legally free. After hearing “voices” that proclaimed
she would become an “instrument of God,” she
changed her name to Sojourner Truth. Proclaiming
her mission to “sojourn” the land, speaking God’s
“truth,” she began a life as a traveling preacher.
From this turning point to her death in November
1883, Truth traveled the country. Before the Civil
War she became an abolitionist. During the war
she recruited Union forces and taught, counseled,
and helped resettle freed slaves. Following the war
she promoted equal rights and full suffrage. Dur-
ing her travels, Truth met with Presidents Lincoln
and Grant, was brutally beaten and attacked on
several occasions, and succeeded in filing an 1865
lawsuit that resulted in the desegregation of Wash-
ington, D.C.’s streetcars.
Truth related many of the details of her early
life in slavery to Olive Gilbert, who transcribed
them in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bonds-
woman of Olden Time, which Truth first published
in Boston in 1950. The narrative begins when
young Isabella is separated from her parents and
ends with Dumont’s confession that slavery was
“the greatest curse the earth had ever felt.” Truth’s
Narrative offers a unique view of slavery outside
the southern context and of African Americans’
efforts to maintain family bonds despite slavery’s
destructive effects. It is a spiritual autobiography,
which, like OLAUDAH EQUIANO’s Interesting Nar-
rative of the Life, records Truth’s conversion to
Christianity and spiritual visions. In it she also
combines elements of Dutch Pentecostal and Af-
rican festival traditions.
Missing from Truth’s Narrative, however, are
the accounts of sexual abuse and the focus on liter-
acy found in narratives of HARRIET JACOBS or FRED-
ERICK DOUGLASS. Instead, as a traveling preacher,
Truth stressed spiritual literacy, often saying, “You
read books, I talk to God.” Although she does
not provide explicit references to sexuality in her
Narrative, Truth does offer clear insights into the
dangers of slave life for women between each line.
Truth also speaks freely and vehemently about Af-
rican-American womanhood.
The Narrative of Sojourner Truth went through
seven editions. In the 1870s Frances Titus, Truth’s
neighbor and manager, added Truth’s “Book
of Life,” her scrapbook that includes letters and
newspaper clippings. After her death in 1883,
Titus added obituaries and eulogies. The most re-
printed version (1878) includes Harriet Beecher
Stowes’s 1863 essay, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan
Sibyl” and Dana Gage’s version of Truth’s speech,
“Ar’n’t I a Woman?,” which Truth gave, extempo-
raneously, in Akron, Ohio, at the Women’s Rights
Convention in 1851. In this now-classic speech,
Truth proclaims that women’s rights should be
equal to those enjoyed by men; she contends, “I
have heard the bible and learned that Eve caused
man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do
give her a chance to set it right side up again.”
Gage, the chair of the meeting, wrote the most
widely read version of Truth’s speech in 1863,
adding the famous “ar’n’t I a woman?” refrain.
Several other versions of the speech are available,
including one recorded in Anti-Slavery Bugle dur-
ing the 1851 meeting.
Sojourner Truth is one of the foundational
figures of African-American feminist, WOMANIST,
and Africana womanist activism. She represents
the power of the oral tradition and spirituality that
continues to permeate African-American writing
and that provided power to both the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT of the 1960s and the BLACK ARTS MOVE-
MENT of the 1970s.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mabee, Carleton, and Susan Mabee Newhouse. So-
journer Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York:
New York University Press, 1995.
Olive, Gilbert. Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bonds-
woman of Olden Time, with a History of Her La-
bors and Correspondence Drawn from Her “Book of
Life.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Samra, Matthew K. “Shadow and Substance: The Two
Narratives of Sojourner Truth.” Midwest Quar-
terly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 38, no.
2 (Winter 1997): 158–171.
Washington, Margaret, ed. Narrative of the Life of So-
journer Truth. New York: Vintage, 1993.Derrick R. Spires510 Truth, Sojourner