Glorying in Tribulation: The Life Work of Sojourner Truth

Chapter 4: Sojourners

Four Sojourners Hear my prayer, 0 Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all myfathers were. Psalm 39:12 I think some people would understand the quintessence ofsanctifyinggrace if they could be black about twenty-four hours. Amanda Berry Smith, Autobiography, 1893' The woman who boarded the Fulton Street ferry early in the morning on the first day ofJune 1843 had chosen for herself a name that resonated with the pain of an oppressed people dwelling for many generations in a strange land. Within the Old Testament context the sojourner was the non-Hebrew stranger who lived among the Hebrews. During part of their own history, the Hebrews had lived as sojourners among the Egyptians, with some rights and duties; afterward they had been enslaved: "My people went down aforetime into Egypt to sojourn there; and the Assyrians oppressed them without cause"( Isaiah 53:4).2 Harriet Beecher Stowe told Truth's.story ofnaming: My name was Isabella; but when I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wa'n't goin' to keep nothin' of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an' down the land, 88 Glorying in Tribulation showin' the people their sins, an' bein' a sign unto them. Mterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, 'cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people.3 Truth's bold intention to strike out as an itinerant evangelist had formed in a climate of luxuriant enthusiasm. The emotionally charged revival style of preaching of the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s appealed to African captives and their African American descendants. In her elegy for George Whitefield, the great Awakening preacher, Phillis Wheatley repeated the words that offered such emotional succor to the oppressed: "Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you, Impartial Saviour is his title due: Wash'd in the fountain ofredeeming blood, You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God."4 The ecstatic spirituality and inclusive message of revivalist Methodism and other evangelizing denominations appealed to blacks in the Second Great Awakening in the early part of the nineteenth century and was influenced by the shaping vitality of black oral traditions. A style of preaching that accommodated audience response had been shaped in black congregations and amounted to a partial Africanization of religious style. The roots of Truth's performance style, whether singing or speaking, lie in an aesthetics of participation that defined African religious practice spilled over into Christian revivalism.s Christian hymns exerted a powerful attraction for the enslaved black community and black voices influenced the style of the great camp meeting songs. At a Methodist camp meeting in 1828, Truth heard the revival hymn, "There is a Holy City," with its vision of those who "came from tribulation / To everlasting day," to claim their "bright temple / and crowns above the sky." The message for those still caught up in tribulation was not different from Jupiter Hammon's consolation to his New York city audience in 1786: "Our slavery will be at an end, and though ever so mean, low and despised in this world, we shall sit with God in his Kingdom, as Kings and Priests, and rejoice for ever and ever."6 Truth made songs of day to day tribulation resonant with protest. Like the songs sung by Fannie Lou Hamer and Bernice Johnson Reagon they became a weapon in a liberationist struggle for people in the here and now. I am pleading for my peopleA poor, downtrodden race, Sojourners Who dwell in freedom's boasted land, With no abiding place. (NarBk, 302) 89 Truth's use of song to concentrate the attention of her audience on a concrete political and social reality differed from the revivalist use of song to involve the crowd emotionally. When Truth sang a song that evoked the experience shared only among black people, she sang it into an ironic space that opened up between the song and her many white listeners. "Unlike sacred music," Sherley Anne Williams has written, "the blues deals with a world where the inability to solve a...