A History of American Literature

Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 161

It also vividly expressed Truth’s commitment to the related causes of black and

female liberation, black and female pride, that she saw as crucial determinants of her

identity and that her admirers, similarly, saw embodied in her. “Look at me! Look at

my arm!” Gage remembered Truth as saying. “I have ploughed and planted, and

gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’n’t I a woman?” “I could

work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it,” she went on, “and

bear de lash as well! And a’n’t I a woman?” The authenticity of Gage’s account has

been questioned. Some have suggested that the version printed in the Anti-Slavery

Bugle, which is simpler and less of a speech in dialect, is closer to what Truth actually

said. But the question, and suggestion, may well be misconceived, since it is the

essence of the oral tradition – with which Sojourner Truth clearly aligned herself –

that there can be no such thing as a single, authentic version. What matter are the

fundamental character, style, and message of Sojourner Truth as these elements

thread their way through the portraits and speeches associated with her. And what is

consistent here is the impression of an oracular, prophetic, witty, and passionate

woman, who actively resists the constraints imposed on her because of her race and

gender – and who uses a powerful rhetoric, laced with biblical allusion and autobio-

graphical references, to assert her rights as an African-American and a female.

Douglass enshrined his account of how “a slave was made a man” in a form that was

personal, carefully articulated, and (in the sense of being written down by him)

final. Truth asked the question, “a’n’t I a woman?” in a forum that was communal

and in a form that was spontaneous, unpremeditated, and (to the extent that it was

open to the recollections and revisions of others) fluid. Both are equally memorable;

and they share a basic impetus, a commitment to human dignity and natural equal-

ity, along with their differences. And both have a crucial, in fact pivotal, place in the

traditions of African-American and American literature.

African-American writing

By contrast to Sojourner Truth, who never wrote down a single one of the speeches

for which she is remembered, Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) was one of the

most prolific, as well as popular, African-American writers of the nineteenth century.

Over the course of her life, she produced four novels, several collections of poetry,

and numerous stories, essays, and letters; she also found time to lecture widely on a

whole range of reform issues, especially temperance, slavery and racism, and the

rights of women. Harper was born in a slaveholding state, Maryland, but to free

parents. By the age of 3, she was orphaned; by the age of 16, she had reportedly pub-

lished her first, small volume of poetry, Forest Leaves, no copy of which is known to

have survived; by the age of 24, she had left the South to settle in a free state, choos-

ing Ohio and then Pennsylvania. The publication of her poem “Eliza Harris” in 1853

brought her to national attention. One of her many responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, it described a slave woman escaping across a river covered

with ice, carrying “the child of her love” to “Liberty’s plains.” And it reflected her

growing involvement with the antislavery movement. That involvement became

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