Sojourner Truth: Part One: Her Life by Beth Bartlett

On May 29^th, 1851, a striking, 6’ tall, African American woman rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention being held in Akron, Ohio. There Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman Speech.” 

Originally named Isabella, and known as “Bell,” Truth was born into slavery in 1797, the second youngest of James (“Bomefree” – Dutch for “tree”) and Elizabeth (“Mau-mau Bett”) who were enslaved by a wealthy Dutch man, Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr., who had a large estate in Ulster County, New York, which was inherited by his son, Charles, when Truth was just an infant. Upon the death of Charles, at the young age of nine, she was sold at auction to John Nealy, where she “suffered ‘terribly-terribly’ with the cold”[i] and beatings. In her own words, “He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds – and the scars remain to the present day.”[ii] She prayed for deliverance, and soon after was sold to a fisherman and tavern owner, Martinus Schriver, where she led “a wild, out-of-door kind of life,” carrying fish, hoeing corn, foraging roots and herbs for beer.  Only a year later she was sold again to John J. Dumont, where she lived out the remainder of her enslavement until her emancipation by the State of New York in 1828. She described her life there as “a long series of trials” which she did not detail “from motives of delicacy,  . . . or because the relation of them might inflict undeserved pain on some now living”[iii] whom she regarded with esteem. Knowing the conditions of enslaved women, we can deduce what those trials entailed. Despite her affections for a man on a neighboring estate, who was beaten to death for visiting her when she was sick, she was forced to marry a much older man, Thomas, also enslaved by Dumont, with whom she bore five children. Because Dumont reneged on his promise to free her, she walked away with her infant daughter in 1827 and was taken in by the Van Wegener family where she lived for the next year. 

Eventually she moved to New York City, where she joined the Zion Church and met up with a brother and sister she had never known, and for a short time joined a short-lived religious sect which took all of the money she had saved over the years.  As a result, she became sure that the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” had not been practiced on her. Developing a revulsion toward money, she felt called by the spirit to leave New York City, to travel east and to lecture and preach.  In 1843, she took up the name of “Sojourner Truth,” from then on made her way in the world as an itinerant preacher in the camp revival meetings sweeping that part of the country at the time.  She drew her religious beliefs and inspiration from her mother’s assurance that there was “a God, who hears and sees you,” who “lives in the sky.”[iv] Illiterate, she memorized the entire Bible by asking children to read it to her.

Gaining a reputation as an eloquent and passionate orator, her travels would lead to her meeting abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who enlisted her in the anti-slavery movement, where she also met many involved in the women’s rights movement.  In 1850, she dictated her Narrative to Olive Gilbert. Living on the proceeds from its sale, she moved to the Quaker city of Salem, Ohio, the headquarters of the Anti-Slavery Bugle, and it was from there that she traveled to the Women’s Rights Convention held forty miles away in Akron in 1851, and gave her famous speech. She went on to deliver speeches throughout Ohio and Indiana on a speaking tour for women’s suffrage. 

During the Civil War, she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army, and afterward was honored with an invitation to the White House. She became involved in the Freedman’s Bureau and helped those formerly enslaved find employment and start new lives.  She continued to work for women’s suffrage all of her life and split with Frederick Douglass when he put Black male suffrage ahead of female suffrage. As she said in a later speech, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping things going while things are stirring.”[v]  She eventually settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she lived out the remaining years of her life.

For more on the speech itself and Truth’s recent commemoration in the opening of the Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza in the place where she gave her speech, see Part Two, tomorrow.

Sources

Truth, Sojourner. “Keeping Things Going While Things are Stirring.” In Kolmar, Wendy K. & Frances Bartkowski, eds. Feminist Theory: A Reader.  4^th Ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2013. 91-92.

Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Ed. and with an Introduction by Margaret Washington. New York: Vintage, 1993.

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[i] Truth, Narrative, 15.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid., 18.

[iv] Ibid., 7.

[v] Truth, “Keep Things Going,” 92.