'Then I Will Speak Upon the Ashes'

When Sojourner Truth was informed that Indiana rebel sympathizers threatened to burn down the hall in which she was scheduled to hold a rally, she said, "Then I will speak upon the ashes."

It is in this tenacious manner that she confronted the difficult and often cruel realities of her life. She learned both from the verbal and the non-verbal messages of her mother that one must not be defeated by the injustice, cruelty, and evil of the world. Her mother, Mau MauBett, taught her to pray, to be tough-headed and tough-hearted.

These lessons stood the 9-year-old Isabella in good stead when she was sold away from her parents. The rumors told about her sale claim that her marketability resulted from the fact that she came with a flock of sheep. Regardless of the truth of this story, the fact is that she was bought for $100 by a storekeeper named John Nealy.

Because she spoke only the Low Dutch of her former master, she suffered in the English-speaking Nealy household from not being understood and from not understanding her work instructions. After two years of praying for a better place to live, she was bought for $105, and finally in 1810 she was bought for $300 by John J. Dumont. She was 13 years old. She lived with the Dumonts until gaining her freedom.

Because Sojourner Truth was born black and female, the culture in which she was forced to live intended for her to stand always in the ashes or not to stand at all. But her strength of character and heart set her about the task of transforming that prescription by defying its power to control her and to determine the path that her life could follow.

The image that is created by the words "Then I will speak upon the ashes" conveys the reality of the woman who at age 30 picked up her young child and walked off the Dumont plantation to become Sojourner Truth. The first test came when she set out to find her son, Peter, who had been sold away from her. When she learned that he had been taken to Alabama, she confronted the legal system in her fight to get him returned to her. She won. Of course, she did not seem to realize how extraordinary it was for a black woman to take a white man to court in 1828 and win her case against him.

For Sojourner Truth the whole event was merely a matter of a woman of faith who had "right" on her side, fighting for what was her due and having God undergird that fight. Her entire life was undergirded by an unshakable faith that allowed her to turn to God in her words of prayer. She was known to begin most of her addresses with the phrase, "Children, I speak to God and God speaks to me...."

"Then I will speak upon the ashes."

And, indeed, she did, whether she was confronting the ashes created by the pain of being sold away from her parents as a 9-year-old child, or watching her old, blind, and ill father die of exposure and starvation a few miles from the plantation that had taken the best years of his life but whose owners let him go in his old age because he was a liability.

Sojourner Truth spoke non-verbally as well as verbally to the ashes created by those voices of male criticism that attempted to negate her validity. In one instance men raised questions about her gender, while the white females, who knew that she was a woman, sat silently because of their physical and emotional ties to Sojourner's critics. Her response was to pull open the front of her dress to show her bare breasts in order to validate her femaleness.

The racism of the abolitionists, the sexism of the men, black and white, and the racism of the white women's-rights fighters were never enough to stop her. She knew that she had to stay focused upon the task before her and that she must not be stopped by hardship, cruelty, or fear.

And why is she important?

Of all that one can say about Sojourner Truth, the most profound fact about her life and story is her faith. It was a faith not rooted in some abstract, theological perception of God nor in some image of a puppet being manipulated by individual holiness and justification.

No, this God of hers is one who watches 9-year-old girls being sold into slavery from their parents for reasons that are clear only to God. Her God also meets her as a person in her personal, daily struggle as a slave and keeps her in a relationship that makes sense to her and offers her the courage to be.

Sojourner Truth holds up the beauty of mystery to those of us who are her biological and spiritual descendants. For there is no mystery greater than the reasons why Sojoumer Truth should have hope and faith in the midst of the realities that confronted her throughout her life. It is in her embrace of the mystery of faith and hope that she confronts the forces that would negate the validity of her faith, her life, and her very personhood, in order to transform the negative and to give birth to the brightness of her spirit. Hers is a brightness that continues to shine into this last quarter of the 20th century, as blacks, whites, men, and women try to shape a life of sanity out of a history of insanity and unrelatedness.

Sojourner Truth's brightness of spirit stands at the base of every pile of "ashes" to beckon us forward. That brightness shines in the ashes of our despair over lost civil rights gains, confused feminist struggle, the threat of nuclear holocaust, the deterioration of black families, poverty, and all of the many other ills of this era. The six-foot-tall ex-slave and itinerant woman preacher, declaring that she will not allow her life's light to be determined by the darkness around her, encourages our journeys and calls us - if we find it necessary - to "speak upon the ashes."

Catherine Meeks, a Sojourners contributing editor, was an instructor and director of Afro-American Studies at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia when this article appeared.