Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?

Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman? (1992) by Fredrick McKissack and Patricia C. McKissack is a juvenile biography, recommended for grades 3 to 8. In 1993, the biography won the Coretta Scott King Award. Written in plain, accessible language that does not sugarcoat the realities of slavery but deals with the subject honestly, they chronicle Sojourner Truth’s upbringing, slavery and eventual freedom, her call to preaching, and her abolitionary and feminist activism throughout her life. The book also contains numerous illustrations (portraits, photographs, paintings, documents, and posters), an appendix containing pictures and brief bios titled “More about the People Sojourner Truth Knew,” and a subject index.

The biography is divided into two parts. The first part details Sojourner Truth’s early years. The introduction quickly traces the rise of slavery in America, and the early, aborted attempts to abolish it. Following the invention of the cotton gin that made cotton one of the major crops of the South, slavery became even more institutionalized in the Southern states, even as abolitionist efforts increased in the North. By the time Sojourner Truth was born in 1797, slavery had been outlawed in all but two northern states, New York and New Jersey.

First named Isabelle, or “Belle,” she spends her early years speaking the language of her Dutch master. Although he speaks English fluently, he ensures that his slaves only spoke Dutch in order to isolate them from English speakers. When she is eleven, her master dies and all his possessions, including his slaves, are sent to the auction block. Her parents are freed because they are too old and ill to work anymore, so the family lets them go to fend for themselves and beg charity. They send Belle to the slave auction where she is bundled with a flock of sheep as a package and sold for $10. Her parents both die within a year or so, her mother of sickness and her father of starvation. Belle is devastated. At thirteen, she approaches her six-feet in height and is sold to another master, John Dumont. Although Dumont is decent, his wife is a shrew who delights in petty torments. Belle works for him for sixteen years, and when he reneges on an agreement to free her a year earlier than the lawful deadline, she gathers her youngest child who has yet to be weaned and leaves, taking refuge with sympathetic Quakers. Her children are still enslaved, but she promises to come back for them.

While she works as a free woman, she finds out that her only son, Peter, has been sold to a man who intends to take him back to England as a body servant. However, he realizes that the child—then no more than five years old—is too young for service, so Peter is sold to the man’s brother-in-law who owns a plantation in Alabama. As interstate sales of slaves are illegal, Belle sues for her son’s return and eventually wins, becoming the first black woman to successfully win a lawsuit. When she gets him back, the boy has scars and behavioral issues from being beaten and mistreated. Despite her attempts to get him an education, he falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes a thief. She sends him to sea to straighten him out, and it seems to work. However, he disappears from the ship and she never finds out what happened to him.

In the second part, Belle sheds her slave name and chooses her own: Sojourner Truth. Feeling called to ministry, she goes on the road, taking odd jobs for money and moving on. She becomes a traveling preacher—although illiterate, she quotes the Bible with unerring accuracy. Sometimes she shares her experiences as a slave and as a free woman, in time becoming famous as an inspirational speaker. In 1848, she learns about the early suffragette movement from a newspaper article covering the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. Because Sojourner Truth cannot read, her friend and early feminist Olive Gilbert often reads to her, usually biographies and newspapers, to keep her apprised of the news. Once aware of the women’s rights movements, Sojourner understands that both white women and women of color are captives with no rights, controlled by the men in their lives, and she becomes an activist for women’s rights.

At a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she delivers her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, a blistering rebuke of a morning full of ministers and men delivering speeches on women’s weakness, fragility, inferior reasoning abilities, and natural moral weakness. She points out that no one ever helped her into a carriage, that she outworked men in the fields, and she bore children. In a few succinct moments, she turned every hypocritical argument about women’s inferiority on its head.

In 1857, Sojourner Truth, now sixty years old and having worked tirelessly for abolition and women’s rights for a couple of decades already, decides to retire to live close to one of her daughters and her family. Two years later, she goes back on the road, grandson in tow, resuming her abolitionist career. In 1864, she meets Abraham Lincoln. Although she had intended to speak to him about the plight of the newly freed slaves, when she sees the tired, careworn president, she is moved to pity and keeps the conversation to small talk. She later meets with Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who listens to her speech—the one she had intended for Lincoln—but he makes no definitive comment or promise of support. Her last social project was trying to get land grants as compensation for former slaves. She argues that by giving each former slave twenty acres and a mule, the government could give the freed people a place of their own and a new start. Unfortunately, the petition never makes it; Senator Charles Sumner had promised to bring the petition before lawmakers, but he dies before he can make good on that promise. Not long after, the eighty-six-year-old woman, exhausted from her constant labor, returns to her family in Battle Creek and dies on November 26, 1883.