Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (review)

Sojourner Truth has received scholarly attention from a number of talented historians over the past two decades. A northern slave who escaped, she later became an active member within the abolitionist and the early feminist movements. Along with her autobiography, first published in 1850, Truth used the still relatively new medium of photography—in particular, cartes de visite—for political ends. In the Civil War era Truth’s photographs became not only a central part of her campaign to end slavery but also a means to support herself financially.

In Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s work, Truth’s political use of photography receives the much-needed scholarly attention that it deserves. In this wonderfully illustrated book, Grigsby provides a fascinating study of Sojourner Truth’s use of photography as an instrument of her own agency. The author contends that while Frederick Douglass has been credited with shaping his own image through autobiography and photography, historians have been less keen to do the same for Truth. Grigsby has found twenty-eight original photographic portraits of Truth; however, the author notes that there may be more yet to be discovered. Organized into four sections and ten chapters, the book is structured around the visual, material, and textual nature of these photographs. The chapters focus on a range of related topics: the evolution of copyright law, paper money, and the photographic process. As a result, the reader gains a better understanding of the broader context and Truth’s use of modern innovations in technology.

Sojourner Truth was illiterate, as were the majority of New York’s enslaved population, yet that did not prevent her from having a career as an activist. While Truth placed great significance on the spoken word, she thought about the printed word in a highly complex way, analyzing published work in a manner that was “partly oral, partly visual, partly rhetorical” in nature (p. 110). The reproduction of Truth’s scrapbook of newspaper clippings about herself on page 111 adds another dimension to Grigsby’s book, inviting the reader to think through the texts as Truth would have done.

Illiteracy, however, meant that Truth was often isolated and reliant on others. Indeed, one of the challenges of any study of Truth is that all the evidence has been transmitted through another party; where Truth’s own views begin and end is hard to discern. Photographs were autographed acts, the author contends, and were therefore highly significant to someone like Truth who was illiterate, because it meant that she had a degree of control over how her image was to be (re)presented. Chapter 4, for instance, explores the political aim of these photographs through Truth’s insistence that the words “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” be included under her portrait in her cartes de visite (p. 63). The images in this chapter are some of the most well known of Truth; however, Grigsby finds new ways of understanding them. The author argues that the inclusion of Truth’s knitting in these particular photographs was a demonstration of middle-class respectability. Yet Grigsby goes further to suggest that Truth was reinforcing the message she took in person to the formerly enslaved about the possibilities of knitting as an aid to economic mobility.

This book reinforces the necessity of studying visual sources on their own terms, rather than merely as a tool to be used in conjunction with, not as illustrative of, the printed word. It is Truth’s “visual archive,” as Grigsby terms it, that is essential for our understanding of the historical importance of Truth as a historical actor (p. 11). This is an exciting book, one that will become a standard work on the subject.