this to me?’ or whatever is up there.” He stumbles over this one. “She’s on her last legs. She’ll go into hospice soon probably, which could last twenty-four hours or twenty-four days. Or maybe she’ll come out of it. But I’ve just been sitting with her, holding her hand, holding her hand. She droops her head, but then Robin comes through to clean something or ask a question and I have to say, ‘I need you to stay away right now!’” Then he says, though he said it twice already, “Your mom is out getting the medicine from the pharmacy, but Obama’s in town today with his entourage, so I bet she’s backed up on the Aqueduct.”
I am sitting in another parking lot, in another town just on the other side of the Massachusetts border. It’s so hard thinking of her there now. I was just with her. Wasn’t I? I made her a terrible grilled cheese sandwich, where the cheese wasn’t melted enough, and a pasta sauce with summer sausage—it was all wrong. She was in pain and she slept so much with her eye mask on during the day and the oxygen up her nose, but then she’d wake up at night to watch movies that Galen had brought (Charlie Chaplin shorts, Twin Peaks, After Hours) or, later on, The Daily Show, and we would laugh and talk about how much we missed Jon Stewart. I had always felt so close to her, but during that trip I understood I had never asked enough questions, and now it was too late.
I get back in the car and keep driving.
My mom finally calls and I pull over in a McDonald’s parking lot off of I-90. She says, as always, that she is fine; things are “surprisingly OK,” she’s “takin’ it easy,” taking care of herself, making sure grandma is comfortable, “that’s the most important thing.” We talk around and about things, just updates. She is tired. Then I start crying again, sad to have lost so much time with my grandma these past several years since leaving home.
“Shouldn’t I come out to Seattle?” I say. “I mean you got to be with your Grandma Lulu when she died!”
“NO,” she says. “No, I did not get to be with my grandmother when she died.”
“What?” I gasp. “What, sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“I was on my way to Eugene,” she says, “on a bus. I had just seen her at the hospital. She was fine. And then when I got to Eugene your dad called me and said she died, and I said, ‘What? No. That’s impossible.’ And then I caught a bus going back. And when I got there, ya know, everyone was like, ‘You should go over to her house and go through her stuff—it’ll help.’ And I was like, ‘NO, I do NOT want to do that.’ And then they started saying, ‘You should play music at the funeral!’ And I was like, ‘I am not doing that, I can’t’—but somehow I did.”
I asked her what she played.
“Let’s see . . . I played some really pretty Debussy . . . Oh, yes, and ‘Danny Boy.’ Jesus, ‘Danny Boy.’ I don’t know how I kept it together through that one.”
I’m wandering around the grass behind the McDonald’s, trying to keep my crying down. Oh, we’ve lost so much time—it could’ve been different.
“Yes, and then—and then!—maybe I haven’t told you this. A little while later I went to a concert with Carmi, and the performer ended by playing ‘Danny Boy,’ and as soon as it started I burst into tears, just like a volcano, it was so unexpected, it was pouring out of me, like waves, like I had no control. Waves and waves. It was incredible—I still remember that feeling.”
I buy a disgusting chicken sandwich from McDonald’s.
Later, I’m sitting on a hill overlooking Harvey Mountain. The sun is going down and the fireflies are filling the fields. I came here to write about Sojourner Truth, but the minute I got here, my grandma started dying.
She has effectively been a shut-in now for several years, though no one quite talks about it that way, not even me. She has always had her jeweled glasses, her lamp, her fresh New Yorker, her festering wounds on her feet. And for every issue of the New Yorker, she complains about 75 percent of the content—the terrible poetry, the inscrutably twee fiction—with very occasional triumphs and pleasures, but she reads every week anyway, and we always agree about the brilliant Emily Nussbaum. “That’s because,” my grandma would say, “like all great critics, she is not just writing about TV. She is writing about everything.” When I was in college, she’d ask me to send her my work and she’d always say (thanks, Grandma) that it was “better than most of that shit in the New Yorker!” And she would ask for more. We’d write letters, lists of book recommendations, chronicles of meals and seasonal flora—“The magnolia in the backyard is finally blooming. Made a tasty stew.” Whenever I visited her in Seattle from wherever I was living, we’d sit down and she’d extract, with the greatest delight, every story about myself to date. But, otherwise, for those years I’d been away, her life had become the windows in the kitchen and the living room, the television and the book.
She wasn’t always like this. My whole childhood, until I was a teenager, we walked and took the bus everywhere. And we used to go to the zoo most of all, in Seattle, Portland, wherever we were and wherever there was a zoo. Her zoo thing started in the late 1980s to battle some life-threatening depression and anxiety, which she never talked about and I never asked about.
I remember one time at the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, which is now called something else, we were in the gift shop and she refused to buy me a toy, or maybe she was horrified by my toy choice, and I ran out of the store and sat on the fountain by the fake turtles until she came and found me. I’m sure she was scared, but she wasn’t mad, and she sat down and was warm and said she wouldn’t tell my mom and stepdad, and that we were friends, that we’d always be friends. “Are we still friends?” And then she laughed with her mouth closed. She went on to ask me this as a joke for literally twenty years, every time I saw her: Are we still friends?
One of the last times we ever went to a zoo together, I was fifteen, and I had just gotten in trouble for drinking and smoking pot. In the parking lot, a condom, a bright pink condom, fell out of my purse onto the pavement. I picked it up and blushed. And she said, “What was that?” and laughed. Later we walked by the orangutans, and Melati, her closest orangutan friend, gave us the finger. She and Melati had been staring at each other through the habitat glass, nose to nose, for almost a decade at that point, but it had been several months since she’d last visited, so the finger made sense. “Did you see that?” My grandma chuckled, and then mimed the primate.
The very last time she went to the zoo, it took three years to convince her. I wasn’t there for it, but my mother and my sister Charlie said that when they shuttled her to the visitor center, a young male attendant reported that she was going to have to be put on a list to get a wheelchair, to which she muttered back audibly, “I’ll put you on a fuckin’ list.” But five minutes later, she was giggling with her mouth closed, like, Joke’s on you. I’m fine.
We did everything together for the years that I remember—she always came for Grandparents’ Day, took me garage-saling and to the zoo, made me fancy lunches, read me books, slept in my bed while I slept on the floor, and when she snored I’d yell “GRANDMA!” and she’d stop for a moment. We bickered all the time, about everything. She’d provoke me, or I’d feel dramatically wounded by something she’d said, or she’d cut me off, or I’d get whiny, and we would have a real balls-to-the-wall snap—but they were energizing. I remember once, when I was eight or nine, a nurse in a hospital (we were visiting her friend) looked at me in horror and said, “You shouldn’t talk to your grandma that way!” and my grandma thought that was hilarious. For years after she’d follow Are we still friends? with You shouldn’t talk to your grandmother that way! And then laughter.
A few days after my brother was arrested—so I must have just turned sixteen—my grandmother was sitting on the back porch. I got home from school, wearing these tight jeans and a floral top that laced up in the back like a bustier. I looked pudgy and depressed, and she took a photo of me squinting at her, my fingers in my hair, and another with my face pressed into the crook of my arm, both of us sitting at a table with a takeout box and a glass of juice on it.
She gave me a small amused smile and said, “Listen—it’s so loud out here.” We listened. The trees were full of all kinds of birds, screaming. They were in the giant cherry trees just over the fence and the chestnut overhead. “I am always amazed how loud it gets,” she said.
I often took the train up to visit her by myself—starting when? Fifth grade? I’d take the Cascade line, ride business class, and get a free box lunch. And then we’d do the usual: go to the zoo, go to a movie, go to the book store, do crosswords, eat Indian food, maybe go shopping at the Catholic charity thrift store, watch Mad TV, go to the Science Center or to the Pea Patch to garden. I did this almost every summer until I turned eighteen and moved away to college.
And then I remember just a couple of years ago I visited her in Seattle and she said something strange. She was sitting at her pew—an old pew pulled up to the kitchen table and the window overlooking the garden, which has been her seat since time immemorial—and she said, “You wanted to get away from all of this,” obliquely referring to my family, offering an explanation for why I’d gone to college in New York all those years back.
I said, “No, no, that’s not what I had in mind at all—I really wanted to go to Pratt.”
And she said, “But you wanted to get away, too. You needed to.”
But then, this decade of not leaving the house, of inaction, of a fuller life not lived. And why don’t I have a mythology for her, the way I do for my grandfather? My grandfather is the man who wanders unencumbered, but my grandmother the hippie witch—a neighborhood kid in the 1960s called her that, and it stuck—is still and always a mother, a grandmother to me.
I am sitting on that hill overlooking Harvey Mountain, going through all of this in my head, and on the phone now my stepbrother Noel says, “Ya know, that pity thing, that’s OK because it’s part of how you grieve, but it doesn’t do any good for her.” He added, “You know what they say: You gotta know the name of your devil.”
I wonder if she ever did. I wonder if I do. It’s a terrifying thing, to think that the dragon is lurking there, and you either can’t or won’t see it, and you don’t know which.
There were a lot of black women preaching truth to power in the nineteenth century, more than will ever be named. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, Florence Randolph, Harriet Jacobs: women who literally ministered on foot, women, in some cases, who had escaped slavery, walking hundreds of miles to preach. Lee and Jacobs wrote books about slavery, about sexual and physical abuse, and about conversion and talking to God: God is coming, repent, all ye sinners—God loves you and God is full of wrath and Christ will come again. And God loves us, we who are women and are black. When Truth writes her Narrative, she offers something similar, and she eventually figures out how she could make a living off of its distribution.
In 1851, in Akron, she comes out to say that if we are to overturn any system, any world, black women need to be included in the category of “woman,” a category around which there is much anxiety at that time—the whole “cult of true womanhood” thing: pious, pure, domestic, submissive, white. Someone calls Truth’s name off a piece of cardstock and she bundles her Quaker-style skirts together and walks onto the stage.
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers “Intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside-down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right-side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
It’s amazing, right? On many levels. In 1851: Your essentialism is suffocating every social justice movement. The rights of all disenfranchised are bound together. My life has been profoundly different from yours, and I am telling you, nonetheless, I am a woman. If you don’t believe me, if you can’t understand, we’re not going to be able to get it “right-side up again.” And also, Christ was made by God and a woman—“man had nothing to do with Him.”
But is that even her voice? (Here I am, too, putting words in her mouth.) There are two versions of this speech, both transcribed by white people—this one, by Frances Dana Barker Gage, being the most widely referenced and perhaps the most obviously doctored, published twelve years after the convention in The History of Women’s Suffrage. Historian Nell Irvin Painter famously reveals this to us much later: Truth spoke with a Dutch accent—a Dutch New Yorker’s accent, in fact—and she would have said “aren’t,” if anything, and she did not have thirteen children, she had five. That the stenographer recorded her speech patterns, her rhetoric, her syntax, in such a way as to uphold the dominant narrative of what a black American woman might sound like in 1851, and not what Truth actually sounded like, seems likely to Painter. I think of Truth responding to Stowe’s feature in The Atlantic: “I don’t call people ‘Honey.’”
Yet something extraordinary is happening here. She wasn’t asking that black women be considered pious, pure, and domestic angels like the aspirational middle-class Victorian white women—she was poking holes in the whole concept of womanhood as it existed at the time.
Sojourner Truth said such an obvious thing, but something that had seldom or never been said before: Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it.
Then, sometime after Akron, she hires a photographer to take her portrait. Painter describes her style of dress in these photographs, the cartes des visites, as Quaker-style antislavery garb, distinguishing herself as a part of the resistance. At lectures, she starts selling these photos like trading cards, alongside copies of Narrative. “Selling the shadow to support the substance” she calls it, and these words are literally printed on the photos. The substance being her message, the shadow being the image of herself.
When I think of her, I think of how much she had to go through. She passed from one religious cult to another, enduring massive amounts of physical, sexual, and psychic abuse from men, women, congregants; then she ends up in this silk plant run by socialists, and it is there that she is able to bring four of her daughters, it is there that she begins to compose—out loud, on the page, whatever —“Ain’t I a Woman” (or “Aren’t I a Woman”). She was shifting the paradigm.
Another way of saying it:
After running from a thousand crazy, misogynistic religious movements helmed by men—Matthias, Miller, her fucking slave master—and after all but one of her children were sold away from her and into slavery, and after having been physically, sexually, and psychically abused by everyone who’d ever exercised any power over her—she becomes Sojourner Truth.
Today I find myself reading about Yvonne Delk, the first African American woman to be ordained by the United Church of Christ. There’s a sort of spiritual CV online, an essay and self-styled Q&A narrating her path toward ordination. I first find Delk and her essay while developing a list of the most famous twenty-first-century black American women ministers and preachers, because I realize I don’t know who they are. (Malcolm X once said that “the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday,” and that is still true.) But first, how many institutions ordain women today? Not many: the Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church of the USA, United Methodist Church, Pentecostal Church of God, Assemblies of God, African Methodist Episcopal, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ (Delk’s denomination), and Christian Science, still, of course. In more than half of the institutions that do this, the first to seek ordination were black women.
In her essay, Delk draws on Truth for strength, in an invocation, to do what she needs to in the UCC. She calls herself a daughter of the biblical Hannah and Sojourner Truth. Her occupation is, in her own words, a Justice Ministry: battling misogyny, racism, classism, the things the church was always tasked with. The colonizers and slave holders, the religious powerbrokers and patriarchs, they never knew what was coming. She describes the day of her ordination in 1978, surrounded by an all-male clergy with anointing hands, when she asked God for help in this journey. “As I knelt before that altar, I was part of a circle of women who had heard their names called and had stepped out of the shadows of racism and sexism to say, ‘Here I am, God; use me’ . . .” She says that she was on a journey toward “an unimagined future.” She says, “Let’s not worry about whether the world or our churches are ready for truth, because truth makes room for itself.”
The day before I flew out to Seattle to see my grandmother for the last time, Sweeney’s grandmother was diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer. I sat on my grandma’s couch and told her this, and she sort of smiled, a small empathetic smile, though her dentures were falling out and she’d lost so much weight. And the next day she said, “You know, after you told me that, I had a dream that I had cancer.” She put her hand on mine and laughed with her mouth closed.
Later in conversation, another one of my cousins, who was currently living in my grandparents’ spare room, said to her, “Sometimes I still feel like my eight-year-old self,” and she looked at him, her eyes popping like an owl’s, and said, “I’m sixteen.”
I worried that she wasn’t happy to see me that last time, the way she had been in the past. That was hard. I wondered, was our connection gone? Was it because I made her that terrible grilled cheese sandwich that sent her into a kind of spiral of depression? Of course, she was in excruciating pain and probably very scared, but all of this, in my narcissism, I took entirely personally.
All I want to say to her now is that I love her. She taught me to love books and reading and movies; she taught me to laugh, at just about anything, at any time; she taught me to love finding things at garage sales. Grandma, you were warm and protective, you were willing to fight with me without ever shutting down; you were fun and loving, but even now I am not sure that I ever really knew you, and that’s hard. You loved your children, even in those later years when you began to snap and lash out and withdraw. You had good politics. You were welcoming, you asked lots of questions, you read my writing, you taught me to love that I wrote; you donated livestock in my name every Christmas for fifteen years. You were wise and discerning and hip, and even if you didn’t say it, you got stuff no one else got. You had the mind of a writer; you saw the world as a complex system of psychologies, relationships, tragedies, and tensions, all of which were inevitable, but which you could see, catalog, smile at, laugh at. You could see how it was all working.
You remember the day America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. You remember the day your Japanese neighbors were forced out of their house and never seen again. The particular details of your life came to me rarely, but you encouraged the particular from me.
Truth and reconciliation. There has to be truth and reconciliation. I am only just now beginning to understand what that means.
She died while I was on speakerphone. Everyone—aunts, uncles, cousins, parents—was gathered in the living room; I could hear their voices. My sister was crying on the other line, saying that grandma only had an hour left. Then my mom’s voice: “OK, Nan is here—the chaplain. She’s going to say a blessing now.” A chaplain? For my family? Nan gathered everyone around for a prayer: “Dear Lord”—something something—“Gale, a beloved daughter, wife, mother, grandmother—” For some reason it made me jump out of my skin, those words being more like stations in life, none of which were her whole self. She was a beloved person, a beloved woman, an amazing thinker and wit, all of those things, but those four words the chaplain said, they were stations, and they were so imprisoning in so many ways, and it was going too fast now. “. . . who was a source of support and love for her family . . .” Then I heard Robin interject—“And challenge! She challenged us, too, right guys?!” And we were like, Right, right. Nan’s voice wavers, continues: “. . . Please bless the fruits of the marriage between George and Gale, and bring peace to her survivors . . .” Then she opened the floor to us, to add anything we wanted, and we all burst out, started telling all these inappropriate stories, talking about Black Pine Lake and how Grandpa drove her crazy and how snarky she was, how she and I fought while she taught me how to fly a kite at Seaside, how much we bickered but how wonderful it was. Her saying “I’m going to put you on a fuckin’ list,” and Melati, too, her old friend the orangutan—“old buddies,” Grandpa kept saying. Grandma was nonverbal at this point, but her eyes were still open. Then the poor chaplain interrupted us, “I don’t want to offend you, but we should bring some closure here.” So she recited the Lord’s Prayer and everyone said amen, probably had never said it before in their lives, and then the chaplain was gone and ten minutes later Gale Adair died.
Sojourner Truth leaves the Northampton Association for Education and Industry in 1846, and she gets help to buy her house. She pays for a photographer to take her portrait and she sells it at camp meetings, with her book, each photo captioned: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” She wears plain clothes to show that she means business, that, if anything, she is like the Quakers, not the women in bustles and crinoline crying at camp meetings. She starts to get famous, get read, get heard. She meets the president, Abe Lincoln, and in one version he is deferential to her, and she even gets the last laugh (“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he says, to which she responds, “So have I”), but in another version he is dismissive, barely acknowledges her, treats her like a child. She rejects the definition of what it means to be a woman because that definition doesn’t include her. Somehow she sets this kind of thinking in motion: a resistance of which we are still the heirs. The legal stations of female life—daughter, mother, wife—were not ever granted to her, and if those stations cannot include her then it is those stations, that understanding, that must be lacking, because ain’t she a woman?
She is invited to speak at the Women’s Rights conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, and either we know exactly what she said or we don’t at all, but what we do know is that she climbed the plywood steps in her heavy skirts and got onstage, and at that moment (I think of Frank O’Hara’s elegy to Billie Holiday), everyone and I stopped breathing.