Glorying in Tribulation: The Life Work of Sojourner Truth
242
Glorying in Tribulation: The Life Work of Sojourner Truth
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Overview
Glorying in Tribulation offers students, scholars, and teachers of American history and culture studies a comprehensive look and a new perspective on Truth's contribution to American history. It is a long-overdue, exciting interpretation of the meaning of Sojourner Truth's life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611865011 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2024 |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Linda David is an independent scholar from Bloomington, Indiana.
Read an Excerpt
Glorying in Tribulation
The Lifework of Sojourner Truth
By Erlene Stetson, Linda David
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 1994 Erlene Stetson and Linda DavidAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-337-4
CHAPTER 1
Speaking of Shadows
I sell the shadow to support the substance.
Sojourner Truth
On the first day of October 1865 Sojourner Truth dictated a letter from Washington, D.C. to her friend Amy Post in Rochester, New York:
I have heard nothing from my children for a long time, neither from my grandchildren since they left me. I take this occasion to inquire after their whereabouts and health, as well as your own prosperity, and to inform you of my own. I spent over six months at Arlington Heigths [sic], called the Freedmen's village, and served there as counciller for my people, acceptably to the good but not at all times to those who desire nothing higher than the lowest and the vilest of habits. For you know I must be faithful Sojourner everywhere.
Six months after the formal ending of the Civil War, Truth felt that the nation was still wandering like the Israelites in the wilderness with no promised land in sight.
I have generally received the kindest attention from those in Authority even to the President. But I see dark spots still in the great cloud that leads us by day, and occasional angry flashes in the pillar of fire that guides through this long dark night. Yet my comfort in all this is in the thought that God rules.
The dark spots by day were easy enough to account for in her constant confrontation with the racism that persisted after the abolition of slavery.
A few weeks ago I was in company with my friend Josephine S. Griffing, when the Conductor of a street car refused to stop his car for me, although closely following Josephine and holding on to the iron rail they draged me a number of yards before she succeeded in stoping them. She reported the conductor to the president of the City Rail Way who dissmissed him at once; and told me to take the number of the car wherever I was mistreated by a conductor or driver, and report to him and they should be dismissed. On the 13th inst. I had occasion to go for blackbury wine, and other necessieares for the patients in the Freedmen's Hospital in this city where I have been doing and advising, for a number of months under sanction of the Bureau. As they had often refused to stop for me, I thought now I would get a ride without trouble as I was in company with annother Friend Laura S. Haviland of Mich.. As I assended the platform of the car, a man just leaving it, called out, "Have you got room for niggers here?" as the conductor then noticed my black face, pushed me, saying "go back—get off here." I told I was not going off, "then I'l put you off," said he furiously, with clenching my right arm with both hands, using such violence that he seemed about to succeed, when Mrs Haviland reached us and told him, he was not going to put me off, placing her hands on both of us. "Does she belong to you? if she does, take her in out the way" said he, in a hurried angry tone. She replied "She does not belong to me, but she belongs to Humanity and she would have been out of the way long ago, if you had have let her alone." The number of the car was noted, and conductor dismissed at once upon the report to the President (Mr Gideon) who advised his arrest for Assault and Battery as my shoulder was sprained by the wrench given by the conductor in his effort to put me off. Accordingly I had him arrested and the case tried before Justice Thomson who refered the case to the Grand Jury of the United States, and placed James C. Weedon, the conductor under bonds for his appearance to court which opens next Wednesday. My shoulder was very lame and swolen, but is better, but I sometimes fear it will trouble me for a long time, if I ever get entirely over it. It is hard for the old slave-holding spirit to die. But die it must. Write immediately, tell me where my children are, and how they are.
"Mrs Haviland is here on business, and will remain a week or ten days longer," added Truth in a postscript; "She does the reading and writing for me while here."
* * *
Although Truth's powerful oratory created her public reputation (J. Miller McKim, the corresponding secretary for the Pennsylvania AntiSlavery Society, thought that a person could "as well attempt to report the seven apocalyptic thunders" as to recapture the effect of Truth's eloquence), scholarly interest in her has often centered around an attempt to assess her role in producing written records of her own words. Again and again this effort hinges on the question of her lack of literacy. Yet clearly it is Truth's experience of illiteracy that functions as an authorizing strategy in her stories about her life and that forms the bridge between her lived experience and the development of her mature political thought. "You know, children," she is reported to have said, "I don't read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations." This was strictly true. This was the source of her efficacy as a spokesperson for the right to political self-determination for millions of formerly enslaved people whose conception of social organization had been formed out of their own experience under a legal prohibition against literacy.
Illiteracy did not exclude Truth from political discourse, and the concept is of little utility in understanding her work. "She is a woman of strong religious nature," wrote a correspondent after the war, "with an entirely original eloquence and humor, possessed of a weird imagination, of most grotesque but strong, clear mind, and one who, without the aid of reading or writing, is strangely susceptible to all that in thought and action is now current in the world" (NarBk, 237).
In evaluating the authenticity of the work of the first English autobiographer, Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century woman who also relied on scribes and intermediaries to put her words into written form, historian Karma Lochrie has argued for a category somewhere between literacy and illiteracy, "a quasi-literacy defined by its access to the written word." For Truth, as for many people in medieval times and since, "reading was more often linked with hearing or listening than it was with seeing" and many written texts would be "read aloud for their 'readers.'" During the 1820s, when Truth had escaped slavery to stay with the Van Wagenens, she was probably being read to from the Bible on a regular basis for the first time, while many an illiterate English laborer went regularly to a pub to hear the editorials of Cobbett read aloud.
We can identify the two crucial elements in the print culture that served as a conduit into Truth's ears and a vehicle for the words she spoke to circulate in the world beyond her immediate audience. These were the Bible and newspapers. We have many images of her methods of interaction with both.
Truth's political primer was the Bible. The power struggles of a people under the eye of a partisan god were models for a marginalized culture. The Narrative allows us to hear her listening to Genesis, to Isaiah, to the passage in which Paul claims that Jesus had a Bride (the Church). Truth expropriated the moral center of white Christianity, emptying out the stores of biblical imagery in the service of her race. She could use the Bible to withering effect. Her speaking strategy on the abolitionist stage was to convert the white man's rationale for slavecatching as soul-saving into the topsy-turvy argument that the civilizing of the whites was now the black person's burden. Playing on the white Christian's convention of wonder that Christ could love man, Truth would ask from the platform, "Isn't it wonderful that the Ethiopians can love you?" She said of the thieving bureaucrats managing the refugee programs in Washington that "the people here (white) are only here for the loaves and fishes while the freedmen get the scales and crusts." Speaking her politics in biblical terms, Truth wrote in outrage to the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1867: "I have just heard an extract of a letter read from Gerrit Smith to Mr. Garrison, which makes all my nerves quiver." She reminded Smith, who was urging reconciliation, that the South had "robbed and starved and butchered for centuries," like those "workers of iniquity" to whom Jesus said "I was hungry and ye fed me not." She asked of Smith, "Has he forgot Andersonville and Fort Pillow?"
Truth was a sophisticated listener who grasped how difficult it is to get a straightforward reading, since every reading is both a presentation and an interpretation; and to this could be added the burden of the reader's analysis. In Truth's Narrative it is explained that
when she was examining the scriptures, she wished to hear them without comment; but if she employed adult persons to read them to her, and she asked them to read a passage over again, they invariably commenced to explain, by giving her their version of it; and in this way, they tried her feelings exceedingly. In consequence of this, she ceased to ask adult persons to read the Bible to her, and substituted children in their stead. Children, as soon as they could read distinctly, would re-read the same sentence to her, as often as she wished, and without comment;—and in that way she was enabled to see what her own mind could make out of the record, and that, she said, was what she wanted, and not what others thought it to mean. (NarBk, 108-9)
Scribes as well as interpreters presented problems for the speaker-hearer. Before God taught her to keep her own records, Rebecca Cox Jackson experienced the problem of the unfaithful recorder in the person of her authoritarian brother:
So I went to get my brother to write my letters and to read them. So he was a writing a letter in answer to one he had just read. I told him what to put in. Then I asked him to read. He did. I said, "Thee has put in more than I told thee." This he done several times. I then said, "I don't want thee to word my letter. I only want thee to write it."
Truth understood that the Bible had been "worded" rather than written. Following her careful hearing/reading of the Bible, she always tested its authority.
She wished to compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness within her; and she came to the conclusion, that the spirit of truth spoke in those records, but that the recorders of those truths had intermingled with them ideas and suppositions of their own. (NarBk, 109)
If the spirit of truth found only intrusive scribes, the human speaking voice could be expected to have problems as well. To separate the recorded word from the speaking spirit of truth in Holy Scripture was an act of searching analytical skill to which Truth felt authorized by the text of her experience. When Lyman Beecher asked her if she preached "from the Bible," Truth asserted that she did not, because she could not "read a letter." She explained that she preached only one text, that of her experience : "My text is, 'WHEN I FOUND JESUS!'" The conversion experience that had thrown the organizing textual grid over her preaching had liberated Truth from the tyranny of written doctrine, even that expounded in the Bible itself.
After the Bible Truth read newspapers, and her political consciousness developed in dialogue with the circulating record of abolitionist opinion. She corresponded with white abolitionist Oliver Johnson, who edited the official organ of Garrisonian abolitionism, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, from 1858 to 1865. A letter dated 29 July 1863, written to her by Johnson after the murderous anti-black riots in New York City, gives some of the quality of their exchange:
Yours by the hand of J. M. Peebles came promptly. I thank you for the photographs, though they are poor compared with the one you sent me first. It is a pity you did not preserve the negative of that instead of this. Not only is the likeness better, but the work also.
The mob did not disturb the Anti-Slavery office, nor me. The fact is the Standard is scarcely known to the vile class composing the mob, having but a small circulation in the city. But it would have taken only a hint to direct their attention to us, and then my life would have been in danger, and the office would probably have been destroyed. A good Providence seems to have watched over us. Mr. Leonard, the colored clerk, was obliged to hide, but no harm came to him. Many of the colored people were dreadfully abused, but a very healthful reaction has already set in; and I believe the condition in this city will be better than it was before. Upwards of $30,000 has been raised for the relief of the sufferers, and they will get pay from the city government for the property they lost. I shall send the Standard as you request. (NarBk, 258-59)
From Washington in 1864 Truth wrote a careful description of her work with the freed people and of her visit to Lincoln to her Quaker friend Rowland Johnson: "You may publish my whereabouts, and anything in this letter you think would interest the friends of Freedom, Justice, and Truth, in the Standard and Anglo-African, and any other paper you may see fit." The surviving files of the New York weekly Anglo-African, the most important of the black newspapers of the Civil War period, are incomplete, so a source for information about the most interesting of Truth's print interactions is lacking; still we know from this letter that she read it and that its readers probably read about her in its pages. In the same letter she wrote, "Ask Mr. Oliver Johnson to please send me the Standard while I am here, as many of the colored people like to hear what is going on, and to know what is being done for them. Sammy, my grandson, reads for them."
* * *
How Truth related to printed accounts of herself reveals much about her awareness of her public image and much about the extent to which she controlled it. Some of the power of the press was on her side. Garrison's Liberator, Marius Robinson's Anti-Slavery Bugle, and Oliver Johnson's National Anti-Slavery Standard sought copy for their antislavery crusade and were willing to give her space on some other subjects—religion, temperance, woman suffrage, and her petition for land grants to post-war blacks—as well. Truth understood the power of newspaper reporters and editors to tailor the message she wanted to convey.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton recounts a compelling scene after the Equal Rights Association meetings in New York City on 9-10 May 1867, which were intended to serve the alliance between feminists and abolitionists. Truth had spoken three times at the convention, delivering arguably her greatest statement on black woman's rights. Stanton wrote to the Democratic editor of the New York World that she had been "entertaining Mrs. Stowe's 'Lybian Sybil' at our home for the last week":
The morning after the Equal Rights Convention, as the daily journals one by one made their appearance, turning to the youngsters of the household, she said: "Children, as there is no school to-day, will you read Sojourner the reports of the Convention? I want to see whether these young sprigs of the press do me justice.
"Sojourner then gathered up her bag and shawl, and walked into the parlor in a stately manner," Stanton wrote, "and there, surrounded by the children, the papers were duly read and considered."
Stanton's witty portrait of Truth seated among the newspapers, being read to by the children who reproduce the written word with straightforward unmediated voice, without the editorializing of adults, renders remarkably Truth's dynamic and dramatic interaction with the printed word. It also gives a sense of Truth's ongoing activity as the keeper of her own image.
"I think," said one of the group, "the press should hereafter speak of you as Mrs. Stowe's Lybian Sybil [sic], and not as 'old church woman.'" "Oh, child, that's good enough. The Herald used to call me 'old black nigger,' so this sounds respectable. Have you read the Herald too, children ? Is that born again? Well, we are all walking the right way together."
Attending to what Karma Lochrie has called "the fundamentally vocal experience of the written text," Truth experienced the presentation of print in terms of her own oral presentations. Breaking up passages, Truth said, "gives the reporter time to take breath and sharpen his pen, and think of some witty thing to say." Truth had a shrewd eye for dramatic format.
She said she liked the wit of the World's reporter; all the little texts running through the speeches, such as "Sojourner on Popping-Up," "No Grumbling," "Digging Stumps," "Biz," to show what is coming, so that one can get ready to cry or laugh, as the case may be—a kind of signboard, a milestone, to tell where we are going, and how fast we go.
When her readers pointed out "the solid columns of the other papers," Truth said that "she did not like the dead calm." She preferred, instead, "the breaking up into verses, like her songs."
The thesis of Stanton's letter to the World is that Truth "understands the whole question of reconstruction, all its 'quagmires and pitfalls,' as she says, as well as any man does." In Stanton's account, Truth, taking in the reports from the Express, the Post, the Commercial Advertiser, the World, the Times, the Herald, the Tribune, and the Sun, is an activist monitor of the subtleties of political coverage of the universal suffrage issue, which saw the defection of long-standing allies like Horace Greeley's Tribune and the opportunistic courting of the woman's rights activists by Democratic papers like the World. Truth is sarcastic about the shift:
"But, children, why did you not send for some of those wicked Democratic papers that abuse all good people and good things?" "They are all here," said the readers in chorus. "We have read you all the Republicans and the Democrats say." "Why, children, I can't tell one from the other. The millennium must be here, when one can't tell saints from sinners, Republicans from Democrats. Is the World Horace Greeley's paper?" "Oh, no; the World is Democratic!" "Democratic! Why, children, the World does move! But there is one thing I don't exactly see; if the Democrats are all ready to give equal rights to all, what are the Republicans making such a fuss about? Mr. Greeley was ready for this twenty years ago; if he had gone on as fast as the Democrats he should have been on the platform, at the conventions, making speeches, and writing resolutions, long ago."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Glorying in Tribulation by Erlene Stetson, Linda David. Copyright © 1994 Erlene Stetson and Linda David. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Illustrations,
Acknowledgements,
One - Speaking of Shadows,
Two - The Country of the Slave,
Three - The Claims of Human Brotherhood,
Four - Sojourners,
Five - I Saw the Wheat Holding up Its Head,
Six - Harvest Time for the Black Man, and Seed-Sowing Time for Woman: Nancy ...,
Appendices,
Bibliography,