In the most recent issue of Atlantichistorian Clint Smith examined the life of a runaway slave named Josiah Henson. He asks, “Why didn’t American students hear about Henson when they heard about (Harriet) Tubman, or received her autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass?”
The answer, according to Smith, is the moral complexity of Henson, a former plantation overseer turned abolitionist. “Not all slaves were Frederick Douglass,” he writes. “Not all slaves were Harriet Tubman. And even these two individuals, as famous as they were, were not the morally pure characters we sometimes portray them to be. That is to say, they were human.
I had a similar thought while reading Nancy Koester’s book We Shall Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth, a religious biography of a woman sometimes overshadowed by Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass in the pantheon of escaped slaves who helped free others from bondage. Truth’s story does not fit the conventional mold of a runaway slave. (In fact, she claimed that she did not “run away” from her enslaver: she walked.) She also did not always agree with Tubman and Douglass on issues of moral reform. She was also not immune to some of the extreme religious views (and sects) that arose in her unique New York context.
Yet Truth was one of the most extraordinary Americans who ever lived. Its complexity is precisely why it has so much to offer us today.
Salvation and reformation
As one might expect from someone who has renowned Staying In truth (she was born Isabella Baumfree), her life has been a journey. As Koester explains: “For the rest of her life” after becoming a Christian, “Sojourner lived in her name.” The truth could not separate her work as a reformer from her faith in Jesus Christ. As a result, his commitment was to something much bigger than any one person or movement. After leaving his old life, the Lord gave him a new name, Truth, “because I had to speak the truth to the people.” And that’s what she did – to almost everyone she met. For nearly half a century, she defended the rights of black people and women. And at times, she even challenged black and women’s rights advocates.
The truth has drawn no boundary between his freedom from slavery and his freedom from sin. We understand why. Technically speaking, she never freed herself from slavery. She was redeemed. Once she was caught by her enslaver, a Dutch Reformed couple offered to pay for the rest of the work she supposedly owed the man. For the first time in his life, Truth heard someone say that God alone is the Master.
A few months later, she met her Master. On a back road in New York in 1827, Truth felt a flash of light and felt God looking directly into his soul. With a “mass of lies” exposed in her dark heart, she felt so much “wickedness” and shame that she could not utter a word. Suddenly, “a friend” protected her from the intense light, preventing her from being burned alive. “It’s Jesus,” said a voice.
A wave of love invaded her, forcing her to preach. “Lord, I can love even white people!” » she exclaimed with joy. From that point on, Truth’s abolitionism would be fueled not by hatred or self-interest but by the love with which Jesus “always loved her.” When she changed her name years later, she explained, “The Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to go through the land, showing people their sins and being a sign to them. One of the strengths of Koester’s book is how it illustrates the spiritual nature of Truth’s abolitionism, as she “viewed her experience of slavery as part of a larger story, a journey continuous spirituality”. Salvation and reformation went hand in hand.
Anyone who had ever laid eyes on Sojourner Truth would have immediately known that she was not your average 19th century woman of color. Standing just under six feet tall and blessed with a voice that rivaled that of any public speaker in America, Truth, speaking Dutch and English, was an imposing figure who loved smoking a pipe almost as much as she did. loved singing hymns, spirituals and anti-slavery songs.
Once sold at auction for $100 as a child with a herd of sheep, she became a preacher in a world dominated by men. Amazingly, Truth demonstrated such strength and versatility as a speaker and challenged so many stereotypes about women of that era that white men publicly doubted whether she was a woman. (While speaking in Indiana in 1858, a crowd of hecklers demanded that she bare her breasts to prove her femininity.) To a hissing pro-slavery crowd, she once charged, “It seems he It takes my black face to bring out your black hearts, so it’s good I came. You are afraid of my black face, because it is a mirror in which you see yourself.
But Truth wanted more than racial or gender equality. According to one journalist, during her speech at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850, she prayed, “God, make me a double woman, that I may stand to the end.” » The woman known for her theological satire and sharp wit believed that the Lord It was his strength, not his voice. As Koester notes, she was indeed a “double woman,” advocating both women’s rights and abolition.
Yet Truth was a “double woman” in another respect. She spoke to both sides of the racial and gender divide, and his unyielding beliefs could hurt friend and foe alike. The woman known for ridiculing pro-slavery crowds and allegedly shouting “Am I not a woman?” to a crowd in Akron, Ohio, in 1863, could be just as bold and unequivocal toward those in his own camp.
In what has since become known as the “Great Interruption” in Salem, Ohio, in 1852, his colleague Frederick Douglass insisted that “violence…under certain circumstances (is) far more powerful than moral persuasion.” . He fumed: “What good is moral persuasion for a people thus trampled in the dust? Douglass wanted war. After a few seconds of silence passed for effect, the booming voice of Sojourner Truth rang out through the crowd: “Is God gone?” If there was a God in heaven, she believed, violence was unnecessary.
Truth aligned with Douglass against slavery, but she would not tolerate his warmongering. As David Blight showed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Douglass imitated Old Testament prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah far more than Christ himself. Therefore, his speeches did not carry the same message of peacemaking and forgiveness as those of Truth, who told his audience to imagine “the poor slave of heaven… robes washed white in the blood of the Lamb “.
These different visions of America created friction within the abolitionist ranks. Truth’s question was later cited as “Is God dead?” » and popularized by Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose religious biography was also written by Koester). Douglass never forgot this encounter, writing in 1870: “Let him who is so rash as to cross her beware. »
An eternal name
In fact, Truth stood her ground numerous times against abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and even her own freedmen and women. She did not call any man (or woman) master. When Harriet Tubman, the so-called “Moses of her people,” told Truth that she did not trust Abraham Lincoln to achieve emancipation, Truth counseled patience and told Tubman that she considered Lincoln as a friend of slaves.
After the Civil War, she scandalized many of her African-American listeners by telling them that it was a “disgrace” to simply live “at the expense of the government.” Truth even experienced friction with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton when the two suffragists insisted that white women should have the right to vote before black men.
Reform movements in the United States have rarely proven monolithic, and Truth knew this firsthand. Fortunately, she also knew the transformative power and peace of the saving gospel, which enabled her to both love her worst enemies and rebuke her good friends. It also propelled her entire career as a reformer. Truth never gave up his drive for reform, campaigning for the prohibition of alcohol in temperance societies in the 1870s.
She lived up to her name, sojourning on earth in the name of Christ even as she lived in poverty in Michigan until the 1880s. As she once told the Lord after leaving “l ‘Egypt’, synonymous with his life spent in the house of bondage: ‘You are my last Master, and your name is the Truth, and the Truth will be my eternal name until I die. »
Obbie Tyler Todd is pastor of Third Baptist Church in Marion, Illinois, and assistant professor of church history at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
