[For this year’s
MLK
Day series, I’ll be AmericanStudying African American lives in texts. I’d
love to hear your responses, as well as other lives and texts you’d highlight,
for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On a voice captured
in a famous speech, and a life lived well beyond it.
When you think about how many of
the inspiring Americans I’ve highlighted in this space are not collectively
remembered at all—and how many others, like Frederick Douglass, are generally
remembered but without, I would argue, the kinds of specific connections to
texts and works that would make those memories truly meaningful—Sojourner
Truth (1797-1883) has it pretty good. Not only is this freed slave and
lifelong activist for African American and women’s rights remembered in our
national narratives, but her most famous speech, “Ain’t I a
Woman?,” a stirring rebuke to both racist and sexist arguments delivered at
an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, is one of the few 19th-century
American texts that has endured in any specific way into our collective 21st-century
consciousness (I’ve seen excerpts from the speech in posters in high school
classrooms, to cite one piece of evidence for that enduring presence).
“Ain’t” is indeed a great
American speech, managing in just a few short paragraphs to develop arguments
using all three principal rhetorical strategies: pathos, appeals to her
audience’s emotions; logos, appeals to their reason; and ethos, appeals based
on Truth’s own character as the speaker. It also nicely illustrates Truth’s
unique perspective and voice, her fiery eloquence which had by this moment
(only a year after the publication of her
personal narrative had first brought her to the attention of abolitionists
and activists throughout the North) already made her a sought-after speaker and
presence at any event. Yet the speech’s representation of that voice, and more
exactly the written version’s use (from its title on) of dialect to portray
Truth’s manner of speaking, makes it somewhat less clear whether this one text
should indeed exemplify the woman behind it. The most significant Truth biographer
and scholar, Nell Irvin Painter, has indeed argued that the dialect version
was produced after the fact and by white activists who, while friendly to Truth
and seeking to help amplify her voice, might have overly emphasized her use of
the vernacular to highlight her natural eloquence and the limitations that her
early life in slavery had enforced on her education and identity. After all,
Truth’s most famous contemporary African American activist, Frederick Douglass,
had been accused at times of falsifying his history because of his highly
literate voice and style; Truth’s dialect voice in the speech thus bears at
least a multi-part relationship to issues of slavery, authenticity, and
identity.
The layers and complications of
Truth’s life and identity go well beyond those questions of dialect, however,
and her name itself both partially obscures and yet reflects that complicated
personal history. The name was one of her own choosing, bestowed upon herself
in 1843 as she began a period of work as an itinerant preacher in New York and
New England. She had been born
Isabella Baumfree, and for the first four decades of her life had worked,
both as a slave and then as a freed servant, in upstate New York; as she traces
in her personal narrative, and as biographers and historians such as Painter
have likewise documented, she moved between numerous families and households in
those years, while having four children of her own as part of a forced marriage
to a fellow slave. By far the most ambiguous and complex period of those
decades was also perhaps one of the most formative of her spiritual
perspective: between 1829 and 1834 she served as both housekeeper and preacher
to a reformer named Elijah Pierson, a man who called his house “the Kingdom”;
sometime in that period another reformer named Robert Matthias took over the
house and turned it into a brief but full-blown cult, including polygamous
marriages and other fanatical practices (as detailed in Paul Johnson and Sean
Wilentz’s compelling narrative history, The
Kingdom of Matthias [1994]). The exact influences of these years and
figures on Truth’s identity will never be known, not least because she wrote
relatively little about them in her narrative; but no account of her life and
perspective can entirely elide her apocalyptic religious visions, one
unquestionably stoked by this time in the Kingdom.
I don’t mean, by highlighting
that one period of Truth’s life, to imply that her later activism or writings
must be analyzed through this lens; these were but five years of a more than
8-decade long life, one that included not only the abolitionist and women’s
rights activism but also contributions to the formation of African
American regiments during the Civil War and numerous post-bellum efforts on
behalf of freed slaves, temperance, and opposition
to capital punishment, among other continuing work. My main point, as ever,
is that the more we know about this inspiring American’s identity and
experiences and writings and work, the more we can understand the whole truth
about who she was, who we were through the 19th century, and thus
where we come from. Last life writing tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other African American lives and/or texts you’d highlight?
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