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Chapter 3 “I don’t know how you will feel when I get through”: Racial Difference, Symbolic Value, and Sojourner Truth My friends, I am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don’t know how you will feel when I get through. I come from another field—the country of the slave. —Sojourner Truth, May 9, 1867, First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association , Church of the Puritans, New York City At the 1867 convention of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), Sojourner Truth readied her audience to hear her speak on a subject she believed they had begun to ignore—the rights and material conditions of formerly enslaved African Americans, including “the colored woman.” During a career of political agitation and public speaking that spanned three decades, Truth spoke at woman’s rights meetings and antislavery societies, demanding her audiences’ attention to slavery and its abolition, the freed people and working-class African Americans, universal suffrage, and the rights of African American women. Truth, though singular in style, was not unlike other early black feminists who often maintained multiple political associations and negotiated the conflicting demands of competing and intersecting publics . Much like Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, feminists like Truth also worked in ways that demand we consider the location of their speeches and writings and the ways in which they have been represented. Such considerations , however, are not only salient to understanding how nineteenthcentury black feminists circulated in their own moment but also bear significantly on how they circulate in the histories of woman’s rights and feminism we have inherited and continue to perpetuate. 94 “I don’t know how you will feel when I get through” Why and how certain black feminists acquire representative status and come to “embody” early black feminism in our historical memory is a central focus for this chapter. Despite the ever-growing body of work on early black feminism, many people recognize a single name, Sojourner Truth, as “the” black feminist of the nineteenth century.1 Remaining in our memories and imaginations for longer than any of her contemporaries, Truth has become a highly transportable symbol of black feminist “difference.” Yet like her black feminist contemporaries, be they preachers as she was or reformers like Craft and Remond, Truth challenged her listeners to see interdependent oppressions and insisted upon a politics that addressed not only black women’s rights but also those of workers, the freedmen, and the black community at large. Recently, two biographies—Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996) and Carleton Mabee’s Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (1993)—have fostered a debate over the authenticity and mediation of Truth’s most famous address, the “A’n’t I a woman?” speech. Delivered at the 1851 woman’s rights convention held in Akron, Ohio, this speech was first reported in the Anti-Slavery Bugle and later “recalled” in Frances Dana Gage’s “Reminiscences” published in 1863 and included in The History of Woman Suffrage. Painter’s work in particular has fueled two larger scholarly trends: the belief that the “A’n’t I a woman” speech is largely Gage’s fabrication and the search for the “real” Truth, which entails choosing either the Anti-Slavery Bugle version or Gage’s account as the more authentic.2 The Bugle’s report neither presents Truth’s speech in dialect nor includes the question that became etched in popular memory. Instead, Marius Robinson quoted Truth as proclaiming, “I am a woman’s rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man” (Robinson). In contrast, Gage’s account employs a plantation-style dialect through which Truth invokes notions of decorum as well as strength: “Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me my best place. . . . And a’n’t I a woman? Look at Me! Look at my arm. . . . I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’n’t I a woman?” (Gage, “Reminiscences” 1: 116). This focus on the “authentic” Truth begs the question of exactly how particular representations of her may have served interests within the nineteenthcentury woman’s rights movement and shaped the image of Truth we have inherited through the narrative of that struggle. Even though we may never know with any certainty exactly what she said, we can know something of [3.15.219.217...

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