Sojourner Truth
Born: c. 1797
Died: November 26, 1883
One day when she was nearly 70 years old, the elderly woman announced to her friends in Battle Creek, Michigan that she was setting off for Washington, D.C. “What for?” they asked. “I’m going down there to advise the president,” she said.
And that’s how Abraham Lincoln met Sojourner Truth, former slave and feisty advocate of black emancipation and women’s right. When Sojourner left the White House, she took with her Lincoln’s signature, inscribed “To Aunty Sojourner Truth.”
Sojourner Truth was born in 1793 to a slave couple in New York state. Her name then was Isabella; she spoke Dutch, the language of her master. Isabella learned about the love and mercy of God at the knee of her mother, who taught her to call on God whenever she was in trouble. She took it to heart, as a child and an adult.
Isabella was sold away from her parents at the age of 9 for $100. Under her next several owners, she grew strong from working in the fields and unloading boat cargo. She learned to speak a rough English dialect and how to smoke pipe; she married and bore five children. And always, she talked with God. all the slaves of New York were by law to be freed on July 4, 1827; when Isabella’s owner went back on his promise to free her a year early, she had enough. She asked for help, and God came through. At three the next morning, Isabella, toting her infant daughter, walked away to freedom. She found shelter with a Quaker couple who paid off her owner when he came to get her. After a few dull months with the Quaker couple who paid off her owner when he came to get her. After a few dull months with the Quakers, her owner again came to visit and nearly charmed her to return. But on her way to the wagon, she later said, she met God. She turned around and went back inside to seek solitude, where she felt the present of Jesus filling her with love. She thought of all that she and her people had suffered at the hands of their owners, but then felt a “rush of love through my soul, an’ I cried out loud- ‘Lord, Lord, I can love even de white folks!’”
Sojourner’s public years began in 1843 when, taking the name Sojourner Truth, she set out to tell others of her experience with Jesus. She soon “became recognized across the land as the tall, thin woman dressed gray with mist-filled eyes and the love of Jesus in her heart,” writes Joyce Hollyday in Sojourners. She met many of the country’s famous abolitionists, who welcomed her support and nicknamed her “Aunty Sojourner.”
Equally outspoken on the equality of women, one of Sojourner’s finest moments came as a women’s right convention in Akron, Ohio. After listening for two days to an assortment of clergymen describing female delicacy and raining contempt on the notion of women’s rights, Sojourner rose to speak. One by one, she challenged the previous speakers. “Nobody eber helped me into carriages or ober mud puddles, or give me any best place? And ain’t I a woman?
Sojourner Truth died on November 26, 1883. A few days earlier she told a visiting friend, I'm going home like a shooting star.”
Originally published in Salt magazine, ©Claretian Publications.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
