Craft Essay "Narrative of Sojourner Truth" by Francis Titus

And it shall come to pass . . . that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy' – Joel 2:28

Sojourner Truth's shadow to support the substance

The woman who would come to be called Sojourner Truth was born around 1797 in Ulster County, New York. Truth's given slave name was Isabella. Nell Irvin Painter identified three significant time periods in Truth's life: "slavery, evangelism, and antislavery feminism" (Painter).  Her first language was Dutch. Yet, through her master’s abuse she learned to speak English around the age of ten— notwithstanding a distinctly Dutch accent.  The abuse ––– beating her mercilessly ––– at the hands of Master Nealy emotionally scarred Truth for life (Truth xviii). Her language competence was typical of those in her region, where slaves in New York and New Jersey not unusually spoke good English and Dutch.

Sojourner was renowned in her time for her speaking and singing ability. As a person whom could neither read nor write, she had people read to her, especially the Bible, and from this she developed her unique voice about how the world worked and how it could be improved. She sounds like a down-to-earth preacher in many of her speeches or personal expressions:

“Oh, God, you know much I am distressed, for I have told you again and again.  Now, God, help me get my son.  If you were in trouble, as I am, and I could help you, as you can help me, think I wouldn’t do it?  Yes God, you know I would do it. ‘Oh, God, you know I have no money, but you can make the people do for me, and you must make the people do for me.  I will never give you peace till you do, God. Oh, God, make the people hear me” (Truth51).

This language of impressions and impositions emphasizes how sentimentalism enunciates the connection through the languages ability to physically touch subjects.  Sentimentalism works to combine the subjects to body, spirit, language and emotion.

“(Mau-Mau Bett) would sit for hours, recalling and recounting every endearing, as well as harrowing circumstance that taxed memory could supply, from the histories of those dear departed ones, of whom they had been robbed, and for whom their hearts still bled” (Truth11).

Jarena Lee

 In 1836, fourteen years prior to Truth’s narrative, Jarena Lee of Cape May, New Jersey, authored the very first Spiritual Autobiography by any African American woman paving the way for others to follow in her path and narrating the lives of African American women (Truth xix). By becoming Sojourner Truth she transcended slavery, racism, sexism and sexual abuse in order to become a symbol of emancipation.  In the late 1840’s, Truth conveyed her life story to Garrisonian Abolitionist Olive Gilbert. Northern abolitionists were not only fearless but also continuous in denouncing slavery as an ungodly transgression and demanding to elevate all black people to an intellectual, moral, and political equality with whites.  The principle sin of slavery was not simply the brutalization and exploitation of one human being by another; it also arose from the evidence that enslavement restricted black people from being free moral agents:

“Who amongst us, located in pleasant homes, surrounded with every comfort, and so many kind and sympathizing friends, can picture to ourselves the dark and desolate state of poor old James (Truth’s father) –– penniless, weak, lame, and nearly blind, as he was at the moment he found his companion was removed from him, and he was left alone in the world, with no one to aid, comfort, or console him?  For she never revived again, and lived only a few hours” (Truth15).

Theodore Dwight Weld

As the constitution of the Lane Seminary Antislavery Society phrased it, God created the black man as "a moral agent, the keeper of his own happiness, the executive of his own powers, the accountable arbiter of his own choice" (Curry 217).  Theodore Dwight Weld was an active supporter of the immediate emancipation abolitionism, which was opposed to colonization, this action proposed sending blacks back to Africa, their perceived home. Notwithstanding the fact the Seminary had its own colonization society. Over a period of several months Weld convinced nearly all of the students of the advantages of his abolitionist views.   Francis Titus, to some degree addresses this view of understanding and believing those abolitionist views:

“Were she to tell all that happened to her as a slave –– all that she knows is ‘God’s Truth’ –– it would seem to others, especially the uninitiated, so unaccountable, so unreasonable, and what is usually called so unnatural, (though it may be questioned whether people do not always act unnaturally,) they would not easily believe it.  ‘Why no!’ she says, ‘they’d call me a liar! (Truth 60).

         Slavery repressed moralistic tenderness, quashed the elemental yearnings of the spirit, disabled accountability, turned ambition to anguish and murdered the soul.  The Garrisonians, contrary to other abolitionists after 1837, not only assaulted the institution of slavery but questioned the legitimacy of all human institutions, including civil government. Garrisonian non-resistant’s begrudged the charges of "no-governmentism" associated to them, and "insisted that they were striving for, and placing themselves under the only true and effective government, the government of God” (Curry). Garrisonians sustained that they disputed not government, but human posturing to govern. By becoming revolutionized, men would become free of ordinary shackles and restraints and develop non-coercive, instinctual, spontaneous relationships that not only would lead to conformity, but also would lead the millennium (Curry).

Olive Gilbert, author

This 1850 initial release of her narrative was achieved through the help of Olive Gilbert.  Truth’s release coincided with the passage of the much stricter legislation with the Fugitive Slave Laws.   Her book consequently emerges at the very precipice of metamorphosis that led to the Civil War.  In the original 128-page pamphlet, her Narrative described her life as a slave, her conversion to Christianity in 1827, and her experiences in New York. Through her narrative and her picturesque speeches, Truth presented a unique and unschooled personality that secured her place in America's awareness.  Expounding that she was excising certain information from Sojourner's story, Gilbert wrote that "our heroine" endured "a long series of trials," which were not "for the public ear by their very nature"(Truth).

Sojourner suffered regular physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mistress Sally Dumont. Because Truth dictated her life story, lived in the north rather than the south and wasn’t open about sexuality, her narrative is accused of being too sterilized and ignored as a secondary source, rather than as a primary one.  Alice Walker in describing womanist Sojourner Truth has said:

“In her testimonies… she described the physical cruelty of white women who had power over her, how they defamed her, and how they abused her, sexually and otherwise” (Truth xxx).

However, scholars have learned through careful study, Truth’s historical background confirms what is written in her Narrative. The absence of a discussion of sexuality in Truth’s Narrative warrants deeper exploration. The logical reason for the tension between Elizabeth Dumont and Sojourner is jealousy. For one thing, Sojourner was devoted to her master, who highly favored her, and apparently accepted his advances. It was only logical that Elizabeth was jealous of a lovely, spirited girl nineteen years her junior, and who was the only colored female slave in the house. Elizabeth caused Sojourner much abuse, namely because it is heavily implied that Dumont fathered Sojourner’s first two children.

When it comes to Sojourner’s children, scholars continue with the argument that Sojourner and Dumont were involved. The narrative is chronological, mentioning Sojourner’s two “slave husbands” – Robert, who was forbidden from meeting with Sojourner by his master, and an older man Thomas – in sequential order. Yet, abruptly, it mentions that Sojourner became the mother of two children without mentioning the father. It does mention an occasion when Sojourner’s first child was screaming and Dumont ordered Elizabeth to allow the girl to care for the baby. The child, a boy named James, is suspected to be Dumont’s, which would explain the heated exchange between master and mistress. Sojourner’s second child, a daughter named Diana, was so closely linked to the Dumont’s that she stayed with them far after her emancipation and even attended church with them. Sojourner had no more children until 1821, when she was united with Thomas, which implies that she and Dumont’s relationship had ended. Truth admitted her devotion to her master was such that she was happy to bear children – perhaps, even HIS children – to give him more property. The reader must consider what was at stake, what would be gained or lost in exposing any sexual trysts, and explore what bigger decisions impacted the paths Truth took in telling her story.

Francis Titus, author

Consequently, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth was uncommunicative on particular agonies of slavery, "from motives of delicacy" and fear that "relation of them might inflict undeserved pain on some now living." If Sojourner's Narrative appeared "tame" to the reader, Olive Gilbert added, it was "not for want of facts," but from "various motives suppressed." When compared to Frances Titus’s text, little is left to the imagination:

When he tied her hands together before her, he gave her the most cruel whipping she was ever tortured with.  He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds –– and the scars remain to the present day, to testify to the fact. ‘And now,’ she says, ‘when I her ‘em tell of whipping women on the bare flesh, it makes my flesh crawl, and my very hair rise on my head!  Oh! My God! (Truth19).

In 19th-century language, Gilbert was explaining that she purposely omitted sexual improprieties. Such coded expressions in Sojourner's 1850 Narrative leaves much unsaid.  Sojourner Truth, articulated her autonomy in all major ways but one. Conspicuously absent from her speeches, her Narrative, and her Book of Life is any discussion of sexuality.  It is ironic that even Titus in her text leaves just as much unsaid.  There is so some suggestion to improprieties but it is left to the reader to surmise what it may be:

“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… therefore the reader will not be surprised if our narrative appear somewhat tame at this point” (Truth21).

Because Sojourner Truth dictated her life story, recounted northern rather than southern slavery, and because she was not openly revelatory on sexuality, her Narrative is often ignored, accused of being too sanitized, and even declared a secondary rather than a primary source of information.  Moral imperatives and coded historical meaning of sexual representations should be strongly considered as influencing the writing of this narrative.

Original 1850 pamphlet

While lecturing and touring, she supported herself financially by selling copies of her Narrative.  Truth's Narrative is a strikingly spiritual work, and focuses mainly on the evolution of her faith and her religious experiences. Additionally, because it ends not with an indictment of slave-owners but a prayer of forgiveness for their mistakes, it has always remained outside the canon of ex-slave narratives. Many critics and scholars also consider the Narrative as Truth's first attempt at a deliberate representation of herself. The 1850 edition of her autobiography is rare and researchers since then have had to depend more heavily on the 1875-revised edition, published by her friend Frances Titus. According to some critics, this and later editions of the Narrative contain a somewhat revisionist account of Truth as a more worldly woman. In contrast to the first edition, where Titus contended that Truth was still burdened by the legacy of her slavery, the second edition presents a much more intellectual and refined Truth. Regardless of the differences between the two editions, it is ultimately difficult to obtain a coherent and chronological viewpoint of Truth's life—each edition of her autobiography was dictated to and written down by a different person, and each presents different renditions of Sojourner Truth.

It is, however, primarily credited to Mrs. Frances Titus for writing the Narrative of Sojourner Truth in 1878, as this is the version most available to a reading public. Titus was Truth's corresponding secretary, tour director, confidante, financial manager and editor of four versions of her biography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth.  When writing about Truth in the preface of the text Titus says:

“I (Sojourner Truth) am a self made woman… who labored forty long and weary years…one who bore the double burdens of poverty and the ban of caste, yet who, despite all these disabilities, has acquired fame, and gained hosts of friends among the noblest and best of the dominant race” (Truth 3).

Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is in this frame that Titus sets the text of the entire narrative, showcasing Truth in the best possible light, and in an articulate voice, which is the purpose of this craft essay.  Is Titus’ account accurate –– in regard to Truth’s speaking voice -–– or is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s narrative account –– of Truth’s speaking voice –– correct. Frances Titus accomplished much more than this during her lifetime. She was a leader in two important reform movements of her time. She founded a school for resettled freedmen and was a major figure in local and state suffrage movements.  When Titus began her work with Sojourner Truth it was 1856 at the Progressive Friends meeting in Harmonia, where Truth was one of several speakers.   There is no documentary evidence that Titus and Truth worked together closely during the following decade, although they probably knew each other (Ashley).  Throughout her life, Frances Titus worked for the welfare of others, helping those in need, trying to reform social injustice when she found it.

Truth published a scrape book in 1875 with editorial help and comments by Frances Titus.  This issue is a collection of newspaper clippings, articles and signatures of famous activists and leaders of her day.  This collection was included in the version I read for this assignment.

Her text, which is a story of New York Slavery as a Dutch woman  and Truth’s narrative suffering, is outside of the standard slave narrative.  The only black community in which Truth lived, we must keep in mind, was that of her fellow slaves on the various New York plantations in which she lived.  Truth’s style can be described as Sentimentalism in its pathos and its attention to loss and injustice. While the conditions of slavery in the South were, generally, much worse than those faced by northern slaves, slaves in the South, at least, had the consolation of community-- a wide scale culture and support system of their own. Slaves in the North, on the other hand, were extremely isolated: one or two slaves on this farm; a couple more perhaps on the next; then none for miles around. It was an extremely lonely life, often one of sheer isolation and hopelessness.

            The term sentimentalism is used in two senses:                   

1.     Overindulgence in emotion especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to enjoy it.

2.      An optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity and or sensibility representing in part a reaction against Calvinism, which regarded human nature as depraved. The novel of sensibility was developed from this 18th century notion manifested in the Sentimental novel.

In reference to the historical movement of Sentimentalism within the United States of America during the 18th century, Sentimentalism was a European-spawned idea that emphasized feelings and emotions, a physical appreciation of God nature and other people rather than logic and reason. The impact on the American people was that love became as important in marriage as financial considerations (Infosources.org).  In 1850 in the Roundabout Courier’s paper a J.A.D.  wrote a letter about encountering Truth at a religious meeting:

“Just as the meeting was about to close, Sojourner stood up.  Tears were coursing down her furrowed cheeks.  She said: “We has heerd a great deal about love at home in de family.  Now, children, I was a slave, and my husband and my children was sold from me” (Greyser).

          

Solomon Northrop

  Yet this letter suggests that the sentimental mode did not work to Truth’s advantage as easily or as effectively as it did for others in either the Women’s Suffrage Movement or in her being seen as an equal to male speakers and authors of slavery, primarily Fredrick Douglass, Solomon Northrop and others.  The extremity of Truth’s domestic loss became a rhetorical obstacle and finds herself dispossessed.  Her sentimentalism provokes a misty understanding in place of intellectual engagement.  Analysis of sentimentalism revolves around the political, and is given to proclivity thus conflating private and public space.

We think of Truth as a natural, uncomplicated presence in our national life.  Rather than a person is history, she works as a symbol.  We are apt to assume that the mere experience of enslavement endowed Truth with the power to voice its evils.  We may forget a shocking fact:  No other woman who had been through the ordeal of slavery managed to survive with sufficient strength, poise, and self-confidence to become a public presence over the long term.  Only Truth had the ability to go on speaking, year after year for thirty years, to make herself into a force in several American reform movements.  Truth was first and last an Itinerant preacher, stressing both itinerancy and preaching (Painter).

It is not possible to know exactly how Sojourner Truth spoke, for no one of her generation and cultural background kept accurate records.  Sojourner was the slave of the Dumont family from ten until about thirty, and many years later the daughter, Gertrude Dumont, protested that Truth’s speech was nothing like the mock-southern dialect that careless reporters used.  Rather, it was very similar to that of the unlettered white people of New York in her time.  As an older woman, Truth took pride in speaking correct English and objected to accounts of her speeches in heavy Southern dialect.  This, she felt, took unfair advantage of her race (Painter).

    

Uncle Tom's Cabin

        The metaphorical Southern slave appears in classic form in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s phenomenally popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Its types and themes had arisen in the antislavery press and slave narratives in the generation before Stowe published, supplying her with a stock of characters familiar in outline: the long-suffering, Christian slave, the outraged slave mother, the slave trader, even the kind master and the jealous mistress. 

Of the actual facts of Sojourner’s life, little was known in her own day. As time has passed, she has emerged almost entirely as myth, pure symbol. But the historian's calling, often, is to deconstruct myths like these: to take them apart; to examine them; to find out where they came from, and whose cause they served.

            By the time Sojourner Truth became an antislavery speaker, this South had become a taken-for granted setting antithetical to the free North (Painter).  For instance, we almost universally associate the institution of slavery with the antebellum South. By extension, then, we often assume that Sojourner Truth, an ex-slave, must have been a Southern figure, as well. The truth is that Truth's entire life and career (both before her emancipation from slavery and after) was spent in the northern United States-- in eastern New York state and western Massachusetts to be precise. She is no model of the Southern black slave Mammy. Rather, she is the prototype of the northern, industrial strong black woman. She is less Aunt Jemima and more Maya Angelou.

            In 1851, Sojourner left Northampton and travelled west with George Thompson, the British anti-slavery crusader, who was then touring the United States. In Akron, she attended the Ohio Women's Rights Convention. There, she delivered the "Ain't I A Woman?" speech for which she became best known. But there is some controversy as to exactly what Truth said before the convention. The earliest version, reported by Marius Robinson in the June 21, 1851 issue of the Anti-Slavery Bugle, did not even include the question "Ain't I A Woman?" that has come down to posterity as Truth's hallmark. Rather, it had her asking:

"I want to say a few words about this matter... 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" (Truth)?

            However, about twelve years later, Frances Gage, who had presided at the Akron, Ohio meeting, presented a strikingly different version in the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage.  

“To advocate the cause of the enslaved at this period was both unpopular and unsafe… meetings were frequently disturbed or broken up by the pro-slavery mob and… lives imperiled… Sojourner fearlessly maintained her ground, and by her dignified manner… would disperse the rabble and restore order” (Truth98).

Gage’s version of Truth’s speech, along with her own commentary, first appeared in an article in the New York Independent in 1863, twelve years after the convention!  Frances Titus then added excerpts from Gage’s version of Truth’s speech in the second edition of Truth’s Narrative in 1875, twelve years later again!

Gage's version was problematic for several reasons: In it, Truth speaks with the dialect and vernacular of a Southern slave.

“Well, chilern, what dar is so much racket dar must be something out o’ kilter.  I tink dat twixt de niggers of de Souf and de women at de nortf all a talkin’ ‘bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon” (Truth 100).

I have already noted, her accent was distinctly northern throughout her life.  Gage's account only added to the notoriety of Truth and her message, and transformed her into something of a symbol of her times. The poor resemblance of Southern African American dialect is nothing like how Truth spoke, as I have noted.  Gage was using popular racist conventions to depict Truth’s blackness through speech, without concern for its accuracy.  It may also have contributed significantly to the process of obscuring the actual facts of her life.

“Again and again timorous and trembling ones came to me and said with earnestness, ‘Don’t let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us.  Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced” (Truth 99)

                  Gage wrote her account in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Libyan Sibyl, which appeared a month prior to Gage’s account.  Harriet Beecher Stowe says concerning Sojourner Truth “ I never knew a person who possessed so much of that subtle, controlling personal power, called presence, as she” (Truth 179).  Gage’s account is meant to bolster her own reputation by claiming a personal intimacy with Truth.  Gage’s most significant accomplishment was to make her version more available for public consumption.  Gage is also credited for adding the refrain Ar’n’t I a Woman? to truth’s speech (Truth 266). 

                        The phrase, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, is a slogan in Gage’s sentimentalized and ventriloquized plea for unequivocal inclusion than being a concise challenge to the powers that be.  What does it mean to celebrate an recycle a phrase that was not Truth’s own words, but own that has been fabricated to praise the white woman who penned it?

As Sojourner Truth delivered her remarks in Ohio, Harriet Beecher Stowe was reaping her first benefits of fame and influence because of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  An interesting fact by Mrs. Stowe is the presentation of feminism in her writing.  Stowe has been pictured as an enemy of the Women’s Movement.

Gage’s popular and well-read version of Truth’s speech contains detailed narrative asides regarding Truth’s physical presence and her audience’s response to her words. The content of the Gage text focuses on issues of women’s rights and creates a secondary connection to a slave’s emancipation. Another version of the speech was published three weeks after the Women’s Rights Convention of 1851 (which I have pointed out, by Marcus Robinson in the Anti-slavery Bugle, an abolitionist publication edited by Robinson. The Robinson version, devoid of editorial asides and written without dialect, reads less dynamically. It makes a general call for equality and freedom with more biblical references and less humor. The Robinson and Gage versions of this 1851 speech are so different that many times my students are skeptical that they are reading the same speech.

During the Civil War, many New York City newspapers were closely aligned with the anti-war, pro-Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Republicans called them "Copperheads" after the venomous snakes that originate in the area that had become the Confederacy. Their hatred of Abraham Lincoln was probably only surpassed by their virulent racism and hatred of Black Americans. Their pages were filled with racially offensive language. Given the virulent racism of the anti-war Copperhead Democrats and the still open racism of both the pro-war Democrats and Unionist Republicans in New York City and the north, it is amazing that slavery in the United States ended at all. Emancipation was a tribute to the doggedness of abolitionists, Black and White, the need for Black manpower for the North to win the war, and major miscalculations by Southern secessionists who mistakenly exaggerated Northern opposition to slavery and support for Black rights. 

Sojourner Truth educates us because she, innovatively and passionately, found a way to tell her story and those of her unheard sisters.

            There was always something of the mystic about Sojourner Truth. But her mysticism never isolated her from the world, but rather propelled her headlong into the fray. She was a strong black woman who was her own person, who heard the voice of her God in her soul, and remained true to that calling. Through the alchemy of history, she emerged as more symbol than living being, perhaps. But that symbol needs to shine more brightly in our own day than ever before.

Like John Brown, her truth goes marching on.

Like Martin Luther King, her dream survives.

Like Susan B. Anthony, she would declare that, for men and women of goodwill and sacrificial spirit, "Failure is impossible!"

Works Cited

Ashley, Martin. Francis Titus: Sojourner's Trusted Scribe. 1997. Heritage Battle Creek, A Journal of Local History. 23 October 2014 <www.sojournertruth.org/Library/Archive/Titus-TrustedScribe.htm>.

Curry, Richard O. "Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Contradiction: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Nonviolence." The Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. VI.Nos. 3-4 (1982): 217- 226.

Greyser, Naomi. "Affective Geographies: Sojourner Truth's Narrative, Feminism, and the Ethcal bind of Sentimentalism." American Literature, Volumne 79, Number 2 2 June 2007: 275- 305.

Infosources.org. Sentimnetalism (Literature). 2009. 23 October 2014 <www.infosources.org/what_is/Sentimentalism_(literature).html>.

Painter, Neil Irvin. Sojourner truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York City, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996.

Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. QM$. New Yory City: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.