SOURCE: “Reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth as a Collaborative Text,” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1996, pp. 29-52.

[In the following essay, Humez examines the interaction between Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert, characterizing their relationship and the resulting work as a highly collaborative one.]

Important and complex issues of unequal power over representation of women's experience arise in studying and teaching those nineteenth-century African American women's life-history texts that were produced in collaboration with white political allies. Even Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), the text in this category that is currently recognized as the most highly self-authored, underwent some changes under the influence of abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child—though not nearly as much as was assumed before Jean Fagan Yellin's careful scholarship on the Child-Jacobs literary relationship.¹ The most complex of these problems of establishing authenticity of voice and representation of experience undoubtedly arise in the cases where the life-storyteller was not literate herself and therefore depended entirely upon her collaborator to translate her speech into the permanent public form of printed book. Both Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth fall into this category. Their oral-historical life stories, facilitated by white women, have suffered neglect by literary scholars and teachers during the recent renaissance of African American women's literary narratives, as a result, in part, of this ambiguous claim to “authenticity.”

Yet the facilitated autobiography created through conversations with a literate ally is a valuable subgenre that will repay our close attention.² As in the analogous case of the modern oral-historical autobiography based on edited tape-recorded conversations, once we understand the process by which the raw material for the text was collected and turned into narrative, and something of the relationship and motivations of the two participants, we can identify with some confidence the elements of the resulting texts that were more or less highly controlled by each of the participants in the text creation project. Along with whatever information can be gained from other sources about the political and social agendas of the two parties, a close analysis of the mediated text can help us speculate in an informed way about how the storyteller exercised significant control over aspects of the life-history text that was ultimately produced out of the collaboration.³

I will focus here in particular on an analysis of what I take to be the process of meaning creation that went on during the interaction between Sojourner Truth and her white collaborator/amanuensis, Olive Gilbert, as revealed in the 1850 Narrative of Sojourner Truth.⁴ This text, despite its use of a narrator's voice to summarize events in a third-person narrative and to insert editorial opinions and judgments within the narrative, has sometimes been called a “dictated autobiography.” I would prefer to acknowledge its thoroughly collaborative production process by calling it a “mediated” or “facilitated” autobiography. Nevertheless, I assert its value not only for reconstructing a remarkable story of spiritual transformation and guidance but also as a site for the study of women's identity politics in nineteenth-century America. If we approach it expecting to hear more than one voice, this mediated text, and others like it, can yield new insights into the differences in perspective between African American women who were survivors of slavery and their white political allies. By teasing out the contrasting and often clashing agendas of the two women who worked together on Truth's life-history project, I hope to be able to identify some of the most plausible areas of Truth's own control over the meaning-creation process as the interaction between the two women unfolded.

Though the book was ultimately distributed in the context of abolitionist agitation as antislavery northerners responded with anger and alarm to the Fugitive Slave Act, it is not a conventional “slave narrative.” Truth had a story of spiritual awakening and guidance by divine inner voice to tell, and her Narrative ultimately went well beyond and often clashed with the standard abolitionist-sponsored story of the relentless horrors of slavery.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)—her original name was Isabella Van Wagenen—was just over fifty years old when the life-history text project with Gilbert began, and she was not a recent ex-slave. Having been a free woman for almost a quarter of a century, she had already been in the public eye as an itinerant preacher at camp meetings on Long Island and in southern New England in the early 1840s.⁵ Through abolitionist networks, Truth, in need of money to pay off a mortgage, found a sympathetic and politically allied white woman to help create the book, as Harriet Tubman would do in similar circumstances almost twenty years later. Truth's first appearances in antislavery lecture tours and women's conventions in the early 1850s were undertaken to promote and sell the book. Her financial motivation notwithstanding, it seems highly likely that she regarded the project of publishing a life history as an opportunity to testify in public to the meaning of experiences that fused religious with what we would call “political” dimensions.

Much has been written recently about the question of Truth's “illiteracy.” Given the power that the acquisition of literacy would have brought with it, and given the various opportunities to learn to read and write that were available to her as an activist adult, her continuing illiteracy was first seen as a problem for interpretation by her biographer Carleton Mabee. Comparing her with other slaves and ex-slaves, many of whom felt and articulated a strong connection between liberation and lettered learning, Mabee speculated that Truth may have had a learning disability; Mabee also noted that she “learned to use her illiteracy to her advantage” in later years, in her speaking career. Another recent Truth scholar, Jeffrey Stewart, has argued that although Truth might have been literate to some degree in Dutch, the original language she learned, or even somewhat in English, she nevertheless chose a white amanuensis for the biography project either because she “preferred Olive Gilbert's more polished style” or because a white writer would “give her story a more authoritative voice.” Margaret Washington, editor of a recent new edition of the Narrative, is alone in suggesting that Truth might actually have preferred orality to literacy, as an African American woman “who professed a spiritual calling.” Washington reminds us that

memory and orality represent the African practices through which the past was conventionally preserved. Such methods of communicating knowledge and history are closely tied to visionary literacy, which in the case of the spiritual narrative, does not require the technical skills of reading and writing. In essence, the lack of secular literacy forces the spiritual narrator to rely completely on another discourse. … As she said on more than one occasion, “You read books, I talk to God.”⁶

The Narrative project was actually the second time Sojourner Truth had collaborated with a literate white political ally on a text based on her oral testimonial. The first occasion had been in 1835 in New York City, fifteen years earlier. At that time, she was living as the only African American member of a small religious community under the patriarchal dominance of a misogynist white male “prophet” called Matthias.⁷ The white members of the Matthias “kingdom” practiced “spiritual marriage” (religiously rationalized spouse swapping). Believing that physical illness could be cured by spiritual cleansing, they neglected the medical care of one of their prominent members, who then died suddenly under apparently suspicious circumstances. The prophet Matthias was arrested, and Isabella (Truth had not yet changed her name) was accused by some of her white former associates of complicity in a presumed poisoning. Truth successfully sued her accusers for slander, using a book written by British-born newspaper editor Gilbert Vale, who based the volume on interviews he had conducted with her, as a means of getting her side of the story before the public.⁸ Vale's book provides amazing glimpses into the entangled sexual, economic, and religious lives of Truth's white associates and her relationship to them, and it raises many interesting questions about the appeal of the prophet's ideology and of the community for her.⁹ Its relevance here, however, is only to illustrate her prior positive experience with collaborative text creation, using a sympathetic white ally to help achieve her objectives of public self-presentation.

Much had changed for Truth in the years that had elapsed since the Matthias scandal. She had had a vivid religious call to flee the “wicked city” of New York, had renamed herself (in 1843) for her new identity as an itinerant preacher, and had settled in another intentional community, this time in Northampton, Massachusetts. When the Northampton Association, a short-lived cooperative industrial community populated largely by well-educated abolitionists, also dissolved, she arranged to have one of its central organizers buy land for her and build a house on it.¹⁰ It was to help pay the mortgage on this house, probably at the suggestion of William Lloyd Garrison, that she sought the aid of Olive Gilbert, a Connecticut woman friendly with one of the residents at the Northampton Association, who had visited in the mid—1840s especially to meet Truth. Though evidence is scanty on this point, it seems unlikely that Gilbert and Truth had met more than minimally before the project began or had a continuing association after the text was created.¹¹

Although little evidence about Gilbert has emerged outside of the Narrative, we get a fairly sharp picture of her own antislavery agenda and values through her editorializing voice within the text. For example, we hear that, having recently spent a twenty-month residence in the South, she was appalled at white southerners' acceptance of the common practice of selling slave husbands and wives away from each other (Narrative, 36). She had firsthand confirmation of the cruelty of slave owners, in the form of a murder of a woman slave by her mistress only a few miles away from where she stayed with friends in 1846 (84-86). The narrator also shows herself as taking an intelligent “anthropological” interest in the child-care technology of other peoples when she comments on Truth's description of the slave woman's swinging cradles suspended from trees (38-39). And Gilbert expresses strong admiration for Frederick Douglass, a resident in the Northampton Association for a period, as someone who had “devoted his great heart and noble talents entirely to the furtherance of the cause of his down-trodden race.” She cites him as an authority when she discusses the use of slave holidays as a “safety-valve to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity” (64).

It is certainly true that Gilbert reveals a Eurocentric view of Truth's “otherness,” referring to her as a “child of nature” (121) and attributing to her “the energy of a naturally powerful mind—the fearlessness and child-like simplicity of one untrammeled by education or conventional customs—purity of character—an unflinching adherence to principle—and a native enthusiasm, which, under different circumstances, might easily have produced another Joan of Arc” (122). Apparently alluding here to Truth's guidance by inner voice, Gilbert clearly saw her as only a “potential” Joan of Arc, who had made mistakes and fallen victim to “delusions.”

Jeffrey Stewart has sharply critiqued Olive Gilbert's editorial interference in Truth's Narrative, seeing her as “trapped in her paternalistic view of slaves” and “unable to respect Sojourner's moral and spiritual sensibilities” (x, xl).¹² Although I certainly agree that Gilbert shares in many of the limitations of perspective of most white nineteenth-century abolitionists, I want to argue that she had a more complex attitude toward Truth's “moral and spiritual sensibilities” than Stewart's summary implies.

First, unlike other white writers who attempted to record Truth's speech, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Gage, Gilbert did not use dialect to convey her sense of Truth's otherness in her language. This decision makes a tremendous difference in the dignity of the portrait she drew—perhaps especially for a modern reader. Gilbert's decision may reflect a genuine respect for Truth's eloquence in speaking—Gilbert referred more than once to the power of her words:

The impressions made by Isabella on her auditors, when moved by lofty or deep feeling, can never be transmitted to paper, (to use the words of another,) till by some Daguerrian art, we are enabled to transfer the look, the gesture, the tones of voice, in connection with the quaint, yet fit expressions used, and the spirit-stirring animation that, at such a time, pervades all she says.

(45)

How much did Truth initially trust Olive Gilbert, a white abolitionist woman she did not know very well, to listen to, understand, and accurately transmit the story she had to tell? To speculate on this question, we need to review Truth's former experiences with white women, both in slavery and afterward, and with white political allies in general. Having grown to maturity in slavery,¹³ Truth had certainly had experiences as an adolescent and young woman with more than one tyrannical white mistress, experiences that might have led her to be particularly suspicious of white women.¹⁴ But Truth also told one story in which the young daughter of the persecuting mistress stood up against her mother for the unjustly maligned and Isabella actively helped the bondwoman prove her integrity. Moreover, after Truth became legally free, she traveled to New York City with a white woman associate from her Methodist church and through her became involved in moral reform missionary work for a brief period in the 1830s. Thus, whatever deep feelings of mistrust and anger might have been left over from the slave experience, by 1850 Truth also had a history of being able to find white women with whom she could make common cause.

Truth also had an unusual history of successfully seeking justice against white oppressors in white courts of law. As a lifelong New York resident, she had developed networks of sympathetic antislavery neighbors upon whom she could and did call for aid in seeking justice. In one case, she actually won a lawsuit against her former owners, who had illegally sold her son into southern slavery. In another, as mentioned earlier, she won a slander suit against her former associates in the Matthias community who had accused her of complicity in murder. Her legal victory in this case even brought her damages and court costs of $125.¹⁵

Yet there are indications that Truth knew how to manage her self-presentation around whites cautiously.¹⁶ Her earlier white literary collaborator, Gilbert Vale, had noted ironically in his 1835 book that, as the one African American in her religious community, Truth was in an excellent position to have reliable inside information about the intimate relationships of her white associates: “Persons who have travelled in the South know the manner in which the colored people, and especially slaves, are treated; they are scarcely regarded as being present.”¹⁷ He also observed that although Truth had strong opinions on many subjects, “yet she is not communicative”—meaning that she could keep her own counsel when it was wise to do so.

We have established that Truth was experienced with a wide variety of whites, including white women, had interacted with many white women as co-religionists during her years of freedom and maturity, and was able both to assert her rights vis-à-vis oppressive whites and to keep her own counsel, depending upon the situation. What can we learn from the Narrative itself about the communicative interaction that took place between the two women during the interview process? In the case of twentieth-century oral history text creation, we have been alerted to the ways in which both the agenda-setting function of the interviewer and her editorial role tend to lessen the storyteller's control over the meaning of her life story. It is the writer, not the speaker, who is presumed to select certain of the teller's “core stories” and arrange them into an overarching narrative, a dramatic structure with implied themes—thus creating new meaning for the reader. For example, Claudia Salazar refers critically to “interventionist practices carried out by the editors of testimonies,” as exemplified by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray's process in creating the contemporary Guatemalan activist's mediated autobiography, I … Rigoberta Menchu.¹⁸

However, I would argue that because of the evidently very hasty composition of this nineteenth-century text, we have much less reason to be concerned about invisible editorial imposition of meaning than do twentieth-century readers of more polished oral-historical autobiographies. There are many indications in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth that the text was produced concurrently with the interview process, with comparatively little editing and no major rewriting.¹⁹ Though the lack of editorial reorganization makes for a less coherent narrative and some confusion for the reader, it is a positive boon for the historian trying to reconstruct the original interview process.

A “spiritually-minded” man from Bristol, Connecticut, who had met Sojourner Truth in her itinerant preaching days wrote a letter of introduction for her to friends in Hartford in the summer of 1843. He instructed them to “let her tell her story without interrupting her, and give close attention, and you will see she has got the lever of truth, that God helps her to pry where but few can” (106). The Narrative produced by Olive Gilbert several years later does not suggest that Truth simply told her story to Gilbert without interruption. Instead, it implies a process of strenuous contest and negotiation between the two women, in which each “won” some important points. Both wished to teach the reader about the meaning of Isabella's transformation into Sojourner Truth, but their vastly different perspectives on slavery, motherhood, the family, and religion led to contradiction and even incoherence in crucial sections of the text.

Though Gilbert controlled the pen and felt free to insert editorial comments in her own voice, it appears that she did not feel free to omit positive assertions by Truth—after all, she presumably had to read the final text back to the storyteller for approval before it could go into print. Moreover, because of Truth's prior experience with collaboration on a life-story text, her maturity, and her experience in speaking to large and small audiences of white religious and social reformers, she was far from naive or passive as she participated in the project.

In what parts of the text do we come closest to hearing Truth's “own voice”? We get first-person dialogue within stories (representing the voice of Truth's younger self, Bell or Isabella) and some apparently direct quotations from the storyteller Sojourner Truth. Though this representation of speech seems to be the closest this text can bring us to the historical Truth's thought and feeling, we must remain aware that Gilbert's decisions as a writer have had a significant impact on our experience of Truth's speech, and the result is an unknowable relationship to the actual words uttered by the historical Sojourner Truth during the interviews with Gilbert. We can be reasonably sure, however, that it represents what Gilbert found most impressive and memorable on these occasions. And most important, as I suggested earlier, Gilbert has rendered the voices of both the mature storyteller (Truth) and the young slave woman (Isabella or Bell) in dignified standard English, with only very occasional and minor deviations meant to indicate informal or regional speech patterns. This is in striking contrast to the later practice of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frances Gage, both of whom conveyed Truth's speech in heavy dialect.²⁰

A useful example of the impact of this decision on our experience of the characters is the following dramatic confrontation scene retold in the Narrative, in which Gilbert even goes so far as to contrast the slangy, less educated speech of one of the slave-owning women—heavily punctuated with exclamation marks to suggest screaming—with Truth's eloquent English. Note how the narrating voice coaches us to respond positively to Truth's “words,” which the narrator characterizes as “pronounced in the most slow, solemn and determined measure and manner.”

Arriving at New Paltz, she went directly to her former mistress, Dumont, complaining bitterly of the removal of her son. Her mistress heard her through, and then replied—“Ugh! a fine fuss to make about a little nigger! Why, have n't you as many of 'em left as you can see to and take care of? A pity 'tis, the niggers are not all in Guinea!! Making such a halloo-balloo about the neighborhood; and all for a paltry nigger!!!” Isabella heard her through, and after a moment's hesitation, answered, in tones of deep determination—“I'll have my child again.” “Have your child again!” repeated her mistress—her tones big with contempt, and scorning the absurd idea of her getting him. “How can you get him? And what have you to support him with, if you could? Have you any money?” “No,” answered Bell, “I have no money, but God has enough, or what's better! And I'll have my child again.” These words were pronounced in the most slow, solemn and determined measure and manner. And in speaking of it, she says, “Oh, my God! I know'd I'd have him agin. I was sure God would help me to get him. Why, I felt so tall within—I felt as if the power of a nation was with me!”

(44-45).²¹

In contrast to such dramatic scenes, much of the text is dominated by the narrating voice created by Gilbert, giving a third-person summary of Truth's stories and ideas. Even in this highly mediated portion of the text, however, where we cannot seem to hear Truth's storytelling voice, I would argue that we can feel her impact on the shape of the narrative by noticing which events, topics, and themes are present and which are missing; observing what proportion of the Narrative is devoted to each segment of the life history; and focusing on occasions when the narrative material forces the narrator to feel defensive or apologetic.

In the first half of the Narrative, which is devoted to Truth's experiences of slavery as a young girl and woman, one of Truth's goals seems to have been to emphasize the vast gulf between her consciousness as a mature free woman and her consciousness under slavery. She offered Gilbert several self-deprecating gestures and comments that can be read in this light, including laughter as she told of her former fear of sleeping in a bed for the first time (46); a joke at her own ignorance of legal institutions and terminology when suing her former owners (she had assumed a “grand jury” was a dignitary) (46); and her description of her own “ignorance and destitution” and that of other slaves (70). But Truth's disparagement of her former state of understanding by no means implies an attitude of deference toward her interviewer, which would imply Gilbert's ability to control their mutual agenda. Rather, her storytelling behavior suggests a quality that Carleton Mabee has characterized as a “stubborn willfulness which helped her resist guidance.”²² Most notable evidence of this to my mind is a series of passages explicitly dealing with what I read as Truth's own decision to censor some of her painful slavery experience.²³

The issue of censorship first comes up quite early, when the Narrative arrives at Isabella's life with slave owners Mr. and Mrs. Dumont, during her adolescence and young womanhood. Gilbert's narrating voice hints at Isabella's highly negative experience with Mrs. Dumont and her more positive attitude toward the master, who was “naturally a man of kind feelings.”²⁴

Had Mrs. Dumont possessed that vein of kindness and consideration for the slaves, so perceptible in her husband's character, Isabella would have been as comfortable here, as one had best be, if one must be a slave. … But Mrs. Dumont, who had been born and educated in a non-slaveholding family … could not have any patience with the creeping gait, the dull understanding, or see any cause for the listless manners and careless slovenly habits of the poor downtrodden outcast. … From this source arose a long series of trials in the life of our heroine, which we must pass over in silence; some from motives of delicacy, and others, because the relation of them might inflict undeserved pain on some now living, whom Isabel remembers only with esteem and love; therefore the reader will not be surprised if our narrative appears somewhat tame at this point, and may rest assured that it is not for want of facts, as the most thrilling incidents of this portion of her life are from various motives suppressed.

(29-30)

This passage strongly suggests to me that Gilbert, the Garrisonian abolitionist, wanting to expose slavery's cruelties for an audience of whites who were ignorant of them, was urging Truth to tell more stories that would “thrill” her white northern antislavery readers with virtuous indignation. Meanwhile Truth, just as staunchly, was refusing to do so. The ostensible reason for her refusal was to protect members of the Dumont family, or of her own, from knowledge of many instances of the mistress's excessive cruelty (or, as some have suggested, perhaps even to conceal a sexual relation between her and the master).²⁵

As the passage goes on, we hear Truth insisting to Gilbert that she record a particular story: “One comparatively trifling incident she wishes related, as it made a deep impression on her mind at the time—showing, as she thinks, how God shields the innocent, and causes them to triumph over their enemies, and also how she stood between master and mistress.” (30)

Gilbert feels obliged to point out the way in which Truth understands the event—as an instance of providential justice—but as the dubious phrase “as she thinks” indicates, Gilbert evidently had her own view of what the story showed. As a matter of fact, the “tame” and “comparatively trifling” story that Truth insisted on Gilbert's recording at this juncture is what I take to be a “core story,” an exceptionally evocative and revealing story of high value to the storyteller, about the wickedness of the white mistress and the comparative kindness of the master.

In this story, Mrs. Dumont and a white female servant conspire to make Isabella's work look slovenly in the eyes of Mr. Dumont. Just as Mr. Dumont begins to think Isabella should be reprimanded, his young daughter Gertrude, “a good, kind-hearted girl of ten years old,” offers to help Isabella with her work. Gertrude then sees and publicly exposes the duplicity of the white servant and Mrs. Dumont, and Mrs. Dumont is embarrassed into impotent silence.

If the story were to end here, it would be a fine vehicle for teaching the white reader which kind of white woman to emulate. But as Gilbert dutifully records it, the story veers in a direction that makes Gilbert less comfortable. We hear that as a result of this “fine triumph for Isabella and her master … she became more ambitious than ever to please him.” The extra work she performed and her master's praises

brought upon her head the envy of her fellow-slaves, and they taunted her with being a “white folks” nigger. On the other hand, she received a larger share of the confidence of her master, and many small favors that were by them unattainable. I asked her if her master, Dumont, ever whipped her? She answered, “Oh yes, he sometimes whipped me soundly, though never cruelly. And the most severe whipping he ever give me was because I was cruel to a cat.”

(33)

This passage clearly reveals a genuine struggle of wills, and a resulting spirited dialogue, between Gilbert and Truth during the early part of the interviews. Gilbert apparently tried to get Truth to criticize Dumont as an exemplar of the cruelty of the institution by asking for a whipping story; but Truth resisted portraying the master as cruel and even characterized her former self as the “cruel” one. Like Gilbert Vale, Olive Gilbert apparently tried to minimize or explain away what she felt as repellent fidelity on Isabella's part to an authoritarian white man. (Vale had found Isabella's continuing loyalty to the “deluded” Matthias difficult to swallow; likewise, Gilbert apparently could not understand her loyalty to the slaveholding master Dumont.) But Truth herself wouldn't let her liberal white partners define her political or emotional reality their way—she insisted on their recording her version of “truth.” In this passage, then, Truth resisted Gilbert's efforts to “put words into her mouth” on this issue, pointing out that there were mitigating circumstances when she was beaten by the master.

I see it as to Gilbert's credit as oral historian that she recorded this interchange in the Narrative when it could easily have been left out. But this cost Gilbert some anxiety, which is displayed in her immediate editorial explanation that

at that time she looked upon her master as a God … and if any one talked to her of the injustice of her being a slave, she answered them with contempt and immediately told her master. … Yet she now sees very clearly the false position they were all in, both masters and slaves; and she looks back, with utter astonishment, at the absurdity of the claims so arrogantly set up by the masters … and at the perfect stupidity of the slaves, in admitting for one moment the validity of those claims.

(33-34)

There came a moment as the interviews went on when, despite the firm intention Truth registered early in the interview process to censor some of her painful slavery experiences, she was willing to tell more of the horror stories Gilbert had sought. About halfway through the Narrative, at the point in the story when the free Isabella was living in New York City, Gilbert inserted—out of chronological order—a final section on Truth's slave reminiscences, called “Gleanings.” It includes a list of new, briefly stated facts that sharpen Truth's indictment of slavery by showing more of its painful impact on Isabella's parents and her husband. The section ends with two classic stories of cruelty about other slaves, both of which emphasize the murderous hatred aroused in the victims by the cruel master (82-84).

What do we make of the fact that at this point in the interview process Truth told Gilbert some slavery stories she had not told earlier? The Narrative gives us some clues as to what happened between them that may help explain this shift. The “Gleanings” section (81-87) begins with an expanded explanation of Truth's reasons for censoring some “hard things” that occurred to her in slavery, using euphemistic language that again suggests the possibly sexual nature of the censored details:

There are some hard things that crossed Isabella's life while in slavery, that she has no desire to publish, for various reasons. First, because the parties from whose hands she suffered them have rendered up their account to a higher tribunal, and their innocent friends alone are living, to have their feelings injured by the recital; secondly, because they are not all for the public ear, from their very nature. …

(82)

Gilbert's voice tells us that Truth thinks that some of the events are so “unnatural” that she would not be believed—and quotes Truth, “I do not wish to say anything to destroy my own character for veracity, though what I say is strictly true.” Then Gilbert adds that “some things have been omitted through forgetfulness, which not having been mentioned in their places, can only be briefly spoken of here,” and proceeds to record some of the traumatic events in Isabella's family's life that were not included in their proper chronological places.

Is it plausible that Truth simply “forgot” this material earlier? Perhaps—it may indeed have taken some time for the middle-aged Truth to allow herself to remember painful material from over twenty years before. It is also possible, and I believe likely, that, as in the modern oral-historical interview process, through working with Gilbert in the somewhat illusory intimacy of the life-history interview setting, Truth was developing a degree of trust in her interviewer that enabled her to tell Gilbert some of her deeper, more bitter feelings about surviving slavery.²⁶

The immediate context in which this “Gleanings” section is set lends support to the idea that accessing one particularly bitter memory led Truth to bring up others. She had just told a story of learning that a church acquaintance who had recently died was actually her unrecognized sister Nancy, who had been sold away from her family in infancy. Perhaps when Truth and Gilbert got to this disturbing story, Truth's aroused sorrow and anger enabled her to reveal more about the cruel impacts of slavery on her family than she had been willing to earlier, especially in a context where Gilbert was obviously trying to “put words into her mouth.” At any rate, the interaction between the two women during the interview process was probably a crucial factor both in Truth's earlier insistence on censorship and in her later decision to enlarge upon the cruelties of slavery.

What other aspects of the mediated text suggest Truth's own agency and exercise of substantial control over the representation of her life? I would argue that the decision to devote almost half of the total text to her postslavery life (1827 to 1848) is much more likely to have been Truth's idea than Gilbert's. The abolitionist Gilbert would have found much of the material in this portion of the Narrative unfamiliar and problematic, difficult to relate to an indictment of the institution of slavery. Truth is seen dealing with apparently problematic relationships with her adult children—notably her son Peter, who became involved in petty criminal activity in New York and was ultimately shipped off as a crew member on a whaling vessel. The narrative also deals briefly with her involvement in the Matthias scandal, a period in her life that could certainly have been censored had Truth wanted to forget it,²⁷ and traces her history as an itinerant preacher during the 1843 Millerite excitement, when she tried to calm mobs who were expecting the imminent end of the world in fire. Finally, it gives a superficial (and confusing) account of Truth's involvement in the recently failed Northampton Association. Rather than confirming a portrait of Truth as a formerly victimized heroine who had survived slavery and settled down into respectable womanhood, anonymity, devotion to family, and modest pursuit of material well-being, this portion of the Narrative could be read (particularly by white middle-class readers) as containing implicit criticism of Truth's judgment, competence, or both. In this portion of the text, she becomes a formerly married, free, and frequently itinerant African American woman who has rejected economic individualism and followed strictly inner guidance in a search for religious truth and an ideal egalitarian community life.²⁸

Once the narrative moves into waters that must have been rather unfamiliar territory for Gilbert the abolitionist, I believe that Truth must have been largely, if not entirely, responsible for setting the agenda in their conversations. This shift seems likely in that Truth probably felt, after her dramatic divine call to wander and testify publicly to her religious experience, that all of her experience showed providential guidance—not just the part that made the political point that slavery is evil. Moreover, she simply did not share Gilbert's middle-class white perspective, by which her actions as a mother and as a female religious quester were problematic.

That there was a vast difference in perspective between Gilbert and Truth on the meaning of motherhood in particular is demonstrated clearly in the earlier part of the Narrative, where we can observe Gilbert's rather frantic efforts to explain away behavior and ideology that she evidently condemned. For example, Truth frankly describes to Gilbert her own harsh disciplinary treatment of her children under slavery—saying “she would sometimes whip her child when it cried to her for bread, rather than give it a piece secretly, lest it should learn to take what was not its own!” Gilbert's narrating voice displays intense anxiety over this information when she records it. She launches into an apostrophe on the hypocrisy of slaveholders' religion before she is able to record Truth's own view of the meaning of this behavior; and even after recording Truth's own speech, she insists on translating it into a more “politically correct” form: “Yet Isabella glories in the fact that she was faithful and true to her master; she says, ‘It made me true to my God’—meaning, that it helped to form in her a character that loved truth, and hated a lie” (34).

Truth emphasized repeatedly to Gilbert that she had learned strict honesty in slavery—primarily from her mother—and this was a central source of pride to her (17, 34). It was by her superior honesty that she was then able to assert her right to leave her owner, who had failed to keep a promise he had made to reward her faithful service with an early emancipation.

“Ah!” she says, with emphasis that cannot be written, “the slaveholders are Terrible for promising to give you this or that, or such and such a privilege, if you will do thus and so; and when the time of fulfilment comes, and one claims the promise, they, forsooth, recollect nothing of the kind; and you are, like as not, taunted with being a Liar.” … When her master saw her, he said, “Well, Bell, so you've run away from me.” “No, I did not run away; I walked away by day-light, and all because you had promised me a year of my time.”

(39-40, 43)

The Narrative gives us another excellent example of the tension between the two women's perspectives on slave motherhood. Gilbert's voice first reports Truth's admission that as a slave mother who bore five children, Isabella “rejoiced in being permitted to be the instrument of increasing the property of her oppressors.” Gilbert rushes to relieve her own feelings and to defend Truth, with this rhetorical aside:

Think, dear reader, without a blush, if you can, for one moment, of a mother thus willingly, and with pride, laying her own children, the “flesh of her flesh,” on the altar of slavery—a sacrifice to the bloody Moloch! … But since that time, the subject of this narrative has made some advances from a state of chattelism towards that of a woman and mother; and she now looks back upon her thoughts and feelings there, in her state of ignorance and degradation, as one does on the dark imagery of a fitful dream.

(37-38)

Later, in a passage defensively explaining why Truth had been “unable” to make a home for her children after slavery, Gilbert waxes lyrical in picturing “a home, around whose sacred hearthstone she could collect her family, as they gradually emerged from the prisonhouse of bondage … a sunny home, where good influences cluster, and bad ones are carefully excluded.” (71-72)

Gilbert is here attempting to defend Truth against the charge of failing to create a home for her children when free of slavery, by pointing to her poverty as a female wage earner and her lack of education in money management. Then, in a long editorial aside, she sternly points out that Truth's children are now adults and should not only take care of themselves but also help take care of their aging mother (72-73).

The fullest apparently direct quotation we are offered from Truth herself suggests quite a different set of assumptions about her responsibilities as a mother, undoubtedly reflecting African American female culture developed in part in response to the institution of slavery. She did not blame herself for her children's experiences nor see herself only as victimized by slavery in this role. Rather, she seems here to evaluate her own mothering behavior as quite adequate, given the circumstances: “‘Oh,’ she says, ‘how little did I know myself of the best ways to instruct and counsel them. Yet I did the best I then knew, when with them. I took them to the religious meetings; I talked to, and prayed for and with them; when they did wrong, I scolded at and whipped them.’” (73)

Moreover, in this later part of the Narrative, Truth gave Gilbert information about her relationships with her adult children that suggests she actually wanted to achieve some degree of distance from them. For example, in the story of her son Peter's difficulties with the law in New York City, we hear that after several attempts to provide him with training and advice, Truth eventually gave up on him and ultimately refused to get him out of jail. After he left the city for a sea-faring life, she felt hopeful that he had reformed and had Gilbert insert several letters from him into the text of the Narrative at this point, “for preservation, in case they prove the last she ever hears from him in this world.”²⁹

We also hear that when Truth felt compelled to change her name and leave New York City as an itinerant preacher in June 1843, she did not notify her adult daughters because “they would make such an ado about it as would render it very unpleasant, if not distressing to all parties” (100). We hear later that her daughters “were filled with wonder and alarm. Where could she have gone, and why had she left? were questions no one could answer satisfactorily. Now, their imaginations painted her as a wandering maniac—and again they feared she had been left to commit suicide; and many were the tears they shed at the loss of her” (109). The admittedly fragmentary evidence suggests to me a middle-aged woman who had turned her face from a former phase of her life (which included two marriages and maternity) to an entirely new one—whether her adult offspring were ready for this change or not. Truth's attitude toward her maternal role at this moment in her life may seem very modern—but it is certainly light-years away from the Victorian lady's magazine picture of the home-centered ideal mother that Gilbert evidently had in mind.³⁰

Gilbert wanted to present Truth as transformed in her understanding of both slavery and maternity, but she attributed the transformation simply to the acquisition of legal freedom. She seems to have resisted Truth's own view of her transformation experiences as fundamentally mystical and spiritual. Gilbert's choice of language suggests that she held Truth's religious ideas at a great distance, as for example when she characterized Truth as explaining “the nature and origin of sin … in accordance with her own most curious and original views” (101). Yet as Truth's collaborator on the life history, Gilbert did feel it to be her responsibility to collect and record some of Truth's religious “views and reasonings,” and on occasion she was able to record sufficient detail to give us important insights into Truth's spirituality and theology. In one very interesting extended passage in this later section of the text, for example, we seem to hear Truth thinking through the contradictions between Scripture and her experience, and learning to read Scripture less literally as a result of trusting her own experience, both of daily life and of inner inspiration (107-108).

She emphasized to Gilbert that there had been two transformative moments of dramatic growth in her knowledge of the nature of God and her mission in the world—the first a classic conversion experience while she was still a slave in which she directly experienced divine power and mercy (64-67), and the second a more philosophical, reflective self-transformation when, as a free woman, she received her call to leave the city to preach (97-100). Truth also insisted on the continuity of her belief in efficacious prayer, as well as her continuing experience of divine guidance from childhood. She told Gilbert about the early religious teachings of her mother, who taught her to take her troubles and needs to a protective but highly humanlike God in the sky.³¹ She showed how her guidance by inner voice in answer to prayer helped her liberate herself from oppression at many crucial moments; for example, her decision to walk away from Dumont because of his broken promise of emancipation is represented as the result of a nighttime colloquy with God (41). Similarly, when she found influential white allies who enabled her to use the law to release her son from southern slavery, she regarded it as a divine answer to prayer (49-50).

When she discovered the physical abuse inflicted on her son by a white slaveholding family to whom he had been sold, she cursed them—“Oh, Lord, ‘render unto them double’ for all this!”—which was later seen as efficacious when the daughter of the family was murdered by her husband. Gilbert records Truth's reaction: “It all seemed very remarkable to her, and she viewed it as flowing from a special providence of God. … She felt as if God had more than answered her petition, when she ejaculated, in her anguish of mind, ‘Oh, Lord, render unto them double!’” (54-58)

Although this text contains only the skeletal structure of the full spiritual autobiography that we might have had if Truth had had direct access to the pen, there is still plenty of rich material, particularly in the core stories, that illuminates Truth's midlife understanding of her religious experience and of such religious issues as the origin and nature of evil.³² There are also many frustrating gaps and questions on which the Narrative is silent. For example, what was Truth's estimation of the misogynist doctrine of the prophet Matthias, to whom she had been loyal, now that more than ten years had passed since she had defended him from his enemies?³³ It would be exceptionally interesting to hear this future defender of women's rights reflect at mid-century on a doctrine said to include the idea that “they who teach women are of the wicked. … Every thing that has the smell of woman will be destroyed. Woman is the capsheaf of the abomination of desolation—full of all deviltry.”³⁴

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth contains clear evidence of Truth's forceful impact on the collaborative text creation project. Although Truth may have begun somewhat docilely in the interview sessions, she soon began to resist strongly what she perceived as Gilbert's pressure to tell a “canned” antislavery story. She began by insisting on her right to censor whatever might hurt others or harm her own reputation for “truth,” though she later came to trust Gilbert more and to give her more antislavery material. In the process of resisting Gilbert's politically liberal, middle-class, and secular agenda, she made sure that the major facts of her own religious experience, in both its lifelong continuity and in its moments of sudden spiritual and emotional growth, found their way into the text. She asserted that the values she had learned from her mother in slavery were at the core of her ethical and spiritual identity and that her own practices as a mother had been righteous. She insisted on telling about her whole life, not just her life in slavery. Just as she asserted her right to judge Scripture against her own experience and reason out the truth for herself, so she implicitly asserted the primacy of her own perspective on her life over that of her white amanuensis.

Although she could not control Olive Gilbert's editorial asides to the reader, nor Gilbert's choice of language in her narrative summaries, nor Gilbert's anxiety when there was a disparity between their perspectives, it seems likely to me that Sojourner Truth's own eloquent expressions of both feeling and moral principle influenced Gilbert's decision to avoid the distancing effect of dialect and create a highly dignified-sounding representation of her speech. Truth also offered many clearly articulated core stories and commentary on the complexity of her slave experience through which she represented directly to the reader a view of slavery very different from Gilbert's. As a character in Gilbert's text, Truth could not “tell her story without interruption”; but as an interview subject, she did persistently use her “lever of truth” to “pry where few can.”

And to give Olive Gilbert her due, without denying the biases resulting from her own historical social location, I believe the text shows that she was faithful enough to her role as Truth's historian at least to leave us clear evidence of their different agendas—even of occasions when they disagreed during the interview sessions. Because such evidence remains present in what seems a virtually unrevised text, we are in a better position than we would otherwise be to excavate elements of Truth's story of spiritual guidance and growth, particularly in her core stories of injustice righted.

As feminist scholars and students of nineteenth-century African American history and culture, we need to develop both a new conception of the mediated life-story text and new textual analysis techniques that will help us contextualize it most fully within its production process. Rather than view such texts either as “dictated narratives” (denying the influence of the “amanuensis” on the process and the finished product) or as “inauthentic” (denying the influence of the storyteller), we should reconceptualize the mediated text as a truly collaborative project undertaken by two fully engaged personalities situated in different social locations and attempt to identify the distinct voices and agendas of the two parties. Reading texts like The Narrative of Sojourner Truth within the context provided by such a production scenario can help us understand and appreciate more fully the skills and powers of the oral life-storyteller. In addition, such texts display some of the challenges and difficulties of collaborative communicative projects between political allies who are both women yet who are separated by crucial social differences such as class and ethnicity, as well as philosophical, religious, and cultural differences. This text, like others of its genre, has yet to give up all the useful lessons it may contain on such important topics.

Notes

1. Jean Fagan Yellin points out two “substantive suggestions that Jacobs followed” in revising the manuscript and notes that Lydia Maria Child had made minor verbal changes and rearranged sections of the manuscript. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), xxii. Yellin also tells the story of Jacobs's disillusioning experience with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the first white ally she approached. Stowe wanted to control Jacobs's life story. In letters to a closer friend, Jacobs also expressed disappointment at not being able to read proofs with Child: “I ought to have been there that we could have consulted together, and compared our views—although I know that hers are superior to mine yet we could have marked her great Ideas and my small ones together” (xvii-xxiii).

2. I have suggested the value of this kind of attention in an earlier essay on the Tubman narrative. See Jean M. Humez, “In Search of Harriet Tubman's Spiritual Autobiography,” National Women's Studies Association Journal 5:2 (Summer 1993): 162-182.

3. One of Truth's biographers, Margaret Washington, asserts that although the text's mediated status leads to some regrettable silences on issues such as sexuality, “anyone who studies the Narrative and is familiar with the plight of female slaves can easily read between the lines—and should do so whenever reading narratives of black women unable to write for themselves.” “Introduction,” Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Margaret Washington (New York: Vintage, 1993), xxxi.

4. This text was first published with an introduction by William Lloyd Garrison in 1850; then republished with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1855. Later, an enlarged book was created by Sojourner Truth's friend Frances Titus, which included a reprint of the 1850 Narrative and much other later documentary material on Truth's subsequent life as an activist. This second book, called Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Bondswoman of Olden Time, with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence, Drawn from Her “Book of Life,” was published in 1875, 1878, 1881, and 1884. See Margaret Washington's “Note on Editions of Sojourner Truth's Narrative,” in Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Margaret Washington (New York: Vintage, 1993), 125-127. All page references in this article are to the recent Schomberg Library reprint of the 1878 text, Narrative of Sojourner Truth …, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (New York: Oxford, 1991).

5. Truth left the Dumont family in the fall of 1826, less than a year before a New York State law freeing all remaining slaves in the state went into effect.

6. Carleton Mabee, “Sojourner Truth, Bold Prophet: Why Did She Never Learn to Read?” New York History 69 (Jan. 1988): 55-77; Jeffrey Stewart, “Introduction,” in Narrative, xxxix; also see Nell Irvin Painter, “Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism: Difference, Slavery and Memory,” in An Untrodden Path: Antislavery and Women's Political Culture, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Margaret Washington, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, xxvi-xxviii.

7. According to Gilbert Vale, it was Truth who initiated the project, approaching Vale through “a gentleman,” because she wanted to make sure that her side of the story came before the public. Gilbert Vale, Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence, Illustrated by the Simple History of Isabella. … (New York, 1835, I), 5. For careful verification of many of the facts of Truth's life, see Carleton Mabee's Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993). For a full account of the Matthias community, see Thomas M. McDade, “Matthias, Prophet Without Honor,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 62:4 (1978): 311-334.

8. Fanaticism was published when Truth was in her mid-thirties, living in New York City—having been legally free since 1827. Vale saw the accusation against Truth as “made, apparently, to destroy her credibility, as she was expected to give evidence unfavorable to [her accuser] in the case of Matthias” (Fanaticism, “Preface to Part the Second”).

9. Margaret Washington has made the point that, although a misogynist, Matthias might have appealed to Truth in part because he preached racial equality and rejected the concept of marriage based on lust and ownership. Margaret Washington, “The ‘Colored Woman’ and the ‘Kingdom’: Spirituality and Sexuality Among Radical Mystics in Antebellum New York” (Paper presented at Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Vassar College, June 13, 1993).

10. Gilbert says, “Our first knowledge of her was derived from a friend who had resided for a time in the ‘Community,’ and who, after describing her, and singing one of her hymns, wished that we might see her. But we little thought, at that time, that we should ever pen these ‘simple annals’ of this child of nature” (121). Carleton Mabee suggests that the “friend” who wanted Gilbert to meet Truth was William Lloyd Garrison. Apparently this first meeting took place sometime between 1844 and 1846, right before the Northampton Association dissolved. The book project was completed in 1850 and probably was begun during the previous year. On April 15, 1850, Truth purchased a house built for her in Florence, Massachusetts by Samuel L. Hill, a former Northampton Association member, for $300. Hill gave her a mortgage for this amount, and she began to tour almost immediately thereafter.

11. When Truth was getting ready to have a second, enlarged version of the Narrative published in the early 1870s, she apparently contacted Gilbert through their mutual friend Amy Post, and Truth and Gilbert exchanged a few cordial letters. Gilbert congratulated Truth on her stellar rise as a public figure and wrote, “I get a glimpse of you often through the papers, which falls upon my spirit like bright rays from the sun. … 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.” Olive Gilbert, from Leeds, Massachusetts, January 17, 1870, to Sojourner Truth (276-277).

12. Stewart believes that although “Sojourner's narrative thus provided Gilbert with an opportunity to find her voice,” Gilbert's “voice … is problematical” in that she can be heard on occasion dropping the narrative thread in order to present her own Eurocentric middle-class perspective. Here he seems to be responding with annoyance as much to the third-person narrative form chosen for the Narrative as to the Eurocentric attitudes expressed.

13. In the fall of 1826, at the age of twenty-nine and less than a year before her state-mandated legal emancipation, Truth walked away from a New York State master who had broken a promise to free her early. The remaining slaves were to be freed July 4, 1827. Truth virtually chose to live with a new white family—one opposed to slavery—until she was legally emancipated, and the importance of this choice was symbolized in her renaming herself, for this family, Isabella Van Wagenen.

14. In addition to the hated mistress Mrs. Dumont, who tried to discredit her before Mr. Dumont, the Narrative identifies a Dumont relative, Mrs. Gedney, as laughing at Isabella in her distress over her lost son, in a manner “almost demoniacal” (46). For a discussion of the ways in which female slave narratives depict white women, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford, 1987), 20-61; and Margaret Washington, Narrative, xxx.

15. Mabee discusses the possible impact on Truth's view of the legal system of these unusual experiences of victory against white oppressors in Sojourner Truth, Slave, Prophet, Legend, 40.

16. Nell Irvin Painter argues, in fact, that in Truth's public life after she published the 1850 Narrative, during the time she became a public speaker on the antislavery and women's rights platforms, she “crafted a persona that appealed enormously to educated white Americans” by “emphasizing her otherness,” and gaining “maximum advantages of being exotic.” Nell Irvin Painter, “Difference, Slavery and Memory,” in An Untrodden Path, ed. Yellin and Van Horne, 12. During the period covered by the 1850 Narrative, however, Truth had not begun her career as a secular lecturer. Rather, she seems to have been motivated at least as much by spiritual considerations as by political conviction and financial need—so it is perhaps as well to treat this earlier period of her life on its own terms, without the advantages of hindsight.

17. Vale, Fanaticism, 41, 62. Fanaticism gives us a remarkable picture of the power dynamics and entangled relationships among merchant-class white women and men, a working-class white woman servant, and Isabella, whose status in the community combined elements of religious co-equal (eating at the same table, participating in all religious rites) and domestic servant. Although Catherine Calloway, the white working-class servant, seems to have gossiped freely with Isabella over the details of the sex lives of the wealthier members of the community, Vale gives us the impression that Isabella knew better than to gossip freely herself. For instances of white co-religionists confiding confidential information to Isabella, see Fanaticism, II, 16; 92; 115.

18. Claudia Salazar, “A Third World Woman's Text: Between the Politics of Criticism and Cultural Politics,” in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 98-102.

19. This will be discussed in more detail below, but I am relying especially on passages that appear out of chronological order or in which the narrator explicitly says that something relevant should have been inserted earlier. Nineteenth-century manuscript production, we should remember, was a laborious process involving writing by hand in ink, and less time (and money) seems to have been allowed for all phases of book production, including editing and typesetting, than we moderns are accustomed to.

20. Heavy dialect is given to Truth's voice in Harriet Stowe's “African Sibyl” piece about Truth (published in 1863 but based on a visit remembered from the early 1850s); in Frances Gage's famous but probably much decorated version of the “Ain't I a Woman” speech of 1851 (also first published many years after the event it describes); and in many of the newspaper accounts of her speaking well into the 1870s. Mabee raises the possibility that whereas Truth herself could speak relatively standard English (“correct and beautiful,” as a British journalist described it in 1853), she increasingly chose to use folksy and ungrammatical speech as years went by, as part of her strategy of projecting a “picturesque” persona. Mabee, “Sojourner Truth, Bold Prophet: Why Did She Never Learn to Read?” 72.

21. This is reminiscent of Harriet Jacobs's strategy in portraying the ignorant white militia invading her family home, using heavy dialect in contrast to her family's highly polished and educated English. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, chap. 12, “Fear of Insurrection,” 63-67. Jacobs clearly uses dialect as a class marker, giving it to both uneducated whites and uneducated blacks.

22. Carleton Mabee, “Sojourner Truth, Bold Prophet: Why Did She Never Learn to Read?” 75.

23. I am aware that the “censorship” issue in the context of women's slave narratives is a highly complex one, much discussed since Jean Fagan Yellin's edition of Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl brought the question of sexual exploitation to the fore several years ago. Margaret Washington has explicitly attributed the “censorship” of any discussion of sexuality in the Truth Narrative to Olive Gilbert (xxix-xxx), arguing cogently that Truth herself was “not modest about the sexual politics of slavery” and pointing to Truth's baring her breasts in a public meeting in which her gender was contested (xxxii). I agree that Truth's experience of and ideology about sexuality was undoubtedly profoundly different from that of Gilbert, but I find the evidence in the Narrative itself for Truth's own censorship to be strong (not necessarily in the sexual arena only).

24. A clear example of Truth's memory of Dumont's “kind feelings” is his willingness to let Isabella attend to the needs of her own infant child before doing work ordered by her mistress (38). Another example is his intervention in the abusive treatment Isabella's slave lover was receiving from his own master (34-36).

25. See Carleton Mabee's judicious discussion of the evidence that might point to a sexual relationship between Dumont and Isabella, in his Sojourner Truth, Slave, Prophet, Legend, 7-9. He concludes that “while there is no evidence that there were any sexual relations between Dumont and Isabella, nevertheless the emotional ties between them seem unusually close for a master and slave, and a sexual relationship between them cannot be ruled out.”

26. Daphne Patai, describing her experience interviewing Brazilian women as part of a research project, writes with great intelligence and ethical concern of the “asymmetries” of the interview situation and points out that “the interview situation … is often an extremely charged one emotionally. Part of what those interviewed ‘get’ from the process is precisely the undivided attention directed at them by another individual. … I was troubled by the sense of intense emotional involvement that, in my experience, always occurs at the time of the interview.” Daphne Patai, “U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?” in Women's Words, 142-143.

27. Had Truth wished to conceal either her problems with her adult children or her involvement in the Matthias scandal, it seems very likely she could have done so. She had changed her name since the Matthias scandal—which, moreover, took place in a different state over ten years earlier. She might have simply begun the postslavery part of her life story with her call to preach in 1843. It seems unlikely that Gilbert would have questioned her closely about her activities at that time—after all, as it is, an eight-year period between the end of the Matthias kingdom in 1835 and Truth's setting forth on her itinerant career goes entirely undescribed, with no comment from Gilbert on the gap.

28. Though beyond the scope of this paper, it is interesting to observe that the religious crisis in New York City that led to her taking on the new Sojourner name and identity involved the rejection of her prior involvement in individualistic economic activity, not only because she found she was failing to prosper materially herself but because she had a revelation about her own involvement in an exploitive economic system: “After turning it in her mind for some time, she came to the conclusion, that she had been taking part in a great drama, which was, in itself, but one great system of robbery and wrong. … She began to look upon money and property with great indifference, if not contempt” (98-100).

29. Narrative, 74-76. In the letters included in the Narrative, Peter says he has sent five letters and never heard from her and urges her to write (77-79). No further information is given in the Narrative about Peter's fate, though a reference in one of Gilbert's letters to Truth in the 1870s suggests that Truth believed him dead and had contacted his spirit (276).

30. Margaret Washington has also critiqued Gilbert's Eurocentric view of the slave family as “weak and pathetic” (xxiii).

31. Margaret Washington provides an excellent discussion of Isabella's religious education and awakening experiences, in the context of the African-Dutch slave community in New York of that era, in the “Introduction” to her edition (xxii-xxix).

32. For a summary of her doctrine, examples of her preaching, and conversations with Adventists, see especially pp. 106-120.

33. Unfortunately, most if not all of the information in the Narrative on the Matthias experience seems to have been lifted directly from the 1835 Fanaticism text (87-97). One wonders why Truth's later view of this experience was not included—whose silence should we conclude this is, her own or Gilbert's? Vale reported in Fanaticism that, though somewhat disillusioned by the experiences of the Sing-Sing commune, Isabella still said she had “confidence” in Matthias and was prepared to follow him west (Fanaticism, I, 107-108). “What her fixed opinions are now we know not. Her ancient faith is shaken; she is not a believer in the supernatural character of Mathias, but still regards most of his interpretations as more rational, and probably true, than that of any other teacher of religion.” Fanaticism II, 126-127.

34. Vale, Fanaticism, I, 45. These are Vale's “quotations” from one of Matthias's sermons. Matthias also explicitly disapproved of women speaking, and Isabella had already done some religious speaking at the time she came to acknowledge his legitimate role as a prophet and was later to take up this role again. Nevertheless, I am not aware of any recorded critique in her voice of Matthias's misogyny. It is possible that she simply paid much less attention to this aspect of his doctrine than we are inclined to, focusing instead on what he had to say about spirit migration, purifying body and spirit, and his critique of the churches. See Vale, Fanaticism, I, 53; and Truth's comments to Gilbert on fasting, in Narrative, 96-97.