Sojourner Truth

The blaze of a fire threw shadows across the walls of the damp cellar. The pine logs crackled and sputtered, and from time to time Baumfree, tall and gaunt, rose and poked at them. The night was filled with stories, as Baumfree and his wife, Mau Mau Bett, recounted to their two young children the events they had witnessed. Mau Mau, a mother who had seen 10 of her children sold from her, wept as she told how Michel and Nancy had been taken away.

One snowy winter morning, 5-year-old Michel had heard bells outside and ran excitedly to see the horse and sleigh that had stopped by the door. His delight turned to horror as he saw a man take his little sister Nancy and shut her in the sleigh. He ran screaming into the cellar and tried to hide, but the slave traders soon had him as well.

Such stories must have convulsed young Isabella with a sense of dread as she listened and watched eerie shadows dance on the walls. She would one day rise to the stature.of her father, whose well-chosen Dutch name meant "straight as a tree," but as a child she was small and thin. And she had learned at an early age that there is no security for the children of slaves.

The world that her owner, Charles Hardenbergh of New York, gave to her was limited to this dank cellar beneath his tavern. Loose boards thrown over oozing mud served as the floor of the slave quarters. Here men, women, and children slept crowded on pallets of straw and tried to fight off rheumatism, fever sores, and palsy.

But Mau Mau Bett expanded the world of her young daughter and Peter, her only remaining son. On clear nights she took them outside to sit beneath a canopy of stars. "My children," she told them, "there is a God who hears and sees everything you think and do." Isabella was overtaken with this great mystery.

"When you are beaten or cruelly treated, or you fall into any kind of trouble," her mother continued, "you must ask his help. He will always hear you and help you." Then they knelt together as she led the children in the Lord's Prayer,
spoken in a Dutch dialect.

As surely as the fireside stories blazed fear in the soul of Isabella, these starlight lessons kindled in her the warmth of comfort and the mystery of faith. It was these lessons that she carried with her as she traveled from slavery on a path that led her to embrace the name Sojourner Truth and a vocation as God's pilgrim.

ISABELLA'S ACCEPTANCE OF God's mercy and comfort was put to its first severe test in 1806, when she turned 9. In that year Charles Hardenbergh died, leaving his relatives to decide the fate of his slaves. Baumfree, now a bent, old tree, was losing his sight and beginning to suffer the crippling effects of rheumatism. No one wanted the liability of Baumfree, so he and Mau Mau Bett were given their freedom and permission to live out their years in the cellar. Such "generosity" was in fact a way for the Hardenberghs to shirk responsibility for a failing couple that had given them the best years of their lives.

Mau Mau Bett's greatest fear came true on the auction block at the Hardenbergh estate: Both Isabella and Peter were sold away. Isabella was sold to John Nealy of Ulster County, New York, for a paltry $100. It has been conjectured that her "thin and bony" frame, or her "lack of feminine charm," were the reasons for the low price. One report has it that a few sheep were thrown in with her to make the deal more palatable to her new owner.

Isabella spoke no English, and her Dutch jargon was incomprehensible to her new owners. Their instructions left her confused, and if ordered to bring a teaspoon, she would as likely return with a bucket or dishpan. She was cruelly treated, forced to walk in winter without shoes and made victim of various abuses and indignities.

One Sunday morning Isabella was instructed to go to the barn. There Nealy was waiting for her. He tied her hands together and whipped her with a bundle of rods until deep gashes were cut into her flesh and blood streamed from her wounds.

The scars from her beating stayed with her forever, burned into her flesh by the hatred of a white man toward a 10-year-old girl. These, too, she carried on every step along her journey.

WHILE SHE WAS NEALY'S slave, remembering her mother's comforting words under the stars, Isabella began to talk in earnest with God. She asked God to protect her from her persecutors. As the abuse grew worse, she pleaded with God to tell her what she was doing against God's will to bring such tragedy upon herself.

Before long, she knew that her only true prayer could be one for deliverance from the Nealys. She begged God to send to her her father, whom she believed could be the vehicle of her deliverance. A short while later, Baumfree limped through deep snow to her door and heard her daughter's plea.

Not long after, Martin Scriver from Kingston, New York, came to the Nealy estate and bought Isabella for $105. Scriver was a fisherman and tavern owner. He and his family were simple and honest people. Isabella thrived and grew strong in the midst of their boisterous life, unloading boats at the wharf, hauling herbs and roots for the tavern's liquors. While with the Scrivers, she acquired the habit of smoking a pipe and a brand of English that immediately identified her with a boat crew.

At 13 years old, Isabella had been transformed from a shy and frightened young girl into a tall and proud young woman. John Dumont, a nearby plantation owner, felt there was something striking about her and bargained with Scriver to buy her for $300.

Dumont was a kind man, and Isabella, known in the Dumont household as "Bell," soon became his favorite slave. He considered her "better than a man" because she could do as much as half a dozen others in the fields and still do the laundry at night. She soon incurred the envy and ire of the other slaves, Mrs. Dumont, and a white house servant named Kate, who took to throwing ashes in the potatoes Isabella washed every morning and then hurling vicious rebukes about the "dingy potatoes" her way.

While Isabella was with the Dumonts, Mau Mau Bett became very ill with palsy and a fever sore in one of her limbs. Baumfree returned from some chores one day and found her dead in the damp cellar - dead from sickness, toil, and unending grief over the loss of her last children.

Baumfree never stopped weeping. The last time Isabella saw him, he was sitting alone on a rock by the side of a road, disoriented, almost blind. Isabella tried to encourage him, informing him that the state of New York had agreed that in 10 years all slaves would be freed, and then she could come and care for him.

"But my child, I cannot live that long," he answered to her young enthusiasm. A few years later, Isabella, carrying her infant daughter, walked the 12 miles from the Dumont estate to the old cellar to give Baumfree the opportunity to hold - if not see - his grandchild. But the Hardenberghs had moved him out, and Isabella could not find him. Baumfree was discovered frozen to death in a miserable shack a short while later.

AS A YOUNG WOMAN, Isabella never questioned the master-slave relationship, believing it to be God-ordained and trying her best, as her mother had taught her, to be an honest and obedient slave. She in fact related to God and John Dumont in much the same way - as powerful men who recorded every move she made and meted out punishments and rewards.

Isabella made herself a "sanctuary" among some willow trees and daily continued the conversation she had begun with God years earlier. She always began with the Lord's Prayer, chanted in the Dutch her mother had taught her. Then she went on to recount her sins and sufferings to God, begging for forgiveness at times, commanding God to set things straight at others. She questioned and cajoled and bargained with her Lord.

She grew to love a slave named Robert on the neighboring Catlin estate, and the two desired to be married. Recognizing that if they would marry, all offspring would be added to Dumont's estate, Catlin tried to force them apart. Undaunted, Robert came to visit Isabella clandestinely. He was discovered one afternoon at the Dumont estate by Catlin and his son, who beat Robert with sticks until his head and face were pulpy, then dragged him bleeding home. Robert was later forced to marry a woman on the Catlin estate. The tragic series of events, in which Isabella felt completely powerless, struck a deep blow to her faith in the slavery system.

Isabella was given in marriage to a slave named Thomas. She gave birth to five children.

Since the day that she had informed Baumfree that all slaves in New York state would be freed, Isabella longed for July 4, 1827 to arrive. As the years crept by, Dumont even promised to free her a year earlier, since she had been such a faithful slave. But then Isabella contracted a disease in her hand that hampered her work, and Dumont withdrew this promise. Dumont's subterfuge dealt a further blow to Isabella's trust in this system that gave all power to white masters.

Isabella went to the highest tribunal and laid down the law. "Oh, God," she called out in the English dialect that would be her language from then on, "I been a-askin' you, an' askin' you, an' askin' you, for all this long time to make my massa and missis better, an' you don't do it; an' what can be the reason? ...Well, now, I tell you, I'll make a bargain with you. Ef you'll help me to git away from my massa an' missis, I'll agree to be good; but ef you don't help me, I really don't think I can be."

She knew she couldn't see well enough to escape safely in the dark, but she feared getting caught if she left in the daylight. She handed this dilemma over to God and waited for a response. She got her answer: "Get up two or three hours before daylight, and start off."

"Thank you, Lord," she replied. "That's a good idea."

ONE FALL MORNING, at about three o'clock, Isabella arose, put a few articles of clothing and food into a big cotton handkerchief, gathered up her infant daughter, Sophia, and set off. By the time the bright autumn sun crested the horizon, she had reached the summit of a hill a considerable distance from the Dumont estate. She looked down on the valley below her, brilliant with golden hues in the early-morning light, and felt both joy and alarm grip her. She was free.

She sat down for a moment to nurse her child, then knelt on the ground. "Well, Lord," she called out to the vast sky, "you started me out; now please show me where to go."

Isabella walked until late at night and came upon the home of a Quaker couple named Van Wagener, a house she later said had been shown to her in a dream. They ushered her into a spotless room with a tall, white bed. Never having slept in a bed before, she spent the night underneath it.

Dumont soon caught up to her. When she refused to go back with him, he threatened to take her child. The matter was resolved when Isaac Van Wagener, staunchly opposed to buying human beings, agreed to "buy the services" of Isabella and Sophia for the balance of the year. The Van Wageners were staid Quaker folk. Their life held no excesses of either pain or pleasure. Isabella's roving spirit found life there too placid, and after several months another visit by John Dumont tempted her to return with him.

As Isabella started to climb into his carriage, she had an experience she described later in her Narrative:

Well, jest as I was goin' out to get into the wagon, I met God! an' says I, "0 God, I didn't know as you was so great!" An' I turned right round an' come into the house....

I could feel [God] burnin', burnin', burnin' all around me, an'goin' through me; an 'I saw I was so wicked, it seemed as if it would burn me up. An' I said, "0 somebody, somebody, stand between God an'me! for it burns me!"

Then...Ifelt as it were somethin' like an umbrella that came between me an' the light, an' I felt it was somebody....begun to feel 'twas somebody that loved me....And finally somethin' spoke out in me an' said, "This is Jesus!"..An' then the whole world grew bright ...An'I begun to feel sech a love in my soul as I never felt before....

An'then, all of a sudden, it stopped, an' I said, "Dar's de white folks that have abused you, an' beat you, an' abused your people - think o' them!" But then there came another rush of love through my soul, an' I cried out loud - "Lord, Lord, I can love even de white folks!"

TRULY ISABELLA'S FIRST encounter with Jesus was dramatic, showering her with the forgiveness that only Jesus can offer and inviting her to a love so profound that she was able to forgive even her white persecutors. As the years unfolded, she was challenged to return to that forgiveness again and again.

Her immediate desire was to get back her children. She discovered that Peter, age 5, had been illegally sold to a wealthy Alabama planter named Fowler. She determined to take on a whole class of society and an entire state, if necessary, to get her son back.

Isabella became the butt of scorn and contempt as she tried to find help among whites. Mrs. Dumont told her to stop making such a fuss over a "paltry nigger."

But the Quakers sent Isabella to the New York grand jury in Kingston to register her complaint. This former slave woman, barefoot and dressed in a plain cotton dress, with a large colored kerchief on her head, marched into the courthouse. Walking right up to a man she described later as "the grandest lookin' one I could see," she asked, "Sir, be you a grand jury?"

In the end, Isabella triumphed. Not only did she succeed in getting a white slaveowner arrested, he was made to post $600 for his court appearance. In 1828 a black woman taking a white man to court and winning was unheard of.

And she got her son back. At first young Peter, still in the custody of his owner, denied ever knowing his mother and begged the court officials not to take him from his master, blaming the scars and bruises on his face on Fowler's horse. But once out of his owner's brutal grasp, he tearfully told his mother about the kicks and beatings that left bruises and welts all over his small body. When she moaned for his pain, Peter said, "Oh, this is nothing, mammy, you should see Phillis....She had a little baby, too, but Fowler cut her till the milk and blood ran down her body. You would certainly scare to see Phillis, mammy."

In her anguish Isabella cried out,"O Lord, render unto them double for all this!"

IN 1829 ISABELLA MOVED to New York City. There she joined the Zion African Church. During a service she knelt in prayer and extended her hand to the woman who prayed beside her. There was something familiar in the woman's bony hand, and yet Isabella could not explain the strange sense of intimacy she felt with her.

A short while later, Isabella's sister Sophia came to New York and announced that their brother Michel was also in the city. Isabella remembered Mau Mau Bett's numerous recountings of Michel and the sleigh and could not believe that they would be reunited.

The reunion was a joyful one, though tinged with a note of sorrow. "If only you had come a little sooner," Michel said to Isabella. "Nancy, who was shut up with me in the sleigh, died a few months ago." As Michel described her dress and appearance, he added that she attended Zion African Church.

Recognition dawned on Isabella's face. "I have seen my sister Nancy; and now I see that she looked so like Mau Mau." The brother and two sisters quietly wept together for all that had been lost. "Oh, Lord," cried Isabella, "what is this slavery, that it can do such dreadful things? What evil can it not do?"

Isabella's fervent zeal for following God's will and attraction to things mystical made her vulnerable to an experiment in religious fanaticism of a type that flourished in the 1830s. She had begun working at Magdalene House, a refuge for women off New York's streets. There she met Elijah and Sarah Pierson, and through them a man who called himself Matthias.

Matthias believed that he had been sent by God to convert the world and establish a "kingdom." Isabella and the Piersons were among those who turned over their possessions and joined Matthias.

The group's activity grew increasingly bizarre, and though Isabella remained apart from some of its more sordid aspects, she was eventually accused along with Matthias of poisoning Elijah Pierson. Isabella collected character references from eight people who had known her, including a glowing testimony from John Dumont. In the end, the all-white jury not only acquitted her but also awarded her $125 in damages for any suffering her character might have undergone throughout the ordeal.

Isabella soon acquired employment with a wealthy New York family, the Whitings. But she grew increasingly uncomfortable with New York's corruption and vice, saying of the city, "Truly, here the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another."

She felt a call to take her message about Jesus to other parts of the land. On a summer morning in 1843, Isabella placed a few articles of clothing in a pillowcase and announced to the Whitings that the Lord was going to give her a new home. "Farewell, friends," she said as she left. "I must be about my Father's business." God's pilgrim was on the move again.

With only the sun to guide her and a quarter for the ferry to Brooklyn, she headed east. This pilgrimage felt to her like a break from all that had been before, and she wanted to leave everything behind, including her name. Every time she had been sold, her last name was changed to that of her master, and now she wanted a permanent name fitting of her calling.

As she was walking, the name Sojourner came to her, because she planned to "travel up and down the land" and be "a sign to the people." She prayed to God for a last name, and then exclaimed, "Thou art my last master, and thy name is Truth; and Truth shall be my abiding name till I die!"

THE GOD WHO HAD ONCE come upon her like a burning tempest now led her like the pillar of fire that went before the Israelites. She received hospitality from rich and poor alike and soon became recognized across the land as the tall, thin woman dressed in gray with mist-filled eyes and the love of Jesus in her heart.

She had a low voice that rang out when she sang and shook the gates of heaven when she preached. She could not read the Bible, and she often said that she preached from only one text: "When I found Jesus." Though she never learned to read or mastered English beyond a crude dialect, people of the highest intellect and education were swayed by her powerful message. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, said of her, "I do not recollect...anyone who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence than this woman."

Her wanderings took her through Connecticut and into Massachusetts, where she settled for a time in the town of Northampton. There she encountered several noted abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, who counted her among their company and affectionately called her "Aunty Sojourner."

It was in Northampton that Sojourner received her baptism by fire when a camp meeting was disrupted by a gang of ruffians. Mustering all her courage, she talked and sang the violent crowd into tranquility (see "Like Oil on Agitated Waters," page 26).

In this decade before the Civil War, the country was seething with unrest. Slavery was being hotly debated in all quarters. Women's rights were being pushed onto center stage, as the abolitionists and suffragists combined forces to set a social agenda for the nation.

Freedom burned in the soul of Sojourner Truth, and she added her voice to those of the advocates of equality for blacks and women. She was a black woman made steel by the searing, white heat of slavery, made compassion by the tempering fire of Christ's love. She was possessor of both a warm heart and a tongue of fire.

Victim of the slave owner's lash in her early years, she now became the target of lashes of the tongue from her many opponents. At an 1852 women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio, her presence brought scorn from the men - many of them clergy - who had come to argue vigorously against the issue, and from the women, who feared that their cause might be undermined if it were perceived to be sympathetic to the abolitionist struggle. Amid hisses and jeers, Sojourner rose proudly and delivered her now famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech (see "Ain't I a Woman?" page 23).

At a gathering in a United Brethren meeting house in Indiana, a local physician, Dr. T.W. Strain, attempted to stop Sojourner from speaking by accusing her of being a man. He demanded that "for the speaker's own benefit" she submit herself to the inspection of some of the women present.

Furious debate ensued between those who were outraged at the proposed indignity and those who considered it a good idea, Strain, asserting that Sojourner's low voice was surely that of a man, called for a vote, in which an overwhelming chorus of "ayes" voted Sojourner into the male sex.

Amid the tumult, Sojourner rose and spoke with fiery indignation to her tormentors.

"My breasts has suckled many a white baby when dey shoulda been sucklin' my own," she said, adding that many of these babies had in her estimation grown to be far more manly than her persecutors. "I dar'st show my breasts to de whole cong'agation. It ain't to my shame dat I do dis, but yourn. Here den," she shouted as she opened her dress from collar to waist, "see fer yourself!" Her blazing gaze found Dr. Strain in the audience, as she fired her parting thrust, "Mought be you'd like to suck, too?"

Sojourner was always ready with a quick retort for any detractor. A meeting in Indiana in which the noted abolitionist Parker Pillsbury was the featured speaker was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm. A pro-slavery Methodist in the crowd used the interruption as an occasion to state to the gathering, "I am alarmed. I feel as if God's judgment is about to fall upon me for daring to sit and hear such blasphemy." And then the low voice of a woman shouted over the noise of the thunder and rain, "Chile, don't be skeered; you are not going to be harmed. I don't 'spec God's ever heard tell of ye!"

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 criminalized escape from slavery and opened the way for more violence against blacks. In response, militancy increased among the abolitionists. Despairing that their speeches and petitions would ever bring emancipation of the slaves, many began to see armed resistance as the only recourse.

Frederick Douglass began to espouse this point of view. Sojourner Truth was present in the audience one day when he recounted the terrible wrongs done to his people and asserted, "Slavery can only end in blood." Waves of despair swept over the large crowd until Sojourner's voice rang out and charged the throng with hope. She admonished Douglass with one simple question: "Frederick, is God dead?"

DIVISIONS BEGAN TO plague the abolition and suffrage movement. A major split occurred between those who felt that universal suffrage was the only just goal and those who believed that it was important to first secure the enfranchisement of blacks (meaning black men) and later of women. Sojourner grieved the prevailing decision to take the latter course, only too aware that black women performed the same arduous work under slavery as men and suffered the same cruelties, along with additional horror of sexual abuse.

At an 1867 equal rights convention in New York, Sojourner said about the fight for women's suffrage, "I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again." Her words turned out to be prophetic: Once the issue of women's suffrage was set aside in the 19th century, several decades passed before the question was forced again into public consciousness.

Sojourner was outspoken on other issues pertaining to women, especially fashion. She asserted to a group of women in Providence, Rhode Island, that if they had remembered that they are the "mothers of creation," they would not "rig [themselves] up" in wide skirts, high-heeled shoes, and "humps on their heads, and put them on their babies, and stuff them out so they keel over when the wind blows."

She was once asked her opinion of bloomers. "You see," she explained, "dey used to weave what dey called nigger-cloth, an' each one of us got jes' sech a strip, an' had to wear it width-wise. Them that was short got along pretty well, but as for me" - she gave a droll glance at her long limbs - "Tell you, I had enough of bloomers in them days."

As she wandered the country, Sojourner's direct and persistent proclamations of truth about slavery and the rights of women created a huge throng of friends who deeply loved her and an equally large number of foes, who marshaled all their hatred and unleashed, it her way. She was beaten with clubs and pelted with stones, and on one occasion she received a wound that later led to an ulcerated leg.

In Angola, Indiana, persecutors threatened to burn down a hall where she was scheduled to speak. Sojourner's presence created such a stir of hatred that her supporters feared for her life. They decided to dress her in military regalia in the hopes of putting the "fear of God" into her opponents. Sojourner described the experience in her Narrative:

They put upon me a red, white, and blue shawl, a sash and apron to match, a cap on my head with a star in front, and a star on each shoulder. When I was dressed I looked in the glass and was fairly frightened....

My friends advised me to take a sword or pistol. I replied, "I carry no weapon; the Lord will preserve me without weapons. I feel safe even in the midst of my enemies; for the truth is powerful and will prevail."

Sojourner was placed in a carriage, surrounded by soldiers, and followed by a long procession. A huge, hostile crowd was waiting outside the hall where she was to speak, but as the long contingent arrived the throng dispersed "like a flock of frightened crows." She described the evening this way: "The band struck up the 'Star Spangled Banner,' in which I joined and sang with all my might, while amid flashing bayonets and waving banners our party made its way to the platform upon which I went and advocated free speech with more zeal than ever before, and without interruption."

Sojourner's stay in Angola culminated in her arrest. She explained her trial: "After a while, two half-drunken lawyers, who looked like the scrapings of the Democratic Party, made their appearance, eyed us for a few moments, then left. Presently we saw them enter a tavern across the way, and this ended the trial."

DURING THE CIVIL WAR, Sojourner settled for a time in Battle Creek, Michigan, attracted there by a spiritual community and the town's anti-slavery sentiment. Sojourner was now in her 60s. She was well-respected by the town's citizens and particularly loved by its children. They often gathered on her front porch and begged her to tell them stories, which she did between puffs on her white clay pipe.

She still had not learned to read. When a friend offered to teach her in her later years, she responded that her "brains [was] too stiff" to learn. In return for the stories she told them, the children read to her from the Bible. She preferred them as readers over adults, who seemed unable to resist interpreting the scriptures to her while reading.

She was rarely seen without her pipe. Some of her friends apparently criticized her habit. One reminded her that "the Bible tells us that 'no unclean thing can enter the kingdom of heaven'" and that nothing was filthier than the breath of a smoker. Her quick retort: "Yes, chile, but when I goes to heaven I 'spects to leave my breff behind me."

With so much brewing in the nation, Sojourner soon found it impossible to remain in Michigan. One morning in the spring of 1864, she announced to a friend that she was leaving for Washington that afternoon. She was now close to 70 years old and recovering from an illness. In response to her friend's "Whatever for?" Sojourner replied, "I'm going down there to advise the president."

Her friends protested that he was too busy and she was too old. But in words that could stand as a summation of her life, she retorted, "I never determined to do anything and failed."

The meeting of the two tall, gaunt fighters for black emancipation was historic. President Abraham Lincoln confessed that he had heard of Sojourner long before she had heard of him. At the end of their visit, Sojourner brought out the book she carried with her at all times, her Book of Life, whose pages bore the signatures and good wishes of all the interesting people she met on her journey. To such names as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was added the inscription of a president: "For Aunty Sojourner Truth, Oct. 29, 1864, A. Lincoln."

SHE HAD COME TO VISIT a president, but the misery Sojourner witnessed in Washington compelled her to stay. An area by the city's Grand Canal teemed with thousands of former slaves, who had rushed across the Mason-Dixon line and into the city after the Emancipation Proclamation, with no possessions except the freedom given them by a dash of Lincoln's pen. Known in the North as "contrabands," they crowded into dark hovels and shanties, living in a squalor that bred disease and crime.

Upon seeing the poverty, this woman who had spent much of her life among white people preaching and agitating felt God call her to remain with her own for a while. Like a whirlwind, Sojourner attacked the problems that she saw, offering counsel, teaching hygiene, nursing the sick, finding work for her people. Raiders from Maryland frequently crossed into the Washington slum and kidnapped children, and Sojourner became a leader in the resistance to such activity.

In other parts of the city, marble edifices that radiated power and wealth were taking shape. Sojourner passed by these buildings in her journeys around Washington. She often paused at the Capitol, she explained in her Narrative, to thank God that the stars and stripes flying over the dome no longer symbolized the "scars and stripes" on the backs of her people.

But one day, with the picture of the children from the slums in her mind, anguish and anger overtook her as she gazed at the white, resplendent dome built at the nation's expense. She cried out, "We helped to pay this cost!" Her mind recalled all the back-breaking and unrewarded work that had been endured by her people. She later paraphrased the thoughts that came to her that day:

...Beneath a burning southern sun have we toiled, in the canebrake and the rice swamp, urged on by the merciless driver's lash, earning [for him] millions of money; and so highly were we valued, that should one poor wretch venture to escape from this hell of slavery, no exertion of man or trained bloodhound was spared to seize and return him to his field of unrequited labor....Our nerves and sinews, our tears and blood, have been sacrificed on the altar of this nation's avarice....Some of its dividends must surely be ours.

JUSTICE BURNED IN Sojourner's soul now as passionately as freedom once had. She put her energy toward what she hoped would be the crowning achievement of her life - a land grant for blacks in the U.S. West. She understood fully that land ownership was the crux of the issue: Those who had plowed and planted the soil for generations would never be truly free until they could do so to their own benefit. Huge tracts of land were being given over to the development of a railway system, and Sojourner reasoned that surely people were as deserving as the railroads.

With her body now slightly bent and her voice a bit huskier, Sojourner earnestly poured out her last bit of fire as she resumed her travels across the country. She preached and beseeched her audiences to sign petitions on behalf of the land grant. But she misjudged the intransigence of white racism. With slavery no longer an issue, many whites had lost their interest in the black cause, and she faced large opposition to her plan.

At home she faced the hatred for her race in her attempts to get around Washington by streetcar. Just as she had taken on John Dumont and Dr. T.W. Strain, she took on Jim Crow. Always she found a way to turn her enemies' hatred to her own advantage.

In one incident Sojourner seated herself across from two white women. One of them called to the conductor, "Do niggers ride in these cars?...Tis a shame and a disgrace. They ought to have a nigger car on this track."

Sojourner immediately retorted, "Of course colored people ride in the cars. Streetcars are made for poor white and colored folks. Carriages are for ladies and gentlemen."

Another incident has been credited as the probable cause of a change in Jim Crow laws in Washington's streetcars. When Sojourner refused to be put out of a car, the conductor pushed her up against the door, dislocating her shoulder.

"I will let you know whether you can treat me like a dog," Sojourner fired at him, and then told a white friend with her to take the number of the car. Sojourner later had the conductor arrested and dismissed.

SOJOURNER CONTINUED THE arduous work of serving her people, while still journeying far and wide in an effort to secure their civil and political rights. She took up the cause of temperance and child labor, having seen firsthand the ravages of alcohol in the slums and the exploitation of children. She spoke against capital punishment and on behalf of equal pay for equal work, long before the concept became a platform in the women's movement,

She returned to Battle Creek around the time of the 1868 presidential election to campaign for Ulysses S. Grant. On the Saturday before the election, she boldly marched to the Board of Registration to enter her name on the voting rolls. Her request was denied. Undeterred, she appeared at the polls on election day and was again refused.

She acquired an interview in 1870 with President Grant, who added his name to her Book of Life. She also delivered a petition about the land grant to the U.S. Congress and received a standing ovation from the Senate for her relentless efforts for freedom.

Sojourner continued criss-crossing the country, gaining more names for her petition from her supporters and insults from her tormentors. The wear of age and a lifetime of traveling now began to show. "Everybody tells me to 'stir 'em up,' " she confided to a friend. "But I ask you, 'Why don't they stir 'em up?' - as though an old body like myself could do all the stirring." Yet she persisted in the belief that if only she could acquire enough signatures, her dream of a place in the West for her people would be realized. She continued to pour her waning energy into a dream that would never be fulfilled.

Sojourner contracted ulcers and fever sores of the type that had claimed the life of Mau Mau Bett. The physician who treated her leg ulcers recalled that he gave her some medicine and then checked on her six weeks later, only to discover that the sores had significantly worsened. "Well, doctor," Sojourner explained, "I thought those salves...you gave me were too mild for anyone as tough as I am, so I went to the horse doctor and he gave me something that was real strong...."

The art of skin grafting had recently been developed. But when a family member of Sojourner's was approached as a donor, she feared the doctor was proposing to "skin her alive." The doctor finally used patches of skin from his own arm to heal Sojourner and buy her another decade of life.

In her last years, when exhaustion and despair could easily have become temptations, Sojourner found instead a new vision. Too perceptive to ignore the facts, but too faithful to yield £o cynicism, she found hope in a truth far greater than her plan for settling her people in the West. She had a grander vision than others even dared to dream. Listen to the words of a proud, old black woman with fire in her eyes, words that stand as prophecy:

These colored people will bring the whites out of Egyptian darkness into marvelous light. The white people cannot do it, but these will. They will teach the slaveholders the truth that they never had and never knew of... These colored people are going to be a people. Do you think God has had them robbed and scourged all the days of their life for nothing!

She found the faith to take the most difficult step of all on her long journey - the step of forgiving her white persecutors and envisioning their salvation. For Sojourner, this forgiveness became very personal in regard to John Dumont. A twist of fate brought an ironic conclusion to their relationship.

Sojourner had returned to visit her former owner and found him advanced in age and deprived of his wealth. He had changed his mind about slavery, now calling it the "greatest curse the earth had ever felt." Sojourner fervently praised God that she had lived to hear him utter those words.

She received a letter from her daughter a short time later, informing her that Dumont had moved West, taking along - probably by mistake - the few pieces of furniture she had left with him. "Never mind," said Sojourner. "What we give to the poor, we lend to the Lord."

SOJOURNER'S HEALTH continued to fail, and her ulcerous limbs left her in great pain. As the end came close and the suffering grew almost unbearable, she sang - often the same hymn, her favorite, that had quieted the Northampton mob:

It was early in the morning
...Just at the break of day when he rose
...And went to heaven in a cloud.

Friends who were with her near the end talked about a remarkable serenity that enveloped her.

Sojourner Truth died at three o'clock in the morning on November 26, 1883. A few days earlier, a sorrowful friend had come to comfort her. "I'm not going to die, honey," Sojourner reassured her. "I'm going home like a shooting star." No doubt she shot straight to heaven and resumed her conversation with God where they left off.

A long line of carriages and a huge throng followed the hearse with its somber black plumes to Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek. A stone was later placed on her grave, bearing her faithful proclamation and celebrated admonition to Frederick Douglass, "Is God Dead?" A witness reported that as her body was lowered into the ground, the sun appeared like a blaze of fire on the western horizon.

Sojourner Truth has been laid to rest, but the ground cannot contain this faithful wanderer. She moves like God's fiery pillar before us. She has blazed a trail for freedom and justice. And she beckons us, in courage and in faith, to follow.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.