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Introduction: The Three Lives of Sojourner Truth
- University of Illinois Press
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1 Introduction the three lives of sojourner truth On June 1, 1843, the Sojourner boarded the Brooklyn Ferry in Lower Manhattan and headed for Long Island. A thrifty woman with a savings account , she carried only a few coins to “pay Caesar.” Once “vain in her clothes,” she carried only a few belongings in a knapsack. After disembarking on Long Island and walking along the sandy road, she met a Quaker woman. “I can see her now,” Sojourner Truth told a Chicago newspaper reporter, as she recalled that conversation from long ago. The Sojourner asked the woman for a drink of water. “What is thy name?” said she. Said I, “Sojourner.” “Where does thee get such a name as that?” Said I, “the Lord has given it to me.” “Thee gave it to thyself, didn’t thee?” said she, “and not the Lord. Has that been thy name long?” Said I “No.” “What was thy name?” 2 introduction “Belle.” “Belle what?” “Whatever my master’s name was.” “Well, thee says thy name is Sojourner?” “Yes.” “Sojourner what?” Sojourner confessed that she hadn’t thought of that, whereupon the Quaker woman “picked that name to pieces” so much that it looked different, and “didn’t seem to be such a name after all.” Crestfallen, and hastily excusing herself, Sojourner “plodded on over the sandy road and was very hot and miserable.” In her frustration she cried, “Oh God, give me a name with a handle to it.” After all, since God’s voice had led her out of the city into an unknown region, she now needed God to give her a last name. At that moment of despair, it came to her “as true as God is true, Sojourner Truth.” She “leapt for joy” and thanked God for the name. “Thou art my master, and Thy name is Truth, and Truth shall be my abiding name till I die.” Finally, after five masters and five children, and over forty years on the earth, Sojourner recalled, “I was liberated.”1 Thus began the sojourn of perhaps the most remarkable black woman in the nineteenth century. Sojourner Truth waged a forty-year battle as a champion of the downtrodden, and as a spokeswoman for social justice. Convinced that she was an anointed messenger, she followed God’s “voice” wherever it led. That voice guided her to take up religious radicalism, Abolition, temperance, health reform, Spiritualism, women’s rights, anti-Sabbatarianism, and other causes. Sojourner Truth traveled through twenty-one states and the District of Columbia . She attributed her verbal power to divine dispensation; few people who knew or heard Sojourner Truth questioned her calling. Her riveting speeches, narrations, pronouncements, and labors stirred many listeners. “No one can have the least idea of the powerful woman by any written or any description of her,” Sojourner’s Detroit friend Eliza Leggett wrote. “Her presence was so powerful, her magnetism so great, her personal appearance so majestic—her eye keen.” Sojourner’s Abolitionist compatriot Parker Pillsbury noted that like the New Testament apostles, a few honorable women upheld the antislavery banner. Their Acts “could register great numbers of such, who went everywhere preaching the anti-slavery word.” In recounting these women’s bold heroism, and recognizing them by name, Pillsbury added, “but the most wondrous of all was the Ethiopian . . . Sojourner Truth.”2 “There was both power and sweetness in that great, warm soul and that vigorous frame,” the minister Samuel Rogers recalled. Her “withering sarcasm” was matched with a gentle and kind nature. Before and after the Civil War, Sojourner Truth was part of the Lyceum speakers’ movement, which included vice [3.135.205.146] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 02:51 GMT) introduction 3 presidents, senators, poets, clergy, scientists, suffragists, and foreign dignitaries. The American public at that time was “never more in earnest” or more “intellectual in their demands” for able speakers. Sojourner Truth, Lyceum organizer F. P. Powell said, “carried the people by storm.” Of all the “strong characters I met on the platform,” he observed, “there were none stronger than Sojourner Truth,” whose “eloquence was only equaled by her wit.” She was extemporaneous , tense, vigorous, and “a great smoker.” She would swing out one long arm, walking back and forth and gesticulating as she “struck out the straightforward logic of intuitive nature.”3 Sojourner Truth was exceptional by any standards, but her achievements are so notable because she overcame so much: crucibles of race, gender, poverty, lack of education, and...