Sojourner Truth was a self-made, deeply spiritual advocate for equal rights who lived in dignity as a slave and a free woman. In her mid-forties, she renamed herself and began traveling the country as an evangelizing abolitionist.
Isabella Van Wagener was born into slavery in New York State in about 1797. In the unlit, unventilated cellar of their Dutch-speaking owners, “Belle” grew up listening to her parents weep as they remembered the ten older siblings who had perished in the brutal living conditions or been sold away by the slave owners. With her mother’s deep spirituality as sustenance, Belle endured her sale at the age of eleven to an abusive owner and two subsequent sales over the next two years. She learned to speak English, married another slave, and mothered five children on this farm until running away from her owner in 1826 after he reneged on a promise to free her. She took refuge in the home of the Van Wageners, a nearby Quaker family who then bought her freedom. In retribution for Belle’s departure, her former owner sold her five-year-old son into permanent slavery in Alabama. In one of the earliest U.S. cases of a black woman bringing a suit against a white man, Belle successfully fought her son’s sale in court.
Isabella Van Wagener was born into slavery in New York State in about 1797. In the unlit, unventilated cellar of their Dutch-speaking owners, “Belle” grew up listening to her parents weep as they remembered the ten older siblings who had perished in the brutal living conditions or been sold away by the slave owners. With her mother’s deep spirituality as sustenance, Belle endured her sale at the age of eleven to an abusive owner and two subsequent sales over the next two years. She learned to speak English, married another slave, and mothered five children on this farm until running away from her owner in 1826 after he reneged on a promise to free her. She took refuge in the home of the Van Wageners, a nearby Quaker family who then bought her freedom. In retribution for Belle’s departure, her former owner sold her five-year-old son into permanent slavery in Alabama. In one of the earliest U.S. cases of a black woman bringing a suit against a white man, Belle successfully fought her son’s sale in court.
New York State emancipated slaves in 1827 and Belle moved to New York City. There, she discovered that two of her older siblings were members of her church and that another sibling had recently died.
“Belle shrieked in surprise. She knew the woman as one of the elderly mothers of the church. They had prayed beside each other at the altar and sung hymns together. They never knew they were sisters. ‘Here she was,’ Belle told her biographer with tears streaming down her face. ‘We met; and was I not, at the time, struck with the peculiar feeling of her hand – the bony hardness so just like mine? And yet, I could not know she was my sister; and now I see she looked so like my mother…. What is this slavery,’ Belle asked, ‘that it can do such dreadful things?”
On June 1, 1843 Belle had a vision to “Go East” and walked out of the city onto Long Island. That day, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth to identify herself as someone who would spend her lifetime traveling as an evangelist whose “only master I have now is God and His name is Truth.” She told her personal story as testimony against slavery. “All her life Sojourner had been a victim of oppression, despised because of her race, and disregarded because of her sex. It was out of the fog of this life that she emerged at age forty-six, dedicated to the elimination of human suffering. She would speak out against slavery!” Truth dictated her biography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, in 1850. The following year, this illiterate former slave gave the speech for which she is most renowned. “Ain’t I a woman?” she challenged repeatedly, bravely asserting that sexism and racism contradicted the principles of American equality and justice.
The McKissacks’ thorough and inspiring biography is appropriate for older elementary students. The clearly written narrative is organized into manageable chapters and supported by photographs, illustrations, and other relevant graphics. In studying Sojourner Truth, students also learn about other key figures in the American abolitionist and suffrage movements. Truth worked with or met Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, William Lloyd Garrison, and Susan B. Anthony. Understanding Truth’s biography serves to broaden students’ knowledge of American slavery by highlighting Sojourner Truth’s bondage in a northern rather than a southern state, the wide scope and lengthy efforts of the abolitionist movement, and the vigorous activism of freed and runaway African Americans.
Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, and the Amistad case have been longtime interests and inspirations for me. Growing up in Connecticut near the Harriet Beecher Stowe house and museum, I was focused on the history of abolition from as early as third grade. Upon reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth in middle school, I traveled to Northampton http://www.historic-northampton.org/highlights/truth.html
to visit historical sites associated with Truth. I also charted the nearby Farmington, CT homes that had housed the Amistad Africans, and searched encyclopedias (often fruitlessly in this pre-Internet era) for information on the slave rebellions of Denmark Vesey, George Boxley, and Nat Turner. Although they took widely disparate paths, I have always been particularly moved by Truth and Vesey and their activism and selflessness in trying to free enslaved Americans. Truth’s story is accessible and appropriate for early elementary and even preschool audiences. Anne Rockwell's Only Passing Through and Catherine Clinton's When Harriett Met Sojourner were regular read-alouds in our preschool. I am not yet aware of an elementary level text about Denmark Vesey but David Robertson's 2000 biography is a comprehensive and dispassionate account of Vesey's suppressed rebellion. It might prove accessible for more advanced and mature student readers.
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