Click Sojourner Truth Collection/Library of Congress
words by Michael Epis photo by Liljenquist Family
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THEBIGISSUE.ORG.AU
1863
S
ojourner Truth was born around 1797 in New York state. No-one knows exactly when. For Sojourner – or Isabella, as her mother called her – was born into slavery, being the daughter of enslaved people James and Elizabeth “Betsy” Baumfree. She had about 10 siblings, but never met most of them – they’d been sold. She was, however, present the day her brother, about five, and sister, three, were taken away by their new owners, her sister locked
in a box. Her brother tried to hide under a bed. Orphaned at nine, Isabella was sold, and as she told Olive Gilbert, who transcribed her life story, the sale included several sheep. Her new owner spoke an unfamiliar language – English. Isabella spoke the Dutch of her owners. “The war had begun,” she recalled. To wit: “One Sunday morning, in particular, she was told to go to the barn; on going there, she found her master with a bundle of rods,
prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords. When he had tied her hands together before her, he gave her the cruellest whipping she was ever tortured with. He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed – the scars remain to the present day, to testify to the fact.” Isabella was sold again, then again as a teen, to John J Dumont, with whom she passed the next 18 years. Isabella noted events she preferred not to record; others have reported these were rapings by her owner, resulting in one child. Enslaved people were to be freed in New York in 1827; Isabella took her own freedom, forever after saying she did not run away, but walked. When she returned to reclaim her son, he had been sold, illegally, across state lines. She went to court and had him returned – an unprecedented suit by a Black woman against a white man. Many adventures followed, going to New York City, worshipping at a Black church, where she warmed to one fellow congregant, who soon died. Only later did Isabella learn it was her sister, the one in the box. Isabella fell in with religious cranks, one of whom was murdered, over which she was tried – and acquitted. Her son went to sea, never to return. After a vision, she quit New York to wander and lecture – renaming herself Sojourner Truth. Wander she did, for 40 years, meeting two presidents (Lincoln and Grant) while spreading her ideas – of God’s love, slavery’s evil and the equality of men and women. “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?” she said in a famous speech, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Sojourner died in Michigan in 1883. Her story lives on. Gloria Steinem considered calling her Ms. magazine Sojourner – and would have, except it sounded like a travel magazine.
