Dead Christians Society

Sojourner Truth:  Freedom Fighter

Copyright 2006 by Jane E. Spriggs

Introduction

            Sojourner Truth deserves the reputation of being “one of the two most famous African-American women of the nineteenth century”.[1]  She preached the gospel of Jesus Christ without Biblical training, was a powerful voice for abolition as an ex-slave, fought for the rights of women, and saw beyond emancipation to the educational, health, and long-term economic needs of black people.  Her name was well chosen, for she did indeed speak truth at a dark time in American history.

Her Context

1. Slavery

Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabella Van Wagenen in about 1797, in the village of Hurley, New York.  Though slavery was different in the 1700’s than the Southern United States (each family in the North owned less slaves; females had more domestic responsibilities than the agricultural focus of the South) – slavery was a large part of Northern life and economy in the late 1700’s.[2]  Isabella’s slave context was brutal and defined her life in many ways; in later years, she often told of the “most cruel whipping she was ever tortured with” [3] by her master when she was only nine, which permanently scarred her back. 

Slavery devastated generations of families in America – families in the North, as well as the South, were split apart as children were sold to other owners (Isabella often heard her parents tell the sad story of her siblings being taken away and sold when they were 3 and 5 years old), slavery prematurely ended the life of many, including Isabella’s father, Bomefree and mother Elizabeth (though their living conditions were inhumane, they outlived many other American slaves; one estimate of slave life expectancy in 1850 was 29 years for a black male, and thirty-four years for a black female)[4].  Slave-owners controlled marriages – Isabella was prevented from marrying her boyfriend, who was beaten for trying to see her – she was “shocked at the murderous treatment of poor Robert, whom she truly loved, and whose only crime, in the eye of his persecutors, was his affection for her”.[5]  Slavery was particularly cruel to women – in the nineteenth century, when white American women were kept in homes and protected, only slave women were “sexually exploited with impunity, stripped and whipped with a lash, and worked like oxen”.[6]

2. Illiteracy?

            Slaves had no rights, no possessions, and usually had no chance to be educated.  Isabella, who renamed herself Sojourner Truth when she was free, was a “woman of remarkable intelligence despite her illiteracy”[7].  Truth chose to remain ‘illiterate’ throughout her life – she once reportedly said, “You know, children, I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations.”[8] 

But is illiteracy the right designation to give Sojourner Truth?  Historian Karma Lochrie uses fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe, the first English autobiographer, (who also relied on scribes and intermediaries to put her words into writing), to argue for a category between literacy and illiteracy, “a quasi-literacy defined by its access to the written word.”[9]  This seems to fit Truth, as well as many others of her time, for whom “reading was more often linked with hearing or listening than it was with seeing”[10].  Truth loved to hear the Bible and newspapers read to her - when she was examining the Scriptures, she wanted them read ‘without comment’, and, as a result, she asked children, rather than adults, to read to her.  Children, Truth said, “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”.[11]

3. Christian (and other) traditions

            Reading books by and about Truth are like a foray into American religious life of the 19 and 20^th centuries.  Perhaps because of a lack of formal education and Christian community, or because of her spiritual curiosity, Truth had associations with a wide variety of Christian and quasi-Christian traditions of her time.  For example, she became a Methodist perfectionist in the 1820’s (and, for many years, adopted characteristics of the holiness movement such as plain dressing and listening to “the Spirit”)[12], and also became involved with a small, unorthodox group led by the self-proclaimed prophet named Matthias in the 1930’s.  Truth sums up her time with the fanatical group by saying  “while Isabella was a member of the household at Sing Sing, doing much laborious service in the spirit of religious disinterestedness, and gradually getting her vision purged and her mind cured of its illusions, she happily escaped the contamination that surrounded her”.[13] 

After she left the group, Truth moved to Connecticut and preached at camp meetings of Millerites in the 1840’s (Millerites believed in the popular ‘Second Advent’ doctrines of the time – Jesus was coming back soon; people had better be ready!), at one meeting she calmed a riotous crowd by singing and preaching with “truth and wisdom beyond herself”.[14]  Also in the 1940’s, Truth was involved with a utopian community, the Northampton project, in Massachusetts – which opened the door for her to know several reformers of antislavery feminism.[15] 

In the 1850’s, as Truth was on the road as an itinerant preacher, one of her biographers maintains she “embraced a new religion on the American landscape:  spiritualism”.[16]  While it is clear Truth participated in at least one séance at Progressive Friends meetings, as spiritualism “turned its followers more toward the spirits of the dead than toward Jesus the saviour”[17], I struggle with how fully Truth embraced a movement condemned by God.  At any rate, I take comfort in the report of Truth’s last words being, “Be a follower of the Lord Jesus”,[18]– and I believe she was, to the end of her life.

Her Life

            Sojourner Truth lived a remarkable life; one hallmark of her story was her ability to listen to the voice of God.  As a young slave named Isabella, her mother Elizabeth (also called Mau-mau) taught her, in the Low Dutch that was their culture, that “there is a God, who hears and sees you.”[19]  Even in her excruciating experiences of slavery, Truth “did not forget the instruction of her mother to go to God in all her trials and every affliction”[20]; though she did not know at that time that God could hear her thoughts, so she prayed audibly. 

            Isabella was a slave from the age of nine until about 30; during that time she married Thomas, another slave, and bore five children.  In 1826, Isabella heard the voice of her God telling her to leave her slave-owners and become a free woman; she left just before dawn with her infant daughter, Sophia, and spent her first days with a Quaker family, the Van Wagenners, who secured her freedom by paying her owner.   I can’t imagine how difficult it was for Isabella to leave her other children behind – but she did it because “she had no means of sustaining them if she had them with her, and was content to leave them behind.”[21] 

After about a year, Isabella was wrestling with returning to John Dumont, her former slave owner, when suddenly God revealed Himself to her, and made her conscious of her own sinfulness.  She also wished for someone to speak to God for her, and, “At length a friend appeared to stand between herself and an insulted Deity; and she felt as sensibly refreshed as when, on a hot day, an umbrella had been interposed between her scorching head and a burning sun.”[22]  As Isabella meditated on this vision, holy and radiant with love, wondering who it was, “an answer came to her, saying distinctly, “It is Jesus.”[23]  From that time on, Isabella knew Jesus loved her, though she had never known it before.  Isabella describes herself as happy with her dear new Friend; it was later she understood Jesus is God, too; after that her conceptions of Jesus became more “elevated and spiritual”[24] – as she saw Jesus as her friend, “standing between me and God, through whom, love flowed as from a fountain.”[25]  I believe this vision informed the remainder of her life and ministry.  Was Isabella born again at this time?  Baptized in the Holy Spirit?  Entirely sanctified?  Whatever it was, Isabella experienced the assurance of salvation “that gave her the self-confidence to oppose the rich and powerful of this world.”[26]

Isabella starting fighting for truth before she even changed her name.  In 1927, Isabella prayed and fought to recover her son, who had been illegally sold – after a year, she won the court case and legal custody of her son.  (Later she would win several more court cases – by proving her innocence in a charge stemming from the prophet Matthias days, and by having an abusive streetcar driver arrested and convicted of assault and battery.)[27]

On June 1^st, 1843, Isabella knew she needed to leave sinful New York City; she informed the woman whose home she stayed in that her name was “no longer Isabella, but SOJOURNER, and she was going east”,[28] because God’s Spirit was calling her -on the day of Pentecost!  Harriet Beecher Stowe tells the story of Truth’s naming this way:  “…the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an’ down the land, showin’ the people their sins, an’ bein’ a sign unto them.  Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, ‘cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people”.[29]

From this time on, Sojourner Truth traveled throughout the land, singing and preaching salvation in the name of Jesus Christ – which caused controversy because she was not only female, but also black and uneducated![30]  At nearly 6’ tall, with “strong and truthful tones”[31], Truth captured audience’s attention and hearts.  She was a masterful entertainer, who used wit, sarcasm, and Biblical imagery to soften her message and produce surprisingly positive responses from her audiences.  (A copy of Truth’s speech to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in 1867 quotes her as saying, “I am sometimes told that “Women ain’t fit to vote.  Why, don’t you know that a woman had seven devils in her:  and do you suppose a woman is fit to rule the nation?  Seven devils ain’t no account; a man had a legion in him.”  (The audience responded with great laughter!)  Truth tells where the devils asked to go – into hogs, because they were the selfishest beast, “and man is so selfish that he has got women’s rights and his own too, and yet he won’t give women their rights.”[32]

As time went on, and she grew in confidence and conviction, Sojourner Truth became known as a tireless spokesperson for abolition; she was also a pioneering feminist, as the speech above illustrates.  Truth spoke at many other conventions across the country,  selling her narrative (and, in later years, her photographs) to dispel the many myths written about her,[33] and support herself financially. 

Truth intuitively recognized the connections “between the subordination of women and the enslavement of Africans”[34] – for her, the two issues were combined “in her one body”.[35]  These two issues had held together well during the Civil War, but after Emancipation, “Reconstruction tore abolitionists apart.  Southern politics demanded black male suffrage, and black, male suffrage galvanized feminists.”[36]  Truth tried to make a bridge between political claims of race and of sex – as she stood for both blacks and women.[37] 

Truth’s last mission was to ask the government to give western land for resettling refugee freedpeople still unemployed in Washington, D.C., using the Indian reservation as a model – though she again tirelessly worked to move the proposal through Congress, it did not muster much support.  Truth finally retired to her home in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1880; she was cared for in her final years by her daughters Diana, Elizabeth, and Sophia; her son, Peter disappeared at sea in the 1840’s; nothing is known about her fifth child.[38]  Near the end of her life, Truth visited with a reporter from Grand Rapids– she exhorted the reporter to continue her resettlement dream, and sang one of her favorite songs:

It was early in the morning,

It was early in the morning,

Just at the break of day,

When He arose, when He rose, when He rose,

And went to Heaven on a cloud.

            Sojourner Truth died before dawn on November 26, 1883; she was about eighty-six years old.

Her Relevance

            The life and prophetic words of Sojourner Truth are still relevant today.  Racism, sexism, and classism still exist in America, and throughout the world.  If a prophet is “one who continues to keep imagination regarding possible alternative futures alive in those who are oppressed”,[39] Truth was a powerful prophet in her lifetime – even though she was a marginalized person.  By her faithfulness to God’s call on her life, she affected individuals and institutions for truth and liberty (when she presented her land grant program to the U.S. Congress, they gave her a standing ovation because of her relentless efforts for freedom).[40]  I feel a similar call on my life today, as I care about racial, gender, and economic reconciliation in the Body of Christ.

            Truth inspires me to:

·        Utilize all available technologies available to me in reaching audiences (as she utilized the spoken and written word and photography).

·        Speak the truth from God’s Word – finding my own style of saying difficult things in creative and humorous ways.

·        Guard myself against experimenting in religious fanaticism; “testing the spirits” to assure I am listening only to the Lord Jesus Christ.

·        Develop relationship with influential people in each sphere I operate in, like Truth did – and encouraging them to stand for truth as well.

·        Speak against all forms of oppression, and raise my voice in behalf of equality.

·        Love my enemies, even as God gave Truth love for her oppressors – “She used to say she wished God would kill all the white people and not leave one for seed.  Now she found she could even love them.”[41]