Moved By the Spirit
By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Sunday, September 15, 1996
In April 1863, an article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl," catapulted a previously "little-noted evangelist and reformer" into national prominence. A decade earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famous author of the article, had actually met the woman about whom she now wrote, but, during the tense months following the Emancipation Proclamation, she had less interest in Sojourner Truth, the woman, than in her potential power as a symbol of the persisting travail and injustice of slavery. From Stowe's pages, Truth emerges as "quaint and innocent exotic," a tall, spare African-born woman who spoke in dialect, disdained the women's rights movement, and found her main delight in talking of glory and singing hymns. Intent upon constructing a figurative statue of shackled, suffering virtue, Stowe even depicts Truth, who lived until 1883, as dead. Above all, Stowe claims Truth for a tradition of Christian resignation that Truth's life belied. Thus, she has Truth respond to Frederick Douglass's despairing insistence that blacks must secure their freedom by force of arms, in words that would become famous: "Frederick, is God dead?" Less than a month later, Frances Dana Gage, pioneer of the young movement for women's rights, published an alternative, symbolic vision of Truth in the New York Independent, endowing Truth with the words for which she is best known today, "ar'n't I a woman?"
However appealing and politically powerful, these symbols bear scant resemblance to Isabella Van Wagenen who, on June 1, 1843, some 46 years after her birth, took the name Sojourner Truth. In "Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol," Nell Irvin Painter interweaves the history of the real life with the history of the symbol. Until recently, the life of Van Wagenen has, for understandable reasons, remained obscure. Like many African-American slaves, she never knew the precise date of her own birth, remained illiterate throughout her long life, was obliged to spend much of her life in onerous domestic and agricultural labor, did not enjoy the benefits of a long, stable marriage, and had difficulty in keeping track of her children, whose destinies she could not easily shape.
But if Van Wagenen's life in many ways resembled the lives of other slaves, in many other ways it did not. Born into slavery in Ulster County, N.Y., she became a free woman in the late fall of 1826, about six months before the final abolition of slavery in New York State on July 4, 1827. Painter insists that Truth's real journey to freedom was more complex then the mere change in her legal condition and was especially informed by her progress toward Christian sanctification. Painter traces Truth's move from her initial worship of "a God of her own making" to Methodism and on to Pentecostalism and Spiritualism. Indeed, Truth's religious journey seems to have led her through most of the thickets of mid-19th-century American religious experimentation, including the short-lived, radical sect of the Kingdom of Matthias. Eventually, as Painter shows, Truth's religious twists and turns led her into the movements for abolition and women's rights with which her name is now most closely associated.
In these sections, as throughout all of those on Isabella's life, Painter manifests an admirable realism and restraint. Never slighting Isabella-now-Sojourner Truth's capacity for harshness, she carefully fills in the picture of an extraordinarily tough and canny survivor. However we ultimately assess Painter's Truth, we never feel that we are being urged to revere a symbol or a plaster-of-Paris saint. Since the illiterate Truth left no personal records, Painter relies heavily upon the accounts of her life which she dictated over many years to Olive Gilbert and Frances Titus, filling in the gaps with surviving data on Truth's appearances and the movements with which she was associated. Painter's objectivity offers us an admirably unvarnished portrait but one disconcertingly devoid of feeling. Here and there, we catch glimpses of Painter's heartfelt admiration for Truth. Here and there, we may even sense that we are being offered facts that disguise as much as they reveal. For example, readers of Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz's "The Kingdom of Matthias" may well conclude that Painter has obscured Truth's probable role in the murder of one of the sect's members. And if, in this instance, Truth's less admirable traits have been disguised, what of others?
Painter understands that slavery and post-emancipation hardships might inflict wounds that led those who experienced them occasionally to behave with something less than Christian charity, and she occasionally turns to psychology for explanations. She thus argues that Truth's early experience as a slave stamped her with some of the features of a child who has been battered or a "slave mentality": "a lack of self-confidence, personal autonomy, and independent thought, a sense of one's own insignificance in comparison to the importance of others, a desire to please the powerful at any cost, and, finally, a ferocious anger that is often turned inward but can surge into frightening outbursts."
Yet we, as readers, are never invited to witness the anger in action, which strangely distances us from Truth's personality. And, as if to counter the shadow of ferocious anger, Painter evokes Truth's religious faith, arguing that the young Isabella "discovered the secret power that black women have tapped into over the generations to counter the negation they experience in the world." Sanctification, Painter claims, has offered them "a power that has made possible survival and autonomous action when all other means fail. More than anything else she did or said in her life, this ability to act with the support of a powerful supernatural force and to mine its extraordinary resources made Sojourner Truth a representative African-American woman." But here, too, we rarely sense Truth's faith in action, and we are left to wonder about the complex interaction between anger and faith that may have found expression in her role in the kingdom of Matthias.
Sojourner Truth's extraordinary career makes it difficult to see her as a typical or even representative of any group, although she does emerge as a compelling, if unique, embodiment of some of the main crosscurrents of mid-19th-century America. In this respect, Painter's Truth does stand as a Sibyl, or perhaps better, a cipher into which successive generations and groups have easily read their own preoccupations. Painter musters the facts that she and other scholars have, in recent years, amassed to counter the symbol, but her admirable accomplishment still leaves us with a collection of facts enhanced by the succession of symbolic interpretations that attempted to endow them with life. The engaging chapter on Truth in photographs further demonstrates that she was not immune to the temptation to represent herself as a symbol. But notwithstanding Painter's devoted effort, Truth the woman remains as elusive as ever.
In the end the difficulty of shaping the facts of Truth's life into a familiar pattern leads Painter herself to conclude with a sobering reflection upon the abiding power of Truth the symbol. She may never have said "ar'n't I a woman?", but a surprising number of people need her to have done so -- need those words and that symbol as a way of understanding that many American women have always been black and many black Americans have always been women and they have their own story and, above all, their discrete claims upon our attention.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches at Emory University and is the author of "Within the Plantation Household." Her most recent book is "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life."
© 1996 The Washington Post Co.
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