Glorying in Tribulation: The Life Work of Sojourner Truth

Chapter 2: The Country of the Slave

Two The Country ofthe Slave I come from anotherfield-the country ofthe slave. SojoumerTruth,1867' When Sojourner Truth spoke of her ancestors, she spoke in a general way as many African Americans might speak: We came from Mrica. What she allowed her audience, for example in the remarks Harriet Beecher Stowe attributed to her in their 1853 meeting, was the general truth of African American historical experience. You see we was all brought over from Africa, father an' mother and I, an' a lot more ofus; an' we was sold up an' down, an' hither an' yon.2 Truth wrote to James Redpath of the Boston Commonwealth shortly after the publication of Stowe's essay to correct the assertion that "she was evidentlya full-blooded African"3: The history which Mrs. Stowe wrote about me, is not quite correct. There is one place where she speaks of me as coming from Africa. My grandmother and my husband's mother came from Mrica, but I did not; she must have misunderstood me, but you will find my book a correct history .4 In a New York newspaper account of one of her later lectures, which dwelled on her autobiographical statements, Truth is said to have "narrated the history of her mother-in-law, who was stolen from her native land in Africa and brought to this country and sold into bondage" (NarBk, 209). Although Truth sent Redpath her Narrative and called it 30 Glorying in Tribulation "correct," it is correct simply because it does not consider her ancestry. Olive Gilbert was not interested in establishing Truth's African roots or antecedents, specifically or generally. She was interested only in their function in her moral tale of slavery and its effects. Abolitionists were, above all, interested in the stories of white people: the American stories of white enslavers.S Sojourner Truth was born to Elizabeth, the third wife of James Bomefree, in the state of New York at the end of the eighteenth century. Since her parents were enslaved, the infant, named Isabella, was enslaved at birth under a New York state law dating from 1706. Although there is no record of it, Truth placed her birth "as near as she can calculate between the years 1797 and 1800."6 The year 1797 is likely based on the testimony of her former masters. A letter dated 1834 by her last owneremployer , Isaac S. Van Wagenen of Wahkendahl in Ulster County, mentions that he had known her since infancy, and another by her New Paltz, Ulster County owner John J. Dumont comes closest to suggesting a birth year. Writing on 13 October 1834, Dumont said that Isabella had lived with him "since the year 1810" and that "at the time she came here she was between 12 and 14 years ofage."7 If Truth was born in 1797, she could have been Phillis Wheatley's daughter or granddaughter. By any accounting she would have been only recently emancipated at the time of Nat Turner's slave insurrection in Virginia in 1831. She was a nearly exact contemporary of Maria Miller Stewart, who was born in 1803 and died four years before Truth in 1879. The estate of Isabella's first owner, the Dutchman Colonel Johannes Hardenburgh, was located on the banks of the North River in Hurley, not far from Swatakill in Ulster County. Hurley, a hilly upland town, was originally called Nieu Dorp (New Village) by Dutch settlers who created it from an Indian treaty around 1660, which was ratified by the English government after 1667. The Hardenburgh family was among seventy-five families who petitioned for land grants as early as 1706, and the historic Hardenburgh Patent, granted in 1708-1709, included mainly the county of Sullivan and part of Delaware. By the time of Truth's birth, the Hardenburghs had been nearly a century in the founding and settlement of Hurley.8 When Hardenburgh died, his son Charles became the owner of Isabella's family. The misery of the damp cellar where they came to live is described in the Narrative: Among Isabella's earliest recollections was the removal of her master, Charles Ardinburgh [sic], into his new house, which he had built for a The Country ofthe Slave 31 hotel, soon after the decease of his father. A cellar, under this hotel, was assigned to his slaves, as their sleeping apartment,-all the slaves he possessed , of...