Sojourner Truth's America

1. African and Dutch Religious Heritage

9 I have been sent from God to your head to preach to the people. — beatriz kimpa vita As Oliver Cromwell put it, the Dutch preferred “gain to godliness.” — secretary thurloe chapter 1 African and Dutch Religious Heritage I “I am African,” Sojourner Truth told an audience. “You can see that plain enough.” Traveling the antislavery circuit, facing detractors as well as supporters , Sojourner acknowledged ties to the Motherland even as some whites declared her race to be descended from “monkeys and baboons.” She was not born in Africa. However, her maternal grandparents were first-generation “salt water” people who experienced the brutal Middle Passage, “seasoning” into a new culture, and another world. Truth’s mother-in-law always spoke broken English. On the Abolitionist platform, Sojourner sometimes shared with her audience stories of Africa told by her husband’s mother.1 When Sojourner was born, in 1797, slavery flourished among the rural Dutch who owned her family. Her mother named her Isabella, and she was nicknamed Bell. Isabella’s unusually tall father, James, was nicknamed “Bomefree,” merging the Dutch word for tree (bome) with the English word “free.” Africans from the inland Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) were very tall, and this region was the second major European trading station. The tallest Gold Coast Africans were mainly of esteemed, militaristic Denkyira or Ashanti ethnicity. Sojourner’s 10 bell hardenbergh and slavery times father was known as an honest, dependable, and hardworking bondman who possessed the proud spirit that Europeans insisted Gold Coast Africans (called Coromanti) exhibited in great measure. They were “intrepid to the last degree,” one slaveholder said. “No man,” he insisted, “deserved a Coromanti unless he treated him like a brother.”2 Isabella, nearly six feet tall as an adult, inherited her father’s impressive physical stature, strength, and height. Bomefree also reportedly was half Mohawk Indian. Ohio Abolitionists first mentioned this in 1851, and the story persisted from then on. In 1880, Eliza Seaman Leggett of Detroit wrote about Sojourner Truth in a letter to Walt Whitman, her former Long Island neighbor. According to Leggett, Sojourner “greatly admired” Whitman ’s Leaves of Grass, and her “father’s mother was a squaw.”3 Sojourner’s mother, Elizabeth, was “Betsy” to white adults and “Mau-mau Bet” to black and white children in the household. Elizabeth’s heritage was most likely that of West Central Africa—the region of Kongo, north of Angola. The Dutch purchased Africans from that area from the Portuguese, who controlled commerce with Kongolese traders. In the seventeenth century, Africans serving the Dutch in America (New Netherlands) learned Indian languages, and became traders and interpreters. After the British conquest (in 1664) changed New Nether­ lands to New York and New Jersey, Kongo peoples still dominated the North American enslaved population. By the mid-eighteenth century, civil wars had transformed a once strong Kongo monarchy into groups of politically autonomous , rural-based city-states. Around the same time, New York experienced a surge in economic growth, demand for labor, and carrying trade directly from Africa. African elites and traders were the middle men in the African domestic trade. Merchant caravans, “fairs,” and systems of regional markets and coastal entrepôts filled Portuguese traders’ coffers with ethnic people generically called BaKongo, whose main language group was KiKongo. Sojourner’s grandparents fell victim at this time to the slave trade.4 Colonial New York contained the North’s largest enslaved population; it grew by 70 percent between 1750 and 1770. By then, merchants imported captives directly from Africa to discourage entry of “refuse and sickly Negroes” and because colonial vessels coming from Africa paid lower duties. American “sloops”—small, swift, seaworthy vessels—conducted a triangular trade. They transported Hudson Valley foodstuffs to Caribbean and Carolina markets, then carried furs and lumber to England, and then returned to America with Holland duck, housewares, rum, sugar, and Africans. Some New York City families traded with Africa directly and had mercantile collaboration with Ulster County elites. Traders maneuvered their sloops up the Hudson, trading black captives for Ulster’s renowned agricultural products, destined for urban markets or West Indian plantations. Isabella’s owners were local merchants, gentlemen farmers, and customers of these traders.5 African and Dutch Religious Heritage 11 The work Africans performed in America—the gendered divisions of labor and the structures of household economy—was not completely unfamiliar. African village life centered on agriculture and...