Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Truth
1850
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth · 1850
Slavery in New York, testified to by the woman who survived it.
31 chapters · 35,001 words · ~2.7 hr read
Before Sojourner Truth became the movement's most electric voice, she was Isabella — born enslaved in Dutch-speaking Ulster County, New York, sold at nine alongside a lot of sheep, and among the first Black women in the state to sue a white man for her child and win. This 1850 narrative, dictated to Olive Gilbert because Truth could not read or write, preserves the story America tends to forget: slavery was a Northern institution too. And its form poses a question worth reading for — when a white amanuensis writes a Black woman's life in the third person, whose voice reaches the page, and where does Truth's testimony break through?
Contents
Childhood in Bondage
Birth on an Ulster County estate, the cellar the slaves slept in, and the slow, unwitnessed deaths of her parents, Bomefree and Mau-mau Bett.
The Dumont Years
Sold at nine, whipped for not knowing English, married by no law, worked for praise — the long middle of Isabella's enslavement.
Freedom and the Fight for Peter
The dawn walk to the Van Wageners, the illegal sale of her five-year-old son, and the courtroom where she got him back.
God, the City, and the Kingdom
Her religious visions, her son's letters from a whaling ship, a sister recognized too late, and the Matthias commune that took her savings.
Sojourner
A new name, a walking mission east, camp-meetings calmed and mobs sung down, and a last interview with the master who renounced slavery.
Certificates of Character
The testimonial letters — Van Wagenen, Dumont, Northampton neighbors, and William Lloyd Garrison — that vouched for her to readers of 1850.