Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
By Nell Irvin Painter
Norton, 370 pages, $28
Walter Lippmann was right when, writing about the general public, he said “there is nothing universal or eternal or unchangeable about our expectations.” But it might be added to this that, especially in regards to heroism, our expectations are both reductionist and sentimental. The coda of Nell Irvin Painter’s biography of the prominent black abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth seems to prove this last point in showing how we create a usable, public history. We have succeeded in reducing and sentimentalizing Truth because we want and need today a certain type of black woman as representative mother figure of antebellum America. As Painter, a professor of American history at Princeton University, tells the story, blacks and whites in the academy have come to agree at least on a certain construction of Sojourner Truth as the sassy, tough, mannish black woman who quieted hostile white and condescending male audiences with a sharp tongue and a fearless eye, a bit like Jesus before the scribes and Pharisees.
The Truth myth or legend is based largely on her impromptu talk at the Akron women’s rights conference of 1851, where she allegedly used the phrase “Ar’n’t I a woman” in responding to a bunch of sexist, fault-finding ministers who had succeeded in subjugating the cowering white women who supposedly were in change of the meeting. It is a highly charged moment, for the white women are racist and hardly interested in having Truth speak, so she must, as it were, save the cause of women’s rights against considerable force of her own sex and the white patriarchy. She succeeds by adding the authenticating gravity of her blackness to the issue of women’s oppression. As a former slave, she has been treated worse than any woman in the room, but from this experience she has extracted a kind of uncompromising wisdom made all the more legitimate by her illiteracy.
It is a fact that Truth spoke at this meeting and that what she said was of some moment. She certainly spoke up forcefully for the rights of women through the potent but ignored experience of the enslaved woman. However, much of the moment was fabricated by a white feminist named Frances Dana Gage writing about Truth 12 years after the event. According to Painter’s convincing evidence, it is almost certain that Truth never used the phrase “Ar’n’t I a woman”; that the white women at the meeting were never browbeaten by a group of ministers (the white women were quite capable of defending themselves through argument and hardly needed Truth’s assistance); and that they were never hostile to Truth’s speaking to the group. Yet it is the legend that everyone who knows or cares at all about Truth has come to believe. Indeed, Painter has found it virtually impossible to convince her students or her colleagues of the facts. Remarkably, Truth’s speech, as recorded at the time it was given by Marius Robinson, a closer friend of Truth’s than Gage ever was, without the “Ar’n’t I a woman” refrain, seems more incisive in its imagery and construction than the popular revision that Gage supplied.
It is easy to see why the Gage version is so widely and deeply accepted by learned and even popular audiences. For the purposes of black and feminist history, we need a black, female figure from the 19th Century who was a public speaker for the causes of women’s rights and abolition, who was a slave and who had endured abuse. In our quest for a new American history, Truth as the old, tough, slave woman becomes, in effect, the Left’s version of the politicized mammy, of the militant auntie, the black mother as Brecht’s Mother Courage or Kurt Weill’s Pirate Jenny or Richard Wright’s revolutionary mother figure in “Uncle Tom’s Children.” This not only sentimentalizes Truth but reduces her by ignoring her religious self (religion was far and away the most important force in her life), her doubts, her compromises, her sheer dumb fumblings, her courage in simply surviving slavery as a woman who could even speak in public with confidence (no matter the subject or how sensibly she in fact did speak). In other words, the very factors that give her life a rich complexity and deep resonance, that make her truly worthy of being considered a hero, are simply dropped from consideration for our simplistic and childish contemporary needs. Painter tries to give us this real Sojourner Truth in her judicious and balanced biography.
Isabella Van Wagenen was born a slave in the late 1790s in Ulster County, New York. This fact alone is of incredible importance, for the woman who became Sojourner Truth grew up a slave in the North, the most famous slave from that region. Indeed, it is often forgotten that slavery existed in both the North and the South before the 19th Century and that it was not outlawed in New York until 1827. Like most of the blacks of the area, she was deeply influenced by the Dutch culture of the white inhabitants. She worked for a family named Dumont, and, according to Painter, the husband beat her on occasion and the wife sexually abused her. Her master eventually forced her to marry a significantly older man, by whom she had five children, all born into slavery. Toward the end of her term as a slave, she worked for a family named Van Wagenen, who were much kinder than the Dumonts, and she took their name.
Her first courageous act was suing the Gedneys, the family to whom her only son, Peter, had been sold by the Dumonts. The Gedneys had, in turn, sold the boy to a family in Alabama on the eve of the abolition of slavery in New York. This was a common practice for some Northern slaveholders, although it was illegal in New York state. Isabella won the case and got her son back, only to lose him at sea when the troubled youth became a sailor.
In 1843, Isabella Van Wagenen, following the voice of God, became Sojourner Truth. She got involved with white abolitionists and started traveling around the country, speaking out against slavery. It should be remembered that between 1827 and 1843, Truth had been involved in several millenarian religious movements. She was, like many poor, working-class people, drawn to the idea of prophecy, to Pentecostal fervor, to the imminent return of Christ, to the idea of the immediate end of history. She was first drawn to Methodism, then to the “Holy Club” of disaffected Methodists, then to Prophet Matthias, then to the Millerites. Joining more fringe religious movements gave her the opportunity to speak, to become a minister, something that, as a woman and an uneducated person, she could not have done in a more mainstream denomination whether black or white.
Truth spent her whole life almost exclusively in the company of whites. This might be attributed to the kind of slavery she experienced, in which there was no sizable community of slaves, as on Southern plantations. All the religious movements she joined were white; all the people with whom she lived were white, and she often worked for them as a servant. She seemed to like doing this for white people she liked, and she seemed to prefer whites to blacks. The people who shaped her public image during her life were white women. When she spoke before black audiences, such as in Washington during Reconstruction, her reception was decidedly mixed. She was a marginal person who was profoundly alienated from her own marginal group, blacks. This is not unusual, although it may be opportunistic for both parties, black as well as white. In this instance, Truth had powerful patrons who would care for her in her old age (a real concern), and the whites had an exotic article of authentic female slave experience. Because she was a poor, unlettered woman and was trying to make a life as a public speaker, a kind of minister without church or portfolio, she needed whites as supporters and guarantors. She was trying to live solely off her fame. The problem was that her fame was such a tender reed. She did nothing but try to live a life with some dignity and talk. That is why she wrote her autobiography in the late 1840s and hustled it energetically, why she sold pictures of herself in the 1860s. These facts alone, clearly creating an interesting, interpretive tension, make Truth a complex figure who demands rigorous thought and attention.
We learn from Painter’s biography that most of the hooks upon which Truth’s reputation hangs are not very sturdy. She did not plead the freedpeople’s case before Lincoln on several occasions. She met him only once, briefly, and he was not taken with her. She never said to Frederick Douglass, when he gave a speech in 1852 in Ohio despairing the fact that blacks cannot find justice in America and saying they should take arms, “Frederick, is God dead?”–a statement that supposedly stopped him dead in his tracks. (It would seem far from an unanswerable question for any black person living in the U.S. under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The answer would be clearly that, yes, God is dead for black people in the United States.) She actually asked him, “Is God gone?”–a far less dramatic question.
What Painter does as a first-rate historian is peel away the myths and legends so that we might get at a historical Sojourner Truth, a woman of extraordinary strength of character, whose heroism is all the more compelling because it is all the more real, tied to her insecurities, her need for validation, the power and compulsion of her distorted but magnificently reinvented ego. Out of the ashes of a soul-crushing slavery rose this woman. As Painter points out, “No other woman who had been through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength, poise, and self-confidence to become a pubic presence over the long term.” This is the Sojourner Truth we need as Americans. I am thankful that professor Painter was able to give her to us.
