Sojourner Truth's America (review)

Recent historians, such as Marcus Rediker and Gary Nash, have fruitfully reexamined the pre-Civil War tradition of black resistance to slavery, first taken up by historian Herbert Aptheker in his much-neglected investigation of 1941. As slaves in the South lived in the double bind of slaveholder paternalism and repression, the main centres of resistance were in the North, among escaped slaves and among African Americans of the North who had experienced gradual emancipation. Since the 1830s, African-American abolitionists in the North (with the backing of a few steadfast white abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison) formed a social underground, which protected runaway slaves or assisted them in crossing the border into Canada, where they could be safe from the operations of fugitive slave laws. Washington's biography of Sojourner Truth, who was born a slave in 1797, is a significant contribution to the literature, as well as an intimate treatment of the life of one of these antislavery activists.

Washington strives, with some success, to give expression to Sojourner Truth's voice. Apart from the famous Narrative of Sojourner Truth (a second-hand account based on Truth's transcribed testimony), Washington makes good use of newspaper accounts, and the letters and diaries of Truth's contemporaries, to capture her power as an orator.

Washington engages with earlier biographers, such as Carleton and Susan Mabee, and Nell Irvin Painter, who have been dismissive of Sojourner Truth's agency as an historical figure. Washington observes for instance that the Narrative, although penned by white antislavery activist Olive Gilbert, was based on Truth's consent to the creative choices that went into the making of the Narrative. Gilbert was a woman who adhered to conventions of female morality. She was thus inclined to portray a saintly figure and suppress Truth's sexual history, which indeed Washington handles with a gossipy relish that, unfortunately, is inadequately substantiated by the evidence. Washington nevertheless persuasively argues that Truth participated in the decision not to divulge the "moral improprieties" of her youth. (186) Against the doubts of modern historians, Washington observes that Truth affirmed the Narrative as her authentic voice, a seemingly minor point best appreciated in light of Washington's vigorous assertion of Truth's disputed claim to participation in the Underground Railroad. (198)

In standing by Sojourner Truth's agency as a significant antislavery activist, Washington also draws attention to Truth's tireless activist travel. Truth travelled to both welcoming and more hostile urban and rural communities across the Northeast and West, selling her Narrative with an acute business sense remarkable for a woman who had no literacy. Washington makes a determined and admirable effort to demonstrate Truth's formidable qualities as a public speaker. In Washington's Sojourner Truth, we see a woman gifted with a combative and sharp wit. Truth was effective at using a combination of religious metaphor and humour to challenge African-American men who presumed authority over women on religious and political matters.

Among the white women who dominated the National Women's Convention formed in 1850, Truth advocated for women's rights, but proved also to be a vigorous opponent of a tendency in the Convention to place women's issues above race reform and abolition. Typical of Sojourner Truth's proficiency as a speaker is a talk she gave at a July fourth gathering in 1850 in which she played on white women's maternal sentiments to remind them of their common humanity with black women. Washington reports Truth as having said: "Do not white women ... love their infants?... Are not we colored women human?" Black women had the same feelings as whites, she asserted: "We suffer as much when our little ones are torn from us, as you white mothers." (201) Though backing down when challenged by leading feminist Lucy Stone, and thereby agreeing — with a fine touch of sarcasm — to propagate women's issues on weekdays and antislavery issues on weekends, Sojourner Truth would re-emerge fully confident of her own position at the Worcester, Massachusetts, convention in...