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View allNarrative of Sojourner Truth
Truth
1850
Slavery in New York, testified to by the woman who survived it.
Narrative of Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth · 1850
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?
31 chapters · 35,001 words · ~2.7 hr read
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.