Sojourner Truth Essay

[Eustolia Pennycuff]

SojournerTruth exists in American popular culture as a strong contributor to the movements for abolition and women's rights. In order to maintain this image of strength and make the case that black women are just as capable as white men, Truth intentionally elided her disabled right hand. This article explores representations of Sojourner Truth in relation to her nineteenth century context and, in particular, social stigmas regarding race, gender and disability. The interpretations of pictures, a painting, and two events contained in Truth's Narrative suggest that Truth argued against gender and racial oppression by operating with an ideology of ability that suggested that both women and African-Americans are strong, powerful, and able. As Truth maintained an ideology of ability in order to subvert gender and racial hierarchies, she offers a case study into the benefits of intersectional approaches to historical studies.

Sojourner Truth exists in American popular culture as the bearer of a strong, working arm with a voice that powerfully contributed to the movements for abolition and women's rights. With her arm and her voice, Truth used her body to confront social norms and construct new ways of existing in her nineteenth century context. In textbooks and popular children's stories, Truth has been established as a heroine who, with her famous question, "Ar'n't I a woman?", established her status as a strong black woman.1 But this is not all scholars know of Truth's body. According to her Narrative, Truth's body was not only black and female, but also disabled.2 While representations of Truth called attention to the reality of her black, female body, no representation directed attention to Truth's disability. Indeed, just the opposite occurred as pictures of Truth directed attention away from Truth's disability, often portraying her disabled hand performing tasks such as knitting. One painting even "corrected" her "disfigurement"! In brief, Truth, marginalized on account of her race, gender and disability, is represented as strong and able-bodied.

Although contemporary literary studies has demonstrated the limits of assuming a connection between author and text, this essay suggests that Truth's own self-representation called attention to her black, female body while directing attention away from her disability. Such an argument is supported by Truth's self-compiled Book of Life and pictures of Truth because both suggest a relationship between Truth's self-representation and other's representations of her as far as they demonstrate collusion between Truth and others. This article analyzes pictures of Truth in addition to two events recorded in Truth's Book of Life: her famous 1851 "Ar'n't I a woman" address and Truth's response to a challenge in Indiana in which she proved her femininity by displaying her breast. In each of these contexts, Truth confronted cultural discourses with her body. By constructing her body as a challenge to social norms, Truth entered the discourse of nineteenth century abolitionists and women's rights activists concerning the nature of visible differences among human bodies.3 Truth, however, established gender and racial equality by maintaining an ideology of ability.4 By calling attention to the reality of Truth's disability, this essay suggests that Truth's context allowed her to construct her black, female body as a powerful confrontation to the discourses on race and gender through the rejection of her disability. Although some contemporary biographers such as Nell Irvin Painter identify Truth's disability, none has fully explored the significance of Truth's disability in relation to her self-representation as strong and able-bodied.5 Such an investigation is necessary because many arguments for gender and racial equality initially relied and continue to rely on ideologies of ability. Arguments for gender and racial equality are, in other words, often built on an ideology of ability and, although this article demonstrates this operative ideology in the limited case of Sojourner Truth, further studies need to consider the relationship between civil rights movements and ideologies of ability.6

The case of Sojourner Truth suggests that a single critical theory is often inadequate to deal with historical realities because a single critical theory may operate with categories that another critical theory has revealed to be problematic. This analysis of Truth demonstrates the value of working at the intersection of race, gender, and disability in historical studies. It begins with a brief biographical introduction to Sojourner Truth before exploring Truth's nineteenth century context and, finally, how Truth used images and words in order to construct herself in relation to this context. Although this analysis focuses on an historical case, it also exemplifies the need to continue working at the intersection of race, gender, and disability in our contemporary context where, in particular, some feminist arguments for women's equality continue to rely on rhetorics of ability.7

As a black woman, Sojourner Truth used her body to challenge racist and sexist discourses that dehumanized black women. Born around 1797 in upstate New York, her parents gave her the name of Isabella, a name that she changed in 1843 when she announced to her employer that she would no longer answer to the name Isabella but Sojourner Truth. Nell Irvin Painter, a recent biographer of Truth, suggests that this new name carries many layers of meaning for Truth as it attests to Truth's itinerancy, her spiritual authority, and her anxiety over having to prove the truth in several different legal contexts.8

Truth spent about the first thirty years of her life as a slave, being first split from two of her siblings and later, at the age of nine, split from her parents and another brother. After working for John Neely for a year, she was sold to the Schriver family into what she hoped would be a better environment. This new arrangement only lasted a little over a year until Isabella was sold for a final time to the Dumont family where she probably endured sexual and physical abuse.9 At the Dumont's, Isabella performed field labor for John Dumont and household labor for Sally Dumont.

In the midst of New York's state-wide movement to abolish slavery, Isabella struck an agreement with Dumont that she would be freed about a year and a half prior to the date set for all New York slaves to be free: July 4, 1827. After making this agreement, Isabella injured her hand and, as a result of her injury, her farm and household work became less productive. Due to her decreased productivity, Dumont reneged on his agreement to free her and she remained a slave until she freed herself and her youngest child, Sophia when, according to Painter's account, Truth received instructions from God. Painter states: "Looking back, Sojourner Truth said in the late 1840s that the answers came from someone she identified as God, a God of her own making, very different from that of the Methodists she met in Ulster County [New York] … In 1826, Isabella heard the voice of her God instructing her when to set out on her own as a free woman."10 Although Dumont did pursue her and her baby, he did not take them by force and, by the account in her Narrative, she experienced a sanctifying vision of God at the moment she was about to climb into Dumont's carriage.11 When she came-to after her vision, Dumont was gone.

Painter distinguishes between Isabella the slave, the life of Sojourner Truth, and the symbol of Sojourner Truth. While Painter's distinction between the life and symbol of Sojourner Truth makes an important contribution to studies on Sojourner Truth, the distinction between the life and the symbol is not as clear as Painter suggests. Truth participated both in compiling and distributing her Book of Life and her portraits. It is, therefore, impossible to parse out which aspects of Truth's persona are "real" and which are "symbolic", which aspects of Truth's image are self-representations and which are other's representations of Truth. Indeed, there are strong indications that the extant images and stories of Truth bear, in some way, Truth's stamp but contemporary scholars only have access to this stamp by looking at it through other's representations. Parsing out Truth's "real" persona is further complicated by the reality that Truth strategically positioned herself within existing cultural discourses in a manner that allowed her to successfully navigate nineteenth century society and politics. As she positioned herself in light of cultural discourses, Truth participated to some extent in her own symbolification.12 The next section explores some cultural discourses of the nineteenth century in more detail in order to establish an historical foundation for exploring Truth's images and speeches and their relation to her cultural context.

Sojourner Truth's body, like all bodies, was shaped by its cultural context. Although Truth's nineteenth century context has been explored extensively from the exclusive perspectives of race, femininity, and disability, scholarship is only beginning to consider the relationships between these stigmas. The emergence of critical theories of intersectionality, such as feminist disability theory, suggests that the separation of these discourses into separate discourses of oppression fails to identify how discourses of oppression perpetuate and sustain one another.13 Because the stigmas of debility, femininity, and racial otherness in the latter part of the nineteenth century have been described in other scholarship, this section pays particular attention to the intersections of these stigmas. 14 Exploring the relationship between these three social stigmas in the nineteenth-century context establishes a foundation for considering how Sojourner Truth used her own body to navigate these stigmas.15

Baynton and Williams-Searle's arguments suggest that the exclusion of women and African-Americans in nineteenth century society was predicated on an exclusion of those with disabilities. By exploring how black and white women were excluded from society based on their assumed lack of physical and intellectual ability and how black men were excluded from society based on their assumed lack of intellectual ability, the following paragraphs suggest that the exclusion of women and African-Americans from society assumed the exclusion of those with disabilities. Understanding how predominant cultural discourses built problematic stereotypes of women and African-Americans on an ideology of ability creates a foundation to understand the depth of the stigma of disability in Sojourner Truth's context.19

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