Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Glossary

C

Certificates of Character: The closing chapter's collection of written testimonials — from Isaac Van Wagenen, John Dumont, members of the Northampton Association, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison — each affirming Sojourner Truth's honesty, industry, and good character across decades of both enslaved and free life. Appended to a narrative told by a woman who could neither read nor write, the certificates function as external verification aimed at a skeptical white readership, a common feature of nineteenth-century narratives by formerly enslaved authors.; Related: The Amanuensis Frame (Olive Gilbert)
Colonel Ardinburgh and the Ardinburgh Family: The Hurley, New York family of Dutch descent who enslaved Isabella (later Sojourner Truth) from birth, first under Colonel Ardinburgh and, after his death, under his son Charles, whom the narrative describes as comparatively kind. Isabella's parents, James and Betsey, were later divided among other members of the extended Ardinburgh family, illustrating how a single enslaving family's death or debts could scatter an enslaved household across multiple heirs with no say from the people being redistributed.; Related: Mau-mau Bett and Bomefree, The Auction

D

Death of Mrs. Eliza Fowler: The killing of Elizabeth Gedney Fowler by her husband, the plantation owner to whom Peter had been sold, an event Isabella learns of by chance while working in the home of a relative of the Gedney family. Isabella connects the murder to Fowler's earlier cruelty toward her son — whose scarred body she had personally examined after his return — and to her own anguished prayer that God 'render unto them double,' treating the death as an answer to a prayer she had not quite meant so literally.; Related: The Illegal Sale of Peter, The Kingston Grand Jury Suit

E

Elijah Pierson: A wealthy New York merchant turned self-declared prophet, who believed God had called him 'Elijah the Tishbite' in a Wall Street omnibus and who employed Isabella as his housekeeper before allying himself with Robert Matthews. Pierson's sudden and suspicious death at the group's Sing Sing farm led to Matthias's arrest and trial for murder — an ordeal in which Isabella herself was accused by another member of the group before Matthias was acquitted.; Related: Robert Matthews, "Matthias", The Matthias Kingdom

H

Her Escape and the Van Wagenens: Isabella's departure from Dumont's farm before dawn in late 1826, walking away in daylight rather than fleeing at night, with her infant daughter and a bundle of belongings. She found refuge with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener, who — when Dumont came to reclaim her — paid him for the balance of her time rather than let her be taken by force, and instructed her to call them only by their given names, telling her 'there is but one master.' She took their surname afterward, as was customary for a freed person's last enslaver.; Related: The Broken Promise

I

Isabella Becomes Sojourner: Isabella's decision, on the morning of June 1, 1843, to leave New York City, take a new name, and travel east as an itinerant preacher, telling her landlady only that 'the Spirit calls me there, and I must go.' She chose Sojourner because she understood her mission as constant travel and testimony, and later added Truth; the name change marks the narrative's transition from an account of enslavement and its aftermath to an account of religious itinerancy and public speech.
Isabella's Marriage: Isabella's marriage to Thomas, a fellow enslaved man who had already had two wives taken from him by sale, performed — as the narrative notes with pointed irony — by another enslaved person, since no true minister would perform a ceremony he knew carried no legal standing and could be dissolved at any moment by an enslaver's decision. The narrative uses the marriage to indict slaveholding religion broadly, asking what faith could sanction, even by silence, a system that made lifelong vows unenforceable by design.

J

John J. Dumont: The New Paltz farmer who purchased Isabella in 1810 for seventy pounds and held her until her escape in 1826, the longest of her enslavers. The narrative describes him as comparatively humane by the standards of slavery — intervening once to stop two other enslavers from beating a man on his property — but still the one who broke his promise to free her a year early and later sold her son Peter out of state in violation of New York law; visited late in life by Sojourner as a free woman, he told her he had come to see slavery as 'the wickedest thing in the world.'; Related: The Broken Promise, The Illegal Sale of Peter
John Nealy and the Language Barrier: Isabella's second enslaver, whose household spoke only English while Isabella, raised in a Dutch-speaking household, spoke only Low Dutch. The narrative presents the resulting miscommunication — Isabella bringing the wrong tool when sent for one she could not name — as a direct cause of the beatings she suffered there, including a whipping severe enough to leave permanent scars, an illustration of how enslaved children were punished for failures created by their enslavers' own indifference.

M

Mau-mau Bett and Bomefree: Isabella's parents, Betsey ('Mau-mau Bett') and James ('Bomefree,' Low Dutch for 'tree,' for his height), who bore an estimated ten to twelve children, most of whom were sold away before Isabella could remember them. The narrative singles out their nightly practice of teaching their children to pray to a God who could see and help them even when their parents could not — instruction Isabella credits with shaping her lifelong habit of speaking to God directly and informally.; Related: Colonel Ardinburgh and the Ardinburgh Family, The Death of Bomefree

R

Robert: A man enslaved on a neighboring farm with whom Isabella formed an attachment, forbidden by his enslaver, Catlin, who wanted no child of Robert's increasing another man's property. When Robert visited Isabella regardless, the Catlins beat him savagely on Dumont's property; Dumont intervened only to stop them from tying Robert's hands with rope, not to stop the beating itself. Robert never visited Isabella again and was made to marry a woman his enslaver chose for him instead.; Related: John J. Dumont
Robert Matthews, "Matthias": A self-declared prophet, born Robert Matthews, who claimed to embody the spirit of God the Father and led the religious commune later known as the Matthias Kingdom. Isabella first met him at Elijah Pierson's house in 1832 and, struck by an early impression of having seen Jesus, became one of his followers; the narrative traces his prior business failures, itinerant street preaching, and escalating claims of divine authority in detail, presenting him as a case study in religious delusion rather than villainy alone.; Related: The Matthias Kingdom, Elijah Pierson

T

The Amanuensis Frame (Olive Gilbert): The narrative's authorial structure: Sojourner Truth, unable to read or write, dictated her life story to Olive Gilbert, a white abolitionist who transcribed and shaped it into the third-person biography published in 1850. The frame surfaces throughout the text in Gilbert's interjections as 'the writer of this' and in passages Truth chose to withhold, making the book simultaneously a firsthand testimony and an editorially mediated one — a tension common to narratives by formerly enslaved people produced through a white amanuensis.; Related: Certificates of Character
The Auction: The sale of Charles Ardinburgh's estate — 'slaves, horses, and other cattle' auctioned together — at which nine-year-old Isabella was sold for $100 to John Nealy, separately from her parents. Mau-mau Bett was freed rather than sold only because none of the heirs wanted the burden of supporting the aging, disabled Bomefree, illustrating how even an enslaved family's rare moment of relief was calculated purely as a cost-saving measure for the people who owned them.; Related: Colonel Ardinburgh and the Ardinburgh Family, Mau-mau Bett and Bomefree
The Broken Promise: Dumont's pledge to grant Isabella her 'free papers' a year ahead of New York's scheduled statewide emancipation if she worked faithfully, and his refusal to honor it on July 4, 1827, citing the reduced labor she had given him while recovering from a hand injury. The episode becomes Isabella's occasion for a broader observation on slaveholders' promises generally — offered freely, then forgotten or denied at the moment of fulfillment — and for her decision to take her freedom into her own hands rather than wait any longer.; Related: John J. Dumont, Her Escape and the Van Wagenens
The Death of Bomefree: The final years of Isabella's father, freed alongside her mother but left to support himself in a remote cabin after both his caretakers — an elderly couple who had briefly taken him in — died before him. Found frozen and neglected on his pallet, Bomefree's death prompted his former enslaver's grandson to arrange what the narrative bitterly calls a 'good funeral': black paint for the coffin and a jug of liquor, a token gesture the text presents as emblematic of how a lifetime of unpaid labor was repaid.; Related: Mau-mau Bett and Bomefree
The Illegal Sale of Peter: Dumont's sale of Isabella's five-year-old son Peter to a Dr. Gedney, who passed him to his brother Solomon Gedney, who in turn sold him to a plantation owner in Alabama — a transaction that violated New York law explicitly prohibiting the sale of enslaved people out of state. When Isabella learned of it, she set out on foot to recover him, beginning the legal fight documented in the following chapter.; Related: The Kingston Grand Jury Suit
The Kingston Grand Jury Suit: Isabella's successful lawsuit, brought with the help of Quaker allies and lawyer Esquire Demain, to recover her son Peter from Solomon Gedney after his illegal sale South. The case — in which an illiterate formerly enslaved woman swore a legal oath, forced Gedney to retrieve the boy from Alabama, and ultimately saw a judge order Peter delivered to her custody — is presented in the narrative as an extraordinary reversal of the era's ordinary refusal of legal standing to Black litigants, and is often cited as one of the first instances of a Black woman successfully suing a white man in a United States court.; Related: The Illegal Sale of Peter
The Matthias Kingdom: The communal religious sect Isabella joined for roughly three years, first in Manhattan and later on a farm at Sing Sing, organized around Robert Matthews's claim to be God the Father and Elijah Pierson's claim to be his prophetic forerunner. The Kingdom held property in common — absorbing Isabella's savings, which she never recovered — and collapsed amid Pierson's death, Matthias's murder trial, and revelations of sexual relationships among its leaders; Isabella emerged from it without her money but, the narrative insists, with her judgment and reputation intact.; Related: Robert Matthews, "Matthias", Elijah Pierson
The Windsor Locks Camp-Meeting Mob: A confrontation at a Second Advent camp-meeting in Northampton, Massachusetts, where a hundred or more young men threatened to burn the tents and disrupt the services. Sojourner, initially hiding in fear as the only Black person present, resolved to confront the crowd alone, calmed them by singing and preaching from a wagon, and secured a collective promise from the mob to disperse peacefully after one final hymn — which, to the astonishment of onlookers, they kept. The episode is presented as an early, vivid demonstration of the public speaking and crowd command that would define her later career.