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Part I
Sojourner Truth![]()
Chapter 1
Sojourner Truth, Character, and Context
On the morning of June 1, 1843 in New York City, Isabella Van Wagenen, the black house servant of Lucy Whiting, stunned her employer of over 10 years when she announced that she was quitting immediately—that very after-noon. The servant’s unlikely explanation for her abrupt departure was that “the Spirit” called her; she was “going East.” In all likelihood, since her emancipation from slavery 20 years earlier, Isabella Van Wagenen had worked as a housekeeper in the homes of a number of New York City middle-class white merchants. To many of them, and not just to Lucy Whiting, Isabella’s declaration might have seemed an act of lunacy. The 46-year-old black woman had first been a “good slave,” and then a model domestic employee. Her abrupt decision probably seemed impetuous to Lucy Whiting. Lucy knew quite well that Isabella had no financial resources, no pension or property, and no family to support her. Furthermore, at the age of 46, Isabella was old, and nearing the likely end of her productive years; it hardly seemed like an opportune moment in life to be traipsing off on a whim into an uncertain future.
Formerly enslaved people like Isabella could not retire. Most former slaves had to work until the ends of their lives, just to stave off famine and protracted suffering before a painful death. Such an excruciatingly attenuated death had been the fate of Isabella’s own enslaved father many years earlier. “This faithful slave,” Isabella would later say, “this deserted wreck of humanity, was found on his miserable pallet, frozen and stiff in death. . . . He had died, chilled and starved, with no one to speak a kindly word, or do a kindly deed for him, in that last dread hour of need!”1 With the reckless declaration that she was “going East,” Isabella’s sudden departure must have seemed all the more dramatic to Lucy Whiting since the servant appeared to lack any employable skills beyond housekeeping. How would Isabella survive? She had never learned a trade, nor experienced full independence. Isabella was born and remained enslaved until age 25. After her emancipation, she spent another 20 years working as a domestic servant, living under someone else’s roof and someone else’s direction. She had no formal education. She could not even write her name.2
Isabella’s only education came mostly from her experiences of profound oppression: slavery, discrimination, poverty, and exploitation. Subject to the will of her white masters, she had been forcibly separated from the protective presence of her parents at the vulnerable age of nine. She bore the physical and mental scars of her white masters and mistresses’ abuse. The 10-year-old Isabella had been whipped until blood streamed freely down her back. For the rest of her life, a meshwork of raised scars would cover her back. As a young woman, she had been prohibited from seeing the enslaved man whom she loved. A broken heart was the unseen punishment Isabella suffered for her affair, but she was better treated than her enslaved lover who was whipped nearly to the point of death by his enraged master. In that physically, mentally, and emotionally brutal environment, Isabella was forced to marry an older slave whom she did not love. Over the years, she suffered the deaths of two of her five children (one as an infant and the other as an adult). These painful experiences only punctuated a life that at best was grinding, exhausting, and utterly dehumanizing. She raised four children while she attended to her daily labor. On the farm, Isabella rose early in the morning to attend to the kitchen, then joined the laborers in the field or threshing room. She went directly from the fields back to the kitchen for her evening housework.
In the evening of that June day in 1843, when the presumably still-flabbergasted Lucy Whiting sat down to dinner with her husband Perez, she told him about the events of the day and Isabella’s departure. Perez did not seem to be as astonished by the news. Despite Isabella’s age, sex, race, and personal history, Perez Whiting saw in the tall, muscular black woman a strong-willed, resourceful, independent, and deeply spiritual person. Isabella was already a religious leader in the City, and had recently acquired quite a following as an independent preaching woman. Perez, like a number of other liberal Methodist Perfectionists, looked up to Isabella as a gifted mystic. Perez had known Isabella for many years; he believed that Isabella had a special ability to communicate with and directly experience God. Isabella’s claim to be following the call of the Spirit did not strike Perez as weird or insane.
Even Isabella’s sudden departure made sense to Perez; he had witnessed how her religious impulses could be precipitous. A few years earlier, Isabella had left New York City to join a religious commune run by a man who referred to himself as the “Prophet Matthias.” Isabella lived for nearly two years among Matthias’ followers in the religious sect known as the Kingdom of Zion. Although the Whitings had not fallen under the influence of Matthias, they circulated in the same Perfectionist social circles to which Matthias’ one-time followers and financial backers later returned. Isabella worked for the Whitings before and after joining the Kingdom. Even after Isabella’s return to New York City, she remained religiously adventurous and interested in new prophets. In the weeks before her ultimate departure from New York, she had begun preaching at her local African Methodist church, where, from time to time, the black minister permitted women to take the pulpit. She was acquiring a reputation among local black and white Methodists as a religious and spiritual leader. On that June day in 1843, with only 25 cents in her pocket and the clothes on her back, Isabella struck out under a new name. Until that day, her new identity only had form in her imagination. She would live 40 years longer as Sojourner Truth, until her death at the advanced age of 86.
In the four decades after she left New York City, Sojourner Truth’s mission to preach the gospel evolved into a mission to abolish slavery, bring about women’s suffrage, and contribute to the racial uplift of blacks. She preached her mission with what Cornel West would later describe as “black prophetic fire . . . a hypersensitivity to suffering that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.”3 Her lectures and travels would be glowingly detailed in hundreds of newspapers across the country; she would become a household name, and a cherished national icon. She supervised the writing of her personal memoir, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, a book she sold by the thousands to support her activism. Before the Civil War, she tirelessly travelled the country, and powerfully advocated for the freedom and equality of women and blacks. Sojourner Truth, the celebrity activist, met with two Presidents, became a leader in the abolition and women’s suffrage movements, served as the inspiration for writers and artists, and acquired national fame.4 With her fellow activists, she helped shift public opinion in support of the abolitionist movement.
After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth continued her work to end racial injustice. In Arlington, Virginia and Washington D.C., she sought to improve the economic and living conditions for the formerly enslaved refugees who were living there. She took on the district’s streetcar service, protesting its policy of refusing to pick up black passengers. Sojourner, then well into her 60s, bravely endured physical violence as conductors tried to wrestle her off the streetcars.5 In her 70s, she petitioned Congress (albeit unsuccessfully) to grant land in Kansas as a new home for emancipated former slaves. In this second half of her life, she was beloved by her many friends, black and white, male and female. She corresponded extensively with them for years through letters dictated to scribes. At her rallies, she drew crowds numbering in the thousands, speaking with moving, insightful, and often witty rhetoric in support of her cherished causes. Her death made national headlines, and her funeral was attended by 1,000 friends and onlookers—a stark contrast to her father’s unrecognized and solitary end.
Isabella’s life as Sojourner Truth began on that June day of 1843 when the 46-year-old strode forth confidently with her newly-assumed identity. Sojourner had selected this name for herself. Today, few people recognize the name that she left behind: Isabella Van Wagenen. Sojourner Truth’s important role in nineteenth century activism is overlooked by many history books and chroniclers of the era. Her story is eclipsed by those of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Jacobs. Her accomplishments and exploits are frequently confused with those of Harriet Tubman, an Underground Railroad conductor who was a Southerner and Sojourner’s junior by 20 years. To many Americans today, Sojourner’s fame and list of achievements now seem remote and hazy. By comparison to the collected works, biographies and legends of these other abolitionists, Sojourner Truth has received relatively little attention from historians and American folklorists. She never learned to read or write, so she did not, apparently, author any written works. Although hundreds of newspaper articles were written about her, they were written in an era when newspapers openly espoused a political point of view. Abolitionist papers, like Garrison’s own Liberator, only published stories that cast abolitionists in the most favorable light. Anti-abolition papers wrote stories which disparaged and discredited abolitionists. Both sides tried to agitate and frighten their respective opponents. Beyond that, newspaper reporters openly embellished stories, wrote from a partisan perspective, and usually thought of themselves more as entertainment or rumor mills than as objective news recorders. The best source for a history of Sojourner Truth’s life would seem to be the Narrative, a book that is partly a biography, partly an autobiography, and partly a polemical tract. Given this heterogeneity, the Narrative seems not to meet the basic criteria of a historically reliable primary source. In order to fully rely on a primary source, the historian must be able to identify the author, the date of writing, and the purpose for writing the document.
The first edition’s named author, Olive Gilbert, is quite obscure, and she was succeeded by Sojourner’s friend, Frances Titus, as the author of the second and third editions. Though unnamed, Sojourner herself clearly seems to have told the story of her youth. The famed abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, introduced Gilbert and Truth, and suggested that Olive act as amanuensis, or ghost-writer, for the illiterate Sojourner. Garrison had already sponsored the writing of a number of slave narratives, which, in the 1840s and 50s proved to be immensely beneficial in generating support for the abolition movement. Sojourner’s Narrative became so popular that two subsequent editions, updated and edited by her friend Frances Titus, were published in 1875 and 1884 respectively, and all sold out.6 The little pamphlet was written to further and sustain Sojourner’s activism, and not purely for the purpose of recording her life. The same could be said, however, for the Autobiography of Frederick Douglass.7 Unlike Sojourner, Frederick Douglass was the author of his own autobiography, while the illiterate Sojourner penned the Narrative with the assistance of a younger, white abolitionist, Olive Gilbert. Because the Narrative is considered polemical literature, contained some historical errors, and undoubtedly incorporated the perspective of her ghostwriter, historians have chipped away at the reliability of the Narrative.
The authenticity and accuracy of the transcript of Sojourner Truth’s best known and iconic speech—“Ar’n’t I a Woman?”—has been questioned, further diminishing her legacy. The speech, as remembered years later by the woman’s suffragist Frances Gage, was reprinted in Frances Titus’ 1875 edition of the Narrative, and has appeared in many history textbooks.8 The speech was widely considered to be the quintessential expression of the mythic Sojourner, until one of Sojourner’s biographers, the historian Carleton Mabee, presented a convincing argument that Sojourner had never said these words. Mabee pointed out that the speech was written down years after it was delivered, and contained a number of errors of fact. He dismissively wrote of the speech:
Unless evidence to the contrary turns up, we have to regard Gage’s account of Truth’s asking the “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” question as folklore, like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. It may be suitable for telling to children, but not for serious understanding of Sojourner Truth and her times.9
For over a century after her death, the “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech remained at the core of the cherished popular image of the articulate, thoughtful, defiant and indomitable Sojourner Truth. In it, she purportedly boasted of “man like” strength; she challenged conventional Christianity by rereading the Bible to assert the rights of women; she displayed the skill of a seasoned orator. The speech painted a beloved image of an unlikely heroine. Mabee’s analysis threatened to sweep this all away, even though thousands of newspaper articles attested to her popularity as a speaker, her influence on her contemporaries, and her reach upward into the highest ranks of society and government. All had been devalued as historically reliable sources. The line between fact and myth became blurred. Ironically, Mabee was not striving to erase the memory of Sojourner Truth, but only to “correct the record.” Yet, his critique of the authenticity of the speech has had a more significant detrimental effect on the public memory of Sojourner Truth than did his otherwise laudatory portrayal of her life.
The challenge to any biographer of Sojourner, then, is to excavate the true Sojourner from this tangle of fact and myth. How do we account for Sojourner’s rocket-like ascent to national prominence in the antebellum era? Two modern black female historians—Nell Irvin Painter and Margaret Washington—have written excellent biographies based on painstaking research and crosschecking of sources. These biographies and the work of other historians committed to careful identification of the faintly heard voices and inadequately-remembered deeds of African Americans have succeeded in saving the memory of Sojourner Truth.10
A Singular Name for a Singular Woman
On the day of her departure from New York City, although Lucy and Perez Whiting reacted to the news of Isabella’s mission in different ways, neither commented on the singular name that their former servant had chosen for herself. And yet, her act of creating a new identity for herself is an important autobiographical statement. She alone selected the words— Sojourner and Truth—for her name, and with them she declared her identity. The act of re-naming herself was a radical break from her earlier life as a servant and enslaved person. In that earlier life, her changing names marked the number of times this human being was legally transferred as the chattel (personal property) of one slave master to another. Each name change signaled not just a legal status change, but also a dramatic upheaval in all aspects of her life. Her residence and living conditions, the rules for and consequences of her actions, the dominant language of her environment, her work responsibilities, and the people and family who surrounded her, all changed at least five times before she reached the age of 46. Born Isabella Bomefree, she then became Isabella Nealy, Isabella Scriver, Isabella Dumont, and finally, Isabella Van Wagenen. Sojourner’s selection of her own name signified that her enslavement and subservience was literally and metaphorically at an end. From then on, she intended to be the master of her own destiny. The name was remarkable, even in the nineteenth century, when neither the word “Sojourner” nor the word “Truth” were conventionally used as names. What these words meant to Sojourner, how they expressed her intent for the future, and...
