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

Book Reviews 111 while also making clear that the main account is drawn from the historical sources, not personal memory. Finally, the book discusses the years immediately following the shootings and, briefly, their contested memory. Grace clearly shows that the shootings did not kill activism at Kent State, but rather that the student movement broadened and diversified as the war continued, despite persistent tension between activists and authorities. Kent State provides a corrective to the image of the 1960s at Kent State, specifically, but beyond that, it explains the process of movement development, radicalization, and repression among mostly working class, Midwestern students. This focus makes the study unique and insightful among scholarship that is generally focused on the more iconic centers of protest. Christine Lamberson Angelo State University Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 224. Illustrations. Index. Cloth. $45.00. In Enduring Truths, Darcy Grigsby offers readers an impressively researched examination of twenty-eight cartes de visite (the first incarnation of the pocket-photograph) of abolitionist Sojourner Truth and how she used them to spread her image and message. Grigsby contextualizes these images within the broader emergence of both the carte de visite and government-issued paper currency, at times confounding the distinction between the two. In doing so, Gribsby compellingly demonstrates the ways that Sojourner Truth’s photographed image served as an emphatic statement of self-assertion and financial selfreliance . The first of the book’s four parts explores Sojourner Truth’s public persona, over which she often had little control. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who met Truth only once, authored Truth’s biography for the Atlantic Monthly, romantically casting her as the Libyan Sybil, but with creative embellishments. For her own autobiography, Truth, herself illiterate, trustingly had to rely on others to faithfully record her dictations. Most poignantly, in her first publicity photograph, she was reluctantly “swaddled” in a billowing patriotic costume, only her face visible (even 112 The Michigan Historical Review her hands were covered). Grigsby contrasts these fractured representations of Truth with the poise and dignity with which Truth presented herself in her own first set of cartes de visite, taken in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1863. The second and third parts of the book explore the implications of the inscription which appeared on Truth’s cartes de visite (“I sell the shadow to support the substance”) and her decision to copyright her image. By asserting financial and legal ownership of her image and by financially supporting herself by selling her photographs, Truth reversed her former status as a slave, bereft of property or identity. In this context, Grigsby convincingly interprets Truth’s images as a literal form of currency with which she supported and asserted herself. The final section contextualizes the few known extant original collector’s albums of cartes de visite which contained her image, examining the varied motivations that might have inspired their owners to insert Truth’s photo alongside images of other public figures and even family members. Enduring Truths concludes by exploring her final cartes de visite, which she still sold even into her eighties. Grigsby does a magisterial job placing these images in historical and visual context. Her thorough and insightful explanation of the associations behind the most seemingly inconsequential props in some of these photographs (such as the recurrent knitting needles) is particularly rewarding. Readers also see how images of public figures could be caricatured and altered to garner support for (or against) a political cause, something which still resonates today. This book recommends itself as a handsomely illustrated and authoritative explanation of Truth’s cartes de visite and their cultural context. Furthermore, though scrupulously researched, Enduring Truths is also readable and compelling, and will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists alike. Jonathan Rinck Spring Arbor University ...