SOURCE: “Speaking of Shadows,” in Glorying in Tribulation: The Lifework of Sojourner Truth, Michigan State University Press, 1994, pp. 1-27.

[In the following excerpt, Stetson and David examine the power of Truth's oratory, claiming that although much scholarship has focused on her illiteracy, it was in fact irrelevant to Truth's lived experience and political thought.]

I sell the shadow to support the substance.

Sojourner Truth¹

On the first day of October 1865 Sojourner Truth dictated a letter from Washington, D.C. to her friend Amy Post in Rochester, New York:

I have heard nothing from my children for a long time, neither from my grandchildren since they left me. I take this occasion to inquire after their whereabouts and health, as well as your own prosperity, and to inform you of my own. I spent over six months at Arlington Heigths [sic], called the Freedmen's village, and served there as counciller for my people, acceptably to the good but not at all times to those who desire nothing higher than the lowest and the vilest of habits. For you know I must be faithful Sojourner everywhere.

Six months after the formal ending of the Civil War, Truth felt that the nation was still wandering like the Israelites in the wilderness with no promised land in sight.

I have generally received the kindest attention from those in Authority even to the President. But I see dark spots still in the great cloud that leads us by day, and occasional angry flashes in the pillar of fire that guides through this long dark night. Yet my comfort in all this is in the thought that God rules.

The dark spots by day were easy enough to account for in her constant confrontation with the racism that persisted after the abolition of slavery.

A few weeks ago I was in company with my friend Josephine S. Griffing, when the Conductor of a street car refused to stop his car for me, although closely following Josephine and holding on to the iron rail they draged me a number of yards before she succeeded in stoping them. She reported the conductor to the president of the City Rail Way who dissmissed him at once; and told me to take the number of the car wherever I was mistreated by a conductor or driver, and report to him and they should be dismissed. On the 13th inst. I had occasion to go for blackbury wine, and other necessieares for the patients in the Freedmen's Hospital in this city where I have been doing and advising, for a number of months under sanction of the Bureau. As they had often refused to stop for me, I thought now I would get a ride without trouble as I was in company with annother Friend Laura S. Haviland of Mich.. As I assended the platform of the car, a man just leaving it, called out, “Have you got room for niggers here?” as the conductor then noticed my black face, pushed me, saying “go back—get off here.” I told I was not going off, “then I'l put you off,” said he furiously, with clenching my right arm with both hands, using such violence that he seemed about to succeed, when Mrs Haviland reached us and told him, he was not going to put me off, placing her hands on both of us. “Does she belong to you? if she does, take her in out the way” said he, in a hurried angry tone. She replied “She does not belong to me, but she belongs to Humanity and she would have been out of the way long ago, if you had have let her alone.” The number of the car was noted, and conductor dismissed at once upon the report to the President (Mr Gideon) who advised his arrest for Assault and Battery as my shoulder was sprained by the wrench given by the conductor in his effort to put me off. Accordingly I had him arrested and the case tried before Justice Thomson who refered the case to the Grand Jury of the United States, and placed James C. Weedon, the conductor under bonds for his appearance to court which opens next Wednesday. My shoulder was very lame and swolen, but is better, but I sometimes fear it will trouble me for a long time, if I ever get entirely over it. It is hard for the old slave-holding spirit to die. But die it must. Write immediately, tell me where my children are, and how they are.²

“Mrs Haviland is here on business, and will remain a week or ten days longer,” added Truth in a postscript; “She does the reading and writing for me while here.”

.....

Although Truth's powerful oratory created her public reputation (J. Miller McKim, the corresponding secretary for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, thought that a person could “as well attempt to report the seven apocalyptic thunders” as to recapture the effect of Truth's eloquence³), scholarly interest in her has often centered around an attempt to assess her role in producing written records of her own words. Again and again this effort hinges on the question of her lack of literacy. Yet clearly it is Truth's experience of illiteracy that functions as an authorizing strategy in her stories about her life and that forms the bridge between her lived experience and the development of her mature political thought. “You know, children,” she is reported to have said, “I don't read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations.”⁴ This was strictly true. This was the source of her efficacy as a spokesperson for the right to political self-determination for millions of formerly enslaved people whose conception of social organization had been formed out of their own experience under a legal prohibition against literacy.

Illiteracy did not exclude Truth from political discourse, and the concept is of little utility in understanding her work. “She is a woman of strong religious nature,” wrote a correspondent after the war, “with an entirely original eloquence and humor, possessed of a weird imagination, of most grotesque but strong, clear mind, and one who, without the aid of reading or writing, is strangely susceptible to all that in thought and action is now current in the world” (NarBk, 237).

In evaluating the authenticity of the work of the first English autobiographer, Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century woman who also relied on scribes and intermediaries to put her words into written form, historian Karma Lochrie has argued for a category somewhere between literacy and illiteracy, “a quasi-literacy defined by its access to the written word.” For Truth, as for many people in medieval times and since, “reading was more often linked with hearing or listening than it was with seeing” and many written texts would be “read aloud for their ‘readers.’”⁵ During the 1820s, when Truth had escaped slavery to stay with the Van Wagenens, she was probably being read to from the Bible on a regular basis for the first time, while many an illiterate English laborer went regularly to a pub to hear the editorials of Cobbett read aloud.⁶

We can identify the two crucial elements in the print culture that served as a conduit into Truth's ears and a vehicle for the words she spoke to circulate in the world beyond her immediate audience. These were the Bible and newspapers. We have many images of her methods of interaction with both.

Truth's political primer was the Bible. The power struggles of a people under the eye of a partisan god were models for a marginalized culture. The Narrative allows us to hear her listening to Genesis, to Isaiah, to the passage in which Paul claims that Jesus had a Bride (the Church). Truth expropriated the moral center of white Christianity, emptying out the stores of biblical imagery in the service of her race. She could use the Bible to withering effect. Her speaking strategy on the abolitionist stage was to convert the white man's rationale for slavecatching as soul-saving into the topsy-turvy argument that the civilizing of the whites was now the black person's burden. Playing on the white Christian's convention of wonder that Christ could love man, Truth would ask from the platform, “Isn't it wonderful that the Ethiopians can love you?” She said of the thieving bureaucrats managing the refugee programs in Washington that “the people here (white) are only here for the loaves and fishes while the freedmen get the scales and crusts.”⁷ Speaking her politics in biblical terms, Truth wrote in outrage to the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1867: “I have just heard an extract of a letter read from Gerrit Smith to Mr. Garrison, which makes all my nerves quiver.” She reminded Smith, who was urging reconciliation, that the South had “robbed and starved and butchered for centuries,” like those “workers of iniquity” to whom Jesus said “I was hungry and ye fed me not.” She asked of Smith, “Has he forgot Andersonville and Fort Pillow?”⁸

Truth was a sophisticated listener who grasped how difficult it is to get a straightforward reading, since every reading is both a presentation and an interpretation; and to this could be added the burden of the reader's analysis. In Truth's Narrative it is explained that

when she was examining the scriptures, she wished to hear them without comment; but if she employed adult persons to read them to her, and she asked them to read a passage over again, they invariably commenced to explain, by giving her their version of it; and in this way, they tried her feelings exceedingly. In consequence of this, she ceased to ask adult persons to read the Bible to her, and substituted children in their stead. Children, as soon as they could read distinctly, would re-read the same sentence to her, as often as she wished, and without comment;—and in that way she was enabled to see what her own mind could make out of the record, and that, she said, was what she wanted, and not what others thought it to mean.

(NarBk, 108-9)

Scribes as well as interpreters presented problems for the speaker-hearer. Before God taught her to keep her own records, Rebecca Cox Jackson experienced the problem of the unfaithful recorder in the person of her authoritarian brother:

So I went to get my brother to write my letters and to read them. So he was awriting a letter in answer to one he had just read. I told him what to put in. Then I asked him to read. He did. I said, “Thee has put in more than I told thee.” This he done several times. I then said, “I don't want thee to word my letter. I only want thee to write it.”⁹

Truth understood that the Bible had been “worded” rather than written. Following her careful hearing/reading of the Bible, she always tested its authority.

She wished to compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness within her; and she came to the conclusion, that the spirit of truth spoke in those records, but that the recorders of those truths had intermingled with them ideas and suppositions of their own.

(NarBk, 109)

If the spirit of truth found only intrusive scribes, the human speaking voice could be expected to have problems as well. To separate the recorded word from the speaking spirit of truth in Holy Scripture was an act of searching analytical skill to which Truth felt authorized by the text of her experience. When Lyman Beecher asked her if she preached “from the Bible,” Truth asserted that she did not, because she could not “read a letter.” She explained that she preached only one text, that of her experience: “My text is, ‘When I Found Jesus!’”¹⁰ The conversion experience that had thrown the organizing textual grid over her preaching had liberated Truth from the tyranny of written doctrine, even that expounded in the Bible itself.

After the Bible Truth read newspapers, and her political consciousness developed in dialogue with the circulating record of abolitionist opinion. She corresponded with white abolitionist Oliver Johnson, who edited the official organ of Garrisonian abolitionism, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, from 1858 to 1865. A letter dated 29 July 1863, written to her by Johnson after the murderous anti-black riots in New York City, gives some of the quality of their exchange:

Yours by the hand of J. M. Peebles came promptly. I thank you for the photographs, though they are poor compared with the one you sent me first. It is a pity you did not preserve the negative of that instead of this. Not only is the likeness better, but the work also.

The mob did not disturb the Anti-Slavery office, nor me. The fact is the Standard is scarcely known to the vile class composing the mob, having but a small circulation in the city. But it would have taken only a hint to direct their attention to us, and then my life would have been in danger, and the office would probably have been destroyed. A good Providence seems to have watched over us. Mr. Leonard, the colored clerk, was obliged to hide, but no harm came to him. Many of the colored people were dreadfully abused, but a very healthful reaction has already set in; and I believe the condition in this city will be better than it was before. Upwards of $30,000 has been raised for the relief of the sufferers, and they will get pay from the city government for the property they lost. I shall send the Standard as you request.

(NarBk, 258-59)

From Washington in 1864 Truth wrote a careful description of her work with the freedpeople and of her visit to Lincoln to her Quaker friend Rowland Johnson: “You may publish my whereabouts, and anything in this letter you think would interest the friends of Freedom, Justice, and Truth, in the Standard and Anglo-African, and any other paper you may see fit.” The surviving files of the New York weekly Anglo-African, the most important of the black newspapers of the Civil War period, are incomplete, so a source for information about the most interesting of Truth's print interactions is lacking; still we know from this letter that she read it and that its readers probably read about her in its pages. In the same letter she wrote, “Ask Mr. Oliver Johnson to please send me the Standard while I am here, as many of the colored people like to hear what is going on, and to know what is being done for them. Sammy, my grandson, reads for them.”¹¹

.....

How Truth related to printed accounts of herself reveals much about her awareness of her public image and much about the extent to which she controlled it. Some of the power of the press was on her side. Garrison's Liberator, Marius Robinson's Anti-Slavery Bugle, and Oliver Johnson's National Anti-Slavery Standard sought copy for their antislavery crusade and were willing to give her space on some other subjects—religion, temperance, woman suffrage, and her petition for land grants to post-war blacks—as well. Truth understood the power of newspaper reporters and editors to tailor the message she wanted to convey.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton recounts a compelling scene after the Equal Rights Association meetings in New York City on 9-10 May 1867, which were intended to serve the alliance between feminists and abolitionists. Truth had spoken three times at the convention, delivering arguably her greatest statement on black woman's rights. Stanton wrote to the Democratic editor of the New York World that she had been “entertaining Mrs. Stowe's ‘Lybian Sybil’ at our home for the last week”:

The morning after the Equal Rights Convention, as the daily journals one by one made their appearance, turning to the youngsters of the household, she said: “Children, as there is no school to-day, will you read Sojourner the reports of the Convention? I want to see whether these young sprigs of the press do me justice.

“Sojourner then gathered up her bag and shawl, and walked into the parlor in a stately manner,” Stanton wrote, “and there, surrounded by the children, the papers were duly read and considered.”

Stanton's witty portrait of Truth seated among the newspapers, being read to by the children who reproduce the written word with straightforward unmediated voice, without the editorializing of adults, renders remarkably Truth's dynamic and dramatic interaction with the printed word. It also gives a sense of Truth's ongoing activity as the keeper of her own image.

“I think,” said one of the group, “the press should hereafter speak of you as Mrs. Stowe's Lybian Sybil [sic], and not as ‘old church woman.’” “Oh, child, that's good enough. The Herald used to call me ‘old black nigger,’ so this sounds respectable. Have you read the Herald too, children? Is that born again? Well, we are all walking the right way together.”¹²

Attending to what Karma Lochrie has called “the fundamentally vocal experience of the written text,”¹³ Truth experienced the presentation of print in terms of her own oral presentations. Breaking up passages, Truth said, “gives the reporter time to take breath and sharpen his pen, and think of some witty thing to say.” Truth had a shrewd eye for dramatic format.

She said she liked the wit of the World's reporter; all the little texts running through the speeches, such as “Sojourner on Popping-Up,” “No Grumbling,” “Digging Stumps,” “Biz,” to show what is coming, so that one can get ready to cry or laugh, as the case may be—a kind of sign-board, a milestone, to tell where we are going, and how fast we go.

When her readers pointed out “the solid columns of the other papers,” Truth said that “she did not like the dead calm.” She preferred, instead, “the breaking up into verses, like her songs.”

The thesis of Stanton's letter to the World is that Truth “understands the whole question of reconstruction, all its ‘quagmires and pitfalls,’ as she says, as well as any man does.” In Stanton's account, Truth, taking in the reports from the Express, the Post, the Commercial Advertiser, the World, the Times, the Herald, the Tribune, and the Sun, is an activist monitor of the subtleties of political coverage of the universal suffrage issue, which saw the defection of long-standing allies like Horace Greeley's Tribune and the opportunistic courting of the woman's rights activists by Democratic papers like the World. Truth is sarcastic about the shift:

“But, children, why did you not send for some of those wicked Democratic papers that abuse all good people and good things?” “They are all here,” said the readers in chorus. “We have read you all the Republicans and the Democrats say.” “Why, children, I can't tell one from the other. The millennium must be here, when one can't tell saints from sinners, Republicans from Democrats. Is the World Horace Greeley's paper?” “Oh, no; the World is Democratic!” “Democratic! Why, children, the World does move! But there is one thing I don't exactly see; if the Democrats are all ready to give equal rights to all, what are the Republicans making such a fuss about? Mr. Greeley was ready for this twenty years ago; if he had gone on as fast as the Democrats he should have been on the platform, at the conventions, making speeches, and writing resolutions, long ago.”

Horace Greeley had made his influential New York Tribune a strong voice against slavery and had given early, friendly support to the woman's rights movement, but like many abolitionists, he believed that the campaign for woman suffrage would hurt the cause of black male suffrage. Greeley's emphasis on tariffs and protective duties reflected the general shift away from the reformist issues of reconstruction. Truth played with Greeley's free trade argument, adapting its rhetoric of trade relations to her greater text, the reconstruction of human relations:

Yes, I go for everything free. Let nature, like individuals, make the most of what God has given them, have their neighbors to do the same, and then do all they can to serve each other. There is no use in one man, or one nation, to try to do or be everything. It is a good thing to be dependent on each other for something, it makes us civil and peaceable.

Truth's call for interdependence as the enabling structure of freedom resonated against the prevailing view among abolitionists that the end of slavery was equal to freedom and that freedpeople could function without organized assistance.

When Truth asked for Theodore Tilton's paper, the children reminded her that “the Independent is a weekly, it came out before the Convention.” Truth's rejoinder is pointed: “But Theodore is not a weekly; why did he not come to the Convention and tell us what he thought?” Theodore Tilton and Henry Ward Beecher had transformed the New York Independent, a Congregationalist weekly, into the most prominent religious newspaper with a strong abolitionist stance. The paper was now equivocal on the expanding movement for woman suffrage.

“Well, here is his last paper [Tilton's Independent], with a grand editorial,” and Sojourner listened to the end with interest. “That's good,” said she, “but he don't say woman.” “Oh, he is talking about sectarianism, not suffrage; the Church, not the State.” “No matter, the Church wrongs woman as much as the State: ‘Wives, obey your husbands,’ is as bad as the common law: ‘The husband and the wife are one, and that one the husband.’ I am afraid Theodore and Horace are playing bo-peep with their shadows.”¹⁴

From its 1850 publication Truth carried copies of her Narrative to sell, and during the war she sold photographs of herself, captioned “I sell the shadow to support the substance” (NarBk, 203). In a luminous moment, Truth took up the trope of the shadow:

“Speaking of shadows,” said Sojourner, “I wish the World to know that when I go among fashionable people in the Church of the Puritans, I do not carry ‘rations’ in my bag; I keep my shadow there. I have good friends enough to give me clothes and rations. I stand on principle, always, in one place, so everybody knows where to find Sojourner, and I don't want my shadow even to be dogging about here and there and everywhere, so I keep it in this bag.”

The World's insulting image of her as a kind of vagrant with “rations” in her bag, roaming the convention floor in the Church of the Puritans is countered by Truth with her own image of herself as a figure strongly rooted in a community of friends (even if they are, she admits mordantly, “fashionable”). In her bag she carries her “shadow,” her recorded life history and her photographs. Unlike the newspapers, which do not stand “in one place,” Sojourner is always standing “on principle.” The male editors have “shadows” too: their printed words and recorded images cast across the public path and onto history. In her fascinating locution, their shadows have come loose: Greeley and Tilton are “playing bo-peep with their shadows,” losing their old principles or leaving them alone to come home on their own.

Truth is not such a faithless shepherd: “I don't want my shadow even to be dogging about here and there and everywhere, so I keep it in this bag.” The shadow loosed in the external world, figured in words and pictures, in Narrative and in speeches and newspaper accounts, is after all moral conscience, the essence of a person's spirit. Truth stands by her own representations of it.

On that day in Stanton's parlor, Truth was satisfied with the reports of her performances but was considering separate publication of her speeches.

I'll tell you what I'm thinking. My speeches in the Convention read well. I should like to have the substance put together, improved a little, and published in tract form, headed “Sojourner Truth on Suffrage.”¹⁵

Actually, in composing the narrative, “Sojourner Truth on the Press,” and in addressing it to the editor of the Democratic World, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was already packaging some of Truth's opinions for her own purposes. We must look, as always, to the agenda of the framer to try to guess for what purpose the story has been framed. In her portrait of Truth as a savvy ally, Stanton was strategically associating Truth with the white feminist opposition to the extension of suffrage to black and immigrant males unless it was at the same time granted to women. Truth's view was similar but not identical, looking toward the rights of black women without turning away from the rights of black men. In her speeches Truth argued that the vote was crucial for black women as well as for black men because the economic situation of black women prevented them from achieving even the limited degree of autonomy allowed to black men. But in calling “slavery partly destroyed; not entirely,”¹⁶ she acknowledged to the convention what Stanton and her allies would not: that the abolition of slavery had not placed blacks, male or female, on a level of parity with white women. The conflicted nature of Truth's stance can be caught in her enigmatic reformulation of Henry Ward Beecher's recommendation to the convention to “Bait your trap with the white woman, and I think you will catch the black man.”¹⁷ Truth recast Beecher's line to say that “if you bait the suffrage-hook with a woman, you will certainly catch a black man,” the sense of which cut many ways.¹⁸

In the next few months, infuriated by the indifference to woman suffrage of their former allies among Republicans and abolitionists, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony abandoned their universalist rhetoric, campaigning in Kansas with the racist Democrat George Francis Train (“Woman first, and negro last, is my programme”).¹⁹

Stanton's strategies for liberating her people, a certain segment of middle-class white womanhood, would always find some use for black women; but Stanton conceptualized their relations implicitly in her famous “Solitude of Self” address to a Senate committee considering the woman suffrage amendment in 1894: “In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island.”²⁰ The strategies of interdependence that Truth held to were rooted in a very different sense of community.

.....

Although Sojourner Truth lived in a print culture in which books were being dissociated from oral production, she herself remained an oral producer, and it is misguided to see Truth's orality as a pathology, a condition of negation. “She has rare natural gifts; a clear intellect; a fine moral intuition and spirited insight, with much common sense,” wrote Lucy Stone in the official organ of the American Woman's Suffrage Association; “She never could read, and often said, that all the great trouble of the world came from those who could read, and not from those who could not, and that she was glad she never knew how to read.”²¹ This view lay at the heart of Truth's political vision. Perhaps in agreement with Audre Lorde that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,”²² Truth seems never to have believed that what was taught by the white patriarchal culture could be unlearned; it was best not to learn it at all. Truth saw “through a millstone” that Western culture hung around the neck of her people; looking around her, seeing who had literacy and who did not, she rightly saw it not as a condition of human adequacy but as an effect of dominance.²³ Acquiring literacy did not mean moving from defective humanity to plenitude; it meant acquiring a political tool that could be useful in negating racist theories that enslaved Africans could be defined by their inability to decipher Western print. Truth had chosen a different tool for the hoeing of this field. She used her speaking voice as the unalienated inheritor of a great oral tradition.

Sterling Stuckey has argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe recorded one of the first blues performances when Truth visited her at Stone Cottage in Andover:

Her great gloomy eyes and her dark face seemed to work with some undercurrent of feeling; she sighed deeply, and occasionally broke out,—

“Oh Lord! O Lord! Oh, the tears, an' the groans, an' the moans! O Lord!”²⁴

As the enslaved child Isabella, Truth was mothered in this tradition by Mau Mau Bett, who performed the grief of her lineage as a way of binding her children to a communal fate:

At times, a groan would escape her, and she would break out in the language of the Psalmist—“Oh Lord, how long?” “Oh Lord, how long?” And in reply to Isabella's question—“What ails you, mau-mau?” her only answer was, “Oh, a good deal ails me”—“Enough ails me.”

(NarBk, 17-18)

Although Truth grew up believing that the god “high in the sky” saw her and “wrote down all her actions in a great book,” she did not think that he could get inside her head: “she had no idea that God knew a thought of hers till she had uttered it aloud” (NarBk, 59). When she wanted to meet God, she went to where she thought he might be and talked out loud to him. Truth told Stowe that, having heard a story in which someone had met God on a threshing floor (perhaps the biblical story of Boas and Ruth), she “threshed down a place real hard, an' I used to go down there every day, an' pray an' cry with all my might.”²⁵

Her need to speak aloud to God was in conflict with the constraints imposed on the speech of enslaved people, but Truth became certain that if she “were to present her petitions under the open canopy of heaven, speaking very loud,” that God would hear her. So that “she could speak louder to God, without being overheard,” she built herself a shelter on an island in a stream “by pulling away the branches of the shrubs from the centre, and weaving them together for a wall on the outside, forming a circular arched alcove, made entirely of the graceful willow” (NarBk, 60).²⁶ On such a training ground one of the great orators of the nineteenth century perfected her skills.

Talking aloud was Truth's calling, and her audience was broad. “She held almost hourly converse with, as she supposed, the God of the universe,” wrote Lucy Colman.²⁷ From the refugee camp at Mason's Island in the Potomac during the Civil War, Truth wrote, “I do not know but what I shall stay here on the Island all winter and go around among the Freedmen's camps. They are all delighted to hear me talk.”²⁸ With the characteristic reserve of literate black men toward Truth, William Still wondered at her audacity: “She would dauntlessly face the most intelligent and cultivated audiences, or would individually approach the President of the United States as readily as she would one of the humblest citizens.”²⁹ Wendell Phillips praised her power “to move and bear down a whole audience by a few simple words.”³⁰ Her improvisatory style used the material of the moment to incorporate the shifting needs of her audiences into her performances.

At a celebration of the West Indies' Emancipation Day in Abington, Massachusetts in the 1850s Truth appeared on the platform with Charles Lenox Remond, two unnamed enslaved men who were en route to Canada on the Underground Railroad, and “many of the old line [white] abolitionists,” including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen, Parker Pillsbury, and Henry C. Wright. One of the fugitive men “arose and in a brief manner expressed his appreciation” to the audience. His words are not recorded. Garrison then announced that Truth would speak in her “peculiar manner”:

Sojourner began by improvising a song, commencing, “Hail! ye abolitionists.” Her voice was both sweet and powerful, and as her notes floated away through the tree-tops, reaching the outermost circle of that vast multitude, it elicited cheer after cheer. She then made some spicy remarks, occasionally referring to her fugitive brethren on the platform beside her. At the close of her address, in which by witty sallies and pathetic appeals, she had moved the audience to laughter and tears, she looked about the assemblage and said, “I will now close, for he that cometh after me is greater than I,” and took her seat. Mr. Phillips came forward holding a paper in his hand containing notes of Sojourner's speech, which he used as texts for a powerful and eloquent appeal in behalf of human freedom. Sojourner says, “I was utterly astonished to hear him say, ‘Well has Sojourner said so and so’; and I said to myself, Lord, did I say that? How differently it sounded coming from his lips! He dressed my poor, bare speech in such beautiful garments that I scarcely recognized it myself.”

(NarBk, 310-11)

Because her words were so often recorded in somebody else's garments, we have lost most of the music of Truth's performance; only certain words remain, here and there. In 1854, in her scathing assessment of white reformers who supported colonizing blacks in Africa, Mary Ann Shadd Cary preserved a fragment of the lost music, referring to “those whom Sojourner Truth delights in calling the ‘Shaxon race.’”³¹ It seems likely that Stowe's memory of Truth's saying “amberill” for “umbrella” is another such sound fragment. Every attempt to textualize Truth is a sort of performance in itself. We cannot expect to recover some unified original text as if it were the woman; but neither should we reject the attempts to perform her by Olive Gilbert, Stowe, Stanton, Frances Gage, or the newspapers.

The most extensively realized attempt to perform Truth up to 1849 is Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave Emancipated From Bodily Servitude By The State of New York in 1828,³² recorded, shaped, and filled with scribal interpolations by Olive Gilbert. Gilbert, a friend of William Lloyd Garrison, had met Truth in the 1840s through the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community located in Massachusetts where Truth had gone to live, attracted by its diversified population of reformists. Gilbert shared with such other middle-class white women as Amy Post and Lydia Maria Child a desire to bring the voices of black women before an audience as part of their dedication to abolitionism; but in the voices of articulate black women like Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth, these white experimenters in interracial shared authorship also found opportunities to express themselves. In a self-effacing act of generosity or shyness, Gilbert did not put her own name into Narrative in any capacity, not as scribe, compiler, editor, and certainly not as author.

Truth was a storyteller within an African American woman's tradition, and it is surely the echoes of these women we should listen for in her speaking voice. Olive Gilbert had no ear for the kind of “hungry listening” that Zora Neale Hurston knew “helped Janie to tell her story” in Their Eyes Were Watching God, although Gilbert may have felt Pheoby's eagerness “to feel and do through Janie.”³³ Unable to report what she could not hear, Truth's scribe often missed the resonance of ancestral voices in her utterances. Nevertheless, mediated and filtered through white voices, Truth's Narrative is part of the enduring traditional search for a black voice.³⁴ From the moment the child Isabella is brutally whipped because, although she has a language it is the wrong language, to the moment of her religious conversion when the sound of her speaking voice captivates the divine spirit, the book is a chronicle of developing eloquence.

Narrative's most significant activity is that of transforming an oral tradition into written form, a kind of preservation. An oral story exists in the precise historical moment and in the precise historical situation in which it is told. Writing the story down, in some senses, cuts it loose from history, opens up its use values to individual readers in different historical moments. The complexity of this process converges in the reader's role as a participant in the activity of preservation. There is a need for “hungry listening” on our part, too. Truth was looking for an enabling language, but she was not looking to be entrapped. She itinerates in Narrative subverting the text. When we link up with her we become a movement.

Against the grain of the form, Truth can be seen recreating a culture that is separate, unique, and authentic, with its own unique structures of living relationships. Gilbert often does not understand what Truth tells her, and thus cannot fully suppress it. Narrative is marked by its element of struggle to render the growth and development of an individual within a marginalized culture to a listener who cannot comprehend the vitality of the culture. For Truth the story-telling form in Narrative is natural; she carries within the voices of women who do not write down their experiences, naming them instead to each other with the careful descriptiveness of folk language. A pen-tied Gilbert, trying to record at least some of the reverberations, sensed the importance of the voice and knew that she herself had no letters to express it, that it was not “possible to give the tones and manner with the words; but no adequate idea of them can be written while the tones and manner remain inexpressible” (NarBk, 60).

Narrative foregrounds the properties of narrative as acts of memory. Truth tells her story from the “I” perspective, which is then reflected and commented on by Gilbert in the third person. Truth's “I” becomes Gilbert's “she,” although this is by no means a simple metamorphosis. Their contending dialogue reveals itself throughout, in interruptions of chronology and through corrections, amplifications, clarifications, second thoughts and deliberate suppressions. As an interactive document, Narrative highlights a dynamic of corrective unrest and retrospective remembering of remembering in its self-conscious attempts to establish an authentic and enduring identity for its speaker through the medium of its anonymous scribal voice. Their efforts are both collaborative and resisting, as Truth's recollection, reconstruction, and reconstitution strive against Gilbert's censoring authorial control.

As Gayle Margherita has written, “the beginning of a textualized life is always an aesthetic decision.”³⁵ Gilbert begins with doubt. At the opening point of Narrative, “Her Birth and Parentage,” Truth's revisionary declaration of her origin in self-naming is called into question: “The subject of this biography, Sojourner Truth, as she now calls herself, but whose name originally was Isabella. …”³⁶ Gilbert searches for Truth's story as a slave woman. Truth enacts herself as a free woman of color. The unequivocal past that Gilbert needs to make Truth intelligible in the slave narrative form is never available to Truth, for whom the past is past and thus no longer unequivocal, but modulated by the pleasures of freedom, the luxuries of forgetting, of enhancing the bittersweet and the bearable, of nostalgia. While Gilbert probed for the nullifying of the human under the slave system, Truth answered for the continuity of value and meaning in the life of the woman, enslaved or free. Olive Gilbert is an anonymous narrator not of the tale of Truth but of the narrative of “Isabella”; Isabella is an unreliable narrator who keeps her counsel, the speaking likeness of Truth's past negotiated between herself and her present interlocutor.

.....

The 1850 Narrative, published with an unsigned preface by Garrison, consisted of 128 pages. In 1870, Truth's friend Dr. James Boyle made her a gift of the stereotype plates of the book (NarBk, 264). The Quaker Frances Titus then entered the story of Narrative, providing a second part to Truth's life history. The revised and expanded book was published in 1875.

Perhaps influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's documentary approach in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Titus used Truth's correspondence and newspaper accounts, facsimile signatures of famous people from Truth's “Lamb's Book of Life,” and a collection of personal anecdotes to establish and document an official activist identity for the woman whose slave identity dominated Gilbert's Narrative. She also added the famous essay by Stowe and the account by Frances Gage of Truth's “Ain't I a Woman” speech.

Olive Gilbert had cast the 1850 Narrative in the form of a slave narrative, intending, as Garrison wrote in his preface, “that the perusal of the following Narrative may increase the sympathy that is felt for the suffering colored population of this country, and inspire to renewed efforts for the liberation of all who are pining in bondage on the American soil.”³⁷ Frances Titus's rhetorical strategy in 1875 focused on this people's successful passage through the Red Sea out of “the Egypt of their captivity.” In her preface, written shortly before Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the troops from the South and Reconstruction ended, Titus argued that “the promised land” could now “by their own efforts, be obtained”:

Slavery has been swallowed up in a Red Sea of blood, and the slave has emerged from the conflict of races transformed from a chattel to a man. Holding the ballot, the black man enters the halls of legislation, and his rights are recognized there.

(NarBk, vi-vii)

Frances Watkins Harper saw the historical moment differently in her 1875 address to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Acknowledging that since “slavery is dead, the colored man has exchanged the fetters on his wrist for the ballot in his hand,” Harper still found behind the veil of Southern society “the smell of blood, and our bones scattered at the grave's mouth.”

And yet with all the victories and triumphs which freedom and justice have won in this country, I do not believe there is another civilized nation under Heaven where there are half as many people who have been brutally and shamefully murdered, with or without impunity, as in this republic within the last ten years.³⁸

Titus's “Part Second,” is attached with little ceremony to Gilbert's Narrative. Thus the reader of the composite Narrative and “Book of Life” leaves Truth on page 122 as a simple primitive with a “naturally powerful mind,” whose “fearlessness and child-like simplicity” and “native enthusiasm” nevertheless add up to a lack, something missing that causes her to fall short of Joan of Arc (NarBk, 121-22). A reader might be surprised to find Truth on page 130 “in the marble room” of the Senate chamber, then crusading in the company of the renowned abolitionist orator George Thompson, and soon afterward entering into history at the Akron Woman's Rights Convention.

This effect was intentional. In a remarkable opening paragraph, Titus's gesture of repositioning actually functions as a repudiation of Gilbert's work:

The preceding narrative has given us a partial history of Sojourner Truth. This biography was published not many years after her freedom had been secured to her. Having but recently emerged from the gloomy night of slavery, ignorant and untaught in all that gives value to human existence, she was still suffering from the burden of acquired and transmitted habits incidental to her past condition of servitude.

Gilbert's Narrative, Titus argues, recorded the false consciousness of a slave. Titus thus repudiated not just the Narrative, but the fifty-three-year-old Truth who had shaped it. That woman had lived in a “moral gutter” (NarBk, 129); Titus proposed to replace her with the story of Truth's second life. Titus's new Truth was a significant reformer among abolitionists and woman's rights activists, with many testimonials to demonstrate this. Titus maintained an ongoing friendship with Truth, but had not ceased to be keenly alert to Truth's rise “from the dregs of social life, like a phenix [sic] from its ashes, to become the defender of her race” (NarBk, 253).

From this opening paragraph issues Titus's struggle for possession of her subject. Titus's additions and revisions to Narrative read as a kind of future to Gilbert's past, altering the meaning of its muted ending by embedding it in a new text of triumph and publicity. Presenting the Truth of 1850 as an incipient celebrity, the author of her own fate, Titus mentions no other author. In a fascinating passive-aggressive arrangement of correspondence, Titus prints an 1874 letter from Samuel May, inquiring about Truth's whereabouts and her “health and circumstances.” To satisfy “the library of a public institution” he asked “Can you inform me who wrote out (or otherwise compiled) and edited the narrative of Sojourner Truth's life?” (NarBk, 276).

Directly following May's letter, Titus placed without comment two brief letters written by Olive Gilbert to Truth fifteen or more years after the publication of Narrative. They are rather repressively designated by Titus “Extract From A Letter” and “Another Letter From The Same Person.” The letter Titus prints second is undated, but it is probably the earlier of the two, written soon after the end of the Civil War, which brought “the great deliverance of your people from the house of bondage,” and it suggests that for many years most of what Gilbert learned of Truth had come from newspapers and magazines. Their distance is marked out in Gilbert's wistful reference to their great collaboration: “Of the little book I wrote for your benefit, some of the copies I took are sold; others I gave to my friends as keep-sakes, &c.” (NarBk, 278).

In the letter written from Leeds, Massachusetts, 17 January 1870, Gilbert wrote:

You and I seem to move around as easily as soap bubbles—now here—now there—making our mark, I suppose, everywhere, though mine is a very quiet mark compared to yours. I get a glimpse of you often through the papers, which falls upon my spirit like bright rays from the sun. There is a wee bit of a chapel here, pulpit supplied by a Mr. Merritt, and one evening last fall he repeated something that “Sojourner Truth” had said. I was not there, so I cannot tell what it was. I did not think you were laying the foundation of such an almost world-wide reputation when I wrote that little book for you, but I rejoice and am proud that you can make your power felt with so little book-education.

(NarBk, 276-77)

The name “Sojourner Truth” seems to echo as if from a great distance in Gilbert's ear. As an interested observer of the making of Truth's reputation, Gilbert details its shaping through the printed word.

Your call upon Mrs. Stowe, and our dear, sainted president, and your labors connected with the army, and the Freedmen's Bureau, gave you a publicity that enabled me to observe you at your old vocation of helping on and doing good to your fellow-creatures, both physically and mentally. I was much pleased with Mrs. Stowe's enthusiasm over you. You really almost received your apotheosis from her. She proposed, I think, that you should have a statue and symbolize our American Sibyl.

(NarBk, 277-78)

Ironically, Gilbert's role in producing Truth's Narrative was to be effaced by Stowe. Lucy Stone wrote in Woman's Journal in 1876 that “For the past few years she has lived in Michigan, supported mainly by the sale of the narrative of her life which was written for her by Mrs. Stowe, and which, during the last year, has been enlarged by Mrs. Frances Titus, of Battle Creek, Michigan.”³⁹ The reputation of the famous essay had overtaken Narrative itself, without doing harm to Frances Titus's contribution. On 27 November 1883, the New York Tribune carried a dispatch from Battle Creek announcing the death of “Sojourner Truth the colored lecturer and sibyl”; it noted that

Some years ago Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote what is known as Sojourner Truth's “Book of Life,” a volume that had an extensive sale among anti-slavery people. In 1876 this book was enlarged and reprinted at the expense of Mrs. Francis W. Titus, of Battle Creek, Mich., where Sojourner lived for many years.⁴⁰

.....

William Wetmore Story's statue of the “Libyan Sibyl,” produced after hearing Stowe's description of her visit with Truth (and from which Stowe then borrowed the name to use in her essay), loomed over Frances Titus's conception of Truth.⁴¹ Under the spell of both Story and Stowe, Titus saw the older Truth as “true to the character of sibyl.”

And when her free black hands were raised to heaven, invoking blessings upon her country, it was a fairer sight to see and a surer guarantee of its permanence and glory than was the imposing spectacle of that beauteous “queen of the East,” upon whose snowy, perfect hands the golden chains of slavery shone, as she entered the gates of the eternal city, leading the triumphant procession of a Caesar.

(NarBk, 254-55)

Titus's fantastical juxtaposition of the supplicating Truth's “free black hands” with the “snowy” (sic) hands of the enchained Cleopatra referred to the (white) marble Libyan Sibyl and its companion piece, the (white) marble statue of Cleopatra exhibited by Story at the World Exposition in London in 1862. A reader might feel that the Truth of Olive Gilbert's time had been wholly crushed under the weight of Titus's titanic prose.

As members of overlapping circles of spiritualists, woman's rights activists, and reform-minded workers for black refugees, Titus and Truth came to know each other well after Truth moved to Michigan around 1857. Titus traveled with Truth to Kansas to see the Exodusters in 1879.⁴² Her selection of newspaper clippings and letters allow wonderful insight into the surprising webs of interest that bound together a heterogeneous and far-flung group of reform-minded activists during a historic period of Truth's life, although we always wish we could know what she elected not to include. Paradoxically, Titus's documentary approach to Truth's history is belied by her prose, in which Truth is exhibited as a mystery shrouded in facts, a creature of prehistory on whom a history is being imposed.

Sometimes Titus seemed deaf to history. Her continual tampering with Truth's age is a heedlessly cruel play on one of the worst realities of slavery, the absence of any birth record with its implication of the exclusion of the enslaved from the processes of history. In her deliberate revision of Gilbert's dating, Titus buried Truth's birth in the far reaches of time:

She is as ignorant of its date as is the fossil found in the limestone rock or the polished pebble upon the sea-shore, which has been scoured by the waves ever since the sea was born.

(NarBk, 307)

Truth recognized that writing fossilizes. When Theodore Tilton proposed to write her life, Truth “replied in effect that she expected to live a long time yet, and was going to accomplish ‘lots’ before she died, and didn't wan't to be ‘written up’ at present” (NarBk, 234). Unlike Harriet Jacobs, who was able to prevent Harriet Beecher Stowe from using incidents from her life in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Truth had to live with the romantic racialist portrait of her produced by “the Great Lady.” Stowe wrote, “I do not recollect ever to have been conversant with any one who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence than this woman”; Truth had “a strong sphere,” she added, using the language of spiritualism. “So, this is you,” had been Truth's response directly on meeting Stowe. Stowe could see Truth only through many stages of mediation:

She was evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone as Cumberworth's celebrated statuette of the Negro Woman at the Fountain. Indeed, she so strongly reminded me of that figure, that, when I recall the events of her life, as she narrated them to me, I imagine her as a living, breathing impersonation of that work of art.⁴³

Statues! Not just a work of art, but an “impersonation” of a work of art! Perhaps hearing this, Truth felt something of Robert Purvis's dismay in 1852 when he read Stowe's endorsement of colonization in the closing chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin: “Alas!” he exclaimed, “save us from our friends.”⁴⁴

Speaking to a correspondent to the Advertiser and Tribune in 1864, Truth expressed exasperation with the persistence of Stowe's image of her as the “Libyan Sibyl”:

She would never listen to Mrs. Stowe's Libyan Sibyl. “Oh!” she would say, “I don't want to hear about that old symbol; read me something that is going on now, something about this great war.”

“She was then full of intense interest in the war,” the correspondent continued, “and foresaw its result in the emancipation of her race. It was touching to see her eager face when the newspapers were read in her presence” (NarBk, 174).

The flexible, shifting, shared foci of consciousness (observer-reporter, observer-participant, observer-observed) in Narrative incorporated the triad of voices of Truth, Gilbert, and then Titus. The mythmaking rhetoric of Titus invites us to imagine them as triple goddesses of the past, present, and future, shaping the life history of Narrative, spinning, measuring, splicing the loose threads of the lived life into a whole. Truth, mythologized as older than time, acted as the spinner, Gilbert and Titus apportioned the episodes and brought the story to its conclusion with a description of Truth's last illness and death, recounted in the memorial chapter Titus added to the 1884 edition.

Yet the hard facts of production were otherwise. While the book was composed by Gilbert and by Titus, Truth spoke much of it and collected most of its documentary materials. Abolitionist supporters such as Garrison, James Boyle, and Olive Gilbert may have wanted the book to exist for the good it would do the antislavery cause; advocates of various reform causes, the New York Herald sneered in 1853, were “continually advertising from their platforms some ‘Thrilling Narrative.’”⁴⁵ But the book was a product of Truth's labor both in its making and its distribution. The cost of its production was ultimately borne by Truth. Like Jarena Lee, who had paid thirty-eight dollars for the printing of her narrative in 1836 and distributed it on the street and at camp meetings, Truth sold her book at abolitionist and feminist meetings wherever she traveled.⁴⁶ “I had been publishing my Narrative,” she wrote about her decision in 1851 to travel and speak with the British antislavery speaker George Thompson, “and owed for the whole edition.”⁴⁷ “Will you please inform me how much I am now indebted to Mr. Yerrington for the printing,” she wrote at the end of the summer to William Lloyd Garrison, anxious that she had sold only a few books but expecting to sell as many as six hundred at upcoming conventions.⁴⁸

When Truth wrote to James Redpath at The Commonwealth following the publication of Stowe's essay in 1863, she sent him copies of Narrative, which he excerpted for his readers. She was not at the time able to travel to sell her book.

I have sold my books for twenty-five cents apiece. I will send you six copies today, and I am much obliged to you. You will find them correct, they are Sojourner herself. Isaac Post's wife from Rochester, has sent for two dozen of my photographs, and now that I cannot do anything, I am living on my shadow. I used to travel and sell my books, but now I am not able to do that, I send whatever is requested of me. If you can dispose of any for me I would be very much obliged to you. I will put no price on them, let them give whatever they choose to. Please let me know if you received my books. I remain your friend. May heaven bless us.

                                        Yours Respectfully,
                                                            Sojourner Truth.

In her late seventies, having mortgaged her Battle Creek house to pay for the funeral of her grandson, a beloved companion who had been her favorite reader and writer, Truth was advertising the new expanded edition of Narrative, hoping “that she may be able to liquidate old debts, and have a little competency for coming days.”

Sojourner Truth now appeals to true friends, wherever they are to immediately assist her, in selling her new work which has just been printed and is now in the hand of the binder. It is an octavo volume of 320 pages, good paper, and well bound, correct portrait, and has three pages of engraved autographs of the women and men who have aided her in her work. Price of the work $1.25, post paid.⁴⁹

She wrote to William Still in 1876 that she hoped to sell the enlarged edition of Narrative during the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, explaining that she owed Frances Titus several hundred dollars for the printing expenses. She referred to Frances Titus as “the lady that wrote my book.”⁵⁰

.....

Writing in 1808, the period of Truth's childhood, the biographer Anne Grant laid out the problem of constructing a truthful narrative of her friend Margarita Schuyler, a Dutch settler living in eighteenth-century Albany. In Memoirs of An American Lady, Grant stressed the biographer's “dread of being inaccurate”:

Embellished facts, a mixture of truth and fiction, or what we sometimes meet with, a fictitious superstructure built on a foundation of reality, would be detestable on the score of bad taste, though no moral sense were concerned or consulted. ‘Tis walking on a river half frozen that betrays your footing every moment. By these repulsive artifices no person of real discernment is for a moment imposed upon. You do not know which part of the narrative is false; but you are sure it is not all true, and therefore distrust what is genuine where it occurs. For this reason a fiction, happily told, takes a greater hold of the mind than a narrative of facts, evidently embellished and interwoven with inventions.⁵¹

We embrace her fears gladly. It was exactly the climate of distrust engendered by the interplay of invention and fact that opened some space for the chief embellisher and weaver of fantasies in the printed accounts of Truth—Truth herself. Olive Gilbert could not make up her mind about Truth, whose complexly shifting shadow scattered under her pen. On the one hand, Gilbert admired her “bright, clear, positive, and at times ecstatic” religion, which “is not tinctured in the least with gloom.” On the other hand, on a personal level, she saw that Truth “has set suspicion to guard the door of her heart” (NarBk, 122), an alarming tendency in the subject of a biography.

Truth's guarded interiorization disturbed Gilbert. Suppressed interiorizations of black women populate the pages of abolitionist literature. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described an encounter at the house of abolitionist Gerrit Smith, which was a depot of the Underground Railroad:

One day Mr. Smith summoned all the young girls then visiting there, saying he had a great secret to tell them if they would sacredly pledge themselves not to divulge it. Having done so, he led the way to the third story, ushered us into a large room, and there stood a beautiful quadroon girl to receive us. “Harriet,” said Mr. Smith, “I want you to make good Abolitionists of these girls by describing to them all you have suffered in slavery.” He then left the room, locking us in. Her narrative held us spell-bound until the lengthening shadows of the twilight hour made her departure safe for Canada. One remark she made impressed me deeply. I told her of the laws for women such as we then lived under, and remarked on the parallel condition of slaves and women. “Yes,” said she, “but I am both. I am doubly damned in sex and color. Yes, in class too, for I am poor and ignorant; none of you can ever touch the depth of misery where I stand to-day.”⁵²

Complexities of framed response emerge. Gerrit Smith had authorized a paternalist discourse in which the white girls locked into the room with the “beautiful quadroon” were to be made into abolitionists. He framed them as subject to his will and as objects of his efforts at moral improvement. They were to order their relation to the black woman as liberator to exemplary slave, perhaps on the model of the famous abolitionist slogan, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” Stanton, the white female narrator (locked in), reordered the scene in terms of woman's rights, citing “the parallel condition of slaves and women,” disobeying patriarchal law by repositioning the women side by side instead of hierarchically. Then, in a startling rejection of both these constructions, the objectified enslaved woman rejects their inscription of her in their stories and speaks her own story: “none of you can ever touch the depth of misery where I stand to-day.”

Having been authorized to speak as an abolitionist's model slave and then as a white woman's sister in suffering, Harriet rejected ventriloquism to speak her own truth about race, gender, and class. Even when framed by the expectations of white recorders, black women like Harriet and Truth knew how to step out of the frame. They cast their own shadows. They raised their own voices. This is what we watch for, what we listen for.

Notes

1. [Sojourner Truth with Olive Gilbert and Frances Titus], Narrative of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of Life” (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968 [1878]), 203. Unless otherwise noted, all references are to this edition and are abbreviated NarBk. This edition is still available from Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., Salem, New Hampshire.

2. Sojourner Truth to Amy Post, 1 October 1865, The Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Rochester Library, Rochester, New York. Subsequent references to this collection are abbreviated IAPFP, UR.

3. Quoted in Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, American Chivalry (Boston: Clarke, 1913), 107.

4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881-1922), 2:926.

5. See Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 102. Chapter three, “From Utterance to Text: Authorizing the Mystical Word” (97-134) is especially useful. See also Erlene Stetson, “Studying Slavery: Some Literary and Pedagogical Considerations on the Black Female Slave,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1982), 68-69.

6. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 711-13.

7. Truth to “My Dear Daughter,” 3 November 1864, IAPFP, UR.

8. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 27 April 1867.

9. Rebecca Cox Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, edited by Jean McMahon Humez (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 107.

10. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” Atlantic Monthly 11 (April 1863): 474.

11. National Anti-Slavery Standard, 17 December 1864.

12. Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 2:926-28.

13. Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 102-4.

14. Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 2:926-27.

15. Ibid., 2:927-28.

16. Ibid., 2:193.

17. Ibid., 2:219.

18. Ibid., 2:928.

19. Ibid., 2:245. For the Kansas campaign, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 447-48.

20. Gerda Lerner, ed. The Female Experience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 490-93.

21. Woman's Journal, 5 August 1876, 252. For a fascinating discussion of Anna Murray Douglass's refusal to learn to read and Frederick Douglass's commitment to “heroic literacy,” see Jenny Franchot, “The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine,” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, edited by Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 141-65, especially 162-63n.26.

22. Audre Lorde, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (Freedom, California: The Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

23. Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 2:926. See the discussion of literacy as “Western culture's trope of dominance over the peoples of color it had ‘discovered,’ colonized, and enslaved since the fifteenth century,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 165; chapter four, “The Trope of the Talking Book” (127-69) is relevant here.

24. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 474. For Truth as a blues performer see Sterling Stuckey's Foreword in [Sojourner Truth, with Olive Gilbert and Frances Titus], Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn from her Book of Life (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970 [1878]), vii-viii.

25. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 475.

26. See the description of “hush-harbors” for secret prayers and meetings in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41-42. Isabella's prayer shelter is reminiscent of the “little booth, made neatly of palm-leaves and covered in at top, a regular African hut,” built by the soldiers as a place to conduct their “shout,” described in Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960 [1870]), 13.

27. Lucy N. Colman, Reminiscences (Buffalo: H. L. Green, 1891), 65. Colman, like Stowe, regarded Truth as “what the Spiritualists call mediumistic, but her ‘control’ was God.”

28. Truth to “My Dear Daughter,” 3 November 1864, IAPFP, UR.

29. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 480.

30. Evening Bulletin, 28 July 1876.

31. This is from Mary Ann Shadd Cary's “The Humbug of Reform,” an editorial originally published in Provincial Freeman on 27 May 1854, quoted in C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 2:286.

32. [Sojourner Truth with Olive Gilbert], Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave Emancipated From Bodily Servitude By The State of New York in 1828 (Boston: Printed for the author, 1850). The “writer” is identified only as a “lady.” A printer's note facing the opening page states simply: “It is due to the lady by whom the following Narrative was kindly written, to state, that she has not been able to see a single proof-sheet of it; consequently, it is very possible that divers errors in printing may have occurred, (though it is hoped none materially affecting the sense,) especially in regard to the names of individuals referred to therein. The name of Van Wagener should read Van Wagenen.”

33. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper & Row, 1990 [1937]), 10 and 6.

34. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 169.

35. Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), chapter one, “Marjery Kempe and the Pathology of Writing.”

36. [Truth with Gilbert], Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850).

37. Garrison's preface is reprinted as an appendix in the excellent new edition of Narrative of Sojourner Truth, edited by Margaret Washington (New York: Vintage Classics, 1993), 124.

38. “Address to the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery,” 14 April 1875, in Janey Weinhold Montgomery, A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetoric of Two Negro Women Orators—Sojourner Truth and Frances E. Watkins Harper (Hays: Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1968), 107-10.

39. Woman's Journal, 5 August 1876.

40. Tribune, 27 November 1883.

41. For Story's description of the statues, see Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904), 2:70-73.

42. Kathleen Collins discusses Titus's interest in artistic images of Truth, providing fascinating information on Truth's last years (“Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth,” History of Photography 7, no. 3 [July-September 1983]:192-93). See Carlton Mabee and Susan Mabee Newhouse, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 200-8, for details of the Titus-Truth relationship and the “network of Michigan friends” of which Titus and Truth were a part.

43. Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” 473. For Harriet Jacobs's discouraging contact with Stowe, see the letters printed in Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 233-35. Harriet Jacobs referred to Stowe as “the Great Lady.”

44. Robert Purvis to Oliver Johnson, Pennsylvania Freeman, 29 April 1852, quoted in Ripley, et al., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:124. Truth did complain to James Redpath that Stowe had misrepresented her style: “I related a story to her and she has put it on me, for I never make use of the word honey.” (The Commonwealth, 3 July 1863).

45. Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 1:556.

46. See William L. Andrews, ed. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 6.

47. Truth to William Lloyd Garrison, 11 April 1864, Boston Public Library.

48. Truth to William Lloyd Garrison, 28 August 1851, Boston Public Library.

49. Quoted by Collins from a newspaper clipping pasted inside the 1875 edition of the Narrative in the Pattee Library of Pennsylvania State University (“Shadow and Substance,” 200).

50. Mabee and Newhouse, Sojourner Truth, 210-11.

51. Anne MacVicar Grant, Memoirs of An American Lady. With Sketches of Manners and Scenes in America As They Existed Previous to the Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903).

52. Stanton, et al., History of Woman Suffrage, 1:471.