Sojourner reality: A Life, a Symbol

Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol



Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol

Introduction

If looking for blind praise of long-dead African-American heroes, one better stay far away from Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, a comprehensive and often shocking historical analysis of the life of a certain Isabella Van Wagenen, penned by one of Princeton University's leading black professors of history, Nell Irvin Painter. Rich in its detail, engaging in its style and tireless in its quest for historical accuracy and non-bias, the book attempts to divorce as well as marry the two identities of Sojourner Truth, as well as separate the real from the imaginary - and it succeeds at doing so magnificently.

Analysis

The prime critical objective of the book is to deconstruct the mythos surrounding Sojourner Truth, which may sound like a rather typical goal for a historical manuscript, until one realizes that the sheer depth and breadth of said mythos is staggering. One need not look further than respectable editorial reviews of this very book, where they state such vile and false non-sense as “Sojourner Truth (…) eventually fled the South for the promise of the North”1, to see how culturally pervasive the mythos around Truth is. Created by both her constant reinvention of self and the employment by others to further their own goals, the symbol that is Sojourner Truth is dramatically at odds with the real person who became her, and A Life, A Symbol does a great service to the reader by demolishing the fictitious while emphasizing the factual(Nell, 1997).

In fact, the experiences of Sojourner, born Isabella, are nearly completely incongruent with those of her contemporary black men or women of prominence. Without hyperbole, it can safely be stated that Sojourner Truth is an anomaly whose symbolism and influence today are completely detached from the real person who ultimately gave them birth. While standing for a former Southern slave who advocated abolition and the rights of women, the woman who was to become Sojourner Truth was born an Afro-Dutch child in New York's Ulster County hinterlands; she was as far removed from the cotton plantations of the Deep South as her native tongue of Dutch was from the English she would be composing her famed orations in decades later. Not only was she not a product of Southern slavery, she also did not go through the ordeal of an arduous escape, as she was freed by New York law which granted systematic emancipation to her age group. Furthermore, while the black communities of Harlem and the New York area were still more than half a century from manifestation, she virtually shunned any black communities, congregations and conferences and spent most of her life in practically allwhite religious communes and amongst religious friends. Here, too, the deviance of her life as a poor black woman continued, as for the most part she enjoyed the benefits of heightened racial, class and gender tolerance amongst the people she lived with - tolerance shocking ...