Dr. Michelle Chresfield
Appearances
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
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You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And then she decides that now is the time.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes. So she takes her infant daughter, Sophia, and she would later say, I did not run away because I thought that wicked. I walked away because I thought that was all right. And in walks she did, about 13 miles. I calculated, apparently, that's a little over 21 kilometers for our adherence to the metric system.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She goes and she takes refuge with a family, the Van Wagenens, who are anti-slavery, have a strong opposition to slavery, and they take in Isabella and her infant daughter. And it's, I'm sure, a hard decision. She leaves her children and her husband behind with Dumont in order to make this break and to self-emancipate.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So John Dumont eventually tracks her down. He does. He comes to the Van Wagenens and they implore him to sell Isabella and Sophia to them. And so they pay Dumont $25, $20 for Isabella and $5 for Sophia, settling the debt and essentially securing the freedom for both mother and child in a gesture of how much
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
this would mean to her, that the Van Wagenens would do this, Isabella actually takes their surname. So she becomes Isabella Van Wagenen.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes, so her five-year-old son is sold, and not only is he sold, he's sold south to Alabama, which lives in the mind of many enslaved people as the worst place that you want to be enslaved. You do not want to be sold down south. The conditions are arduous and dangerous and violent, and it breaks the spirit. So Isabella is very concerned about her son. She gets lawyers, and she sues.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Not only does she sue Getney—so her son is sold to a man called Solomon Getney— for participating in the illegal sale of her son, because New York state law prevents the sale of a person who would be free in a place where they cannot ever be free, right? So by going to Alabama, he's never going to be emancipated. And she sues Albany Supreme Court for allowing the sale to happen.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So she sues the man and the state, and she is victorious. So in 1828, the judge rules, quote, the boy be delivered into the hands of his mother, having no other master, no other controller, no other conductor but his mother. And she becomes and bringing the suit, the first black woman to win a legal victory against a white man to secure a family member's freedom.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So this is hugely, hugely historic. And we owe a lot to the archives. So the New York archive discovered records only a few years ago in 2022 that give us much more information about the case, including the fact that Isabella was allowed to give a deposition, which is very uncommon for black Americans in the court. at the time.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And Getney, we know from these archival records, was prosecuted for kidnapping and only returned Peter to avoid indictment. And the records also allow us to understand that the young Peter was returned to his mother badly beaten and abused. And so it's definitely a story of celebration, but also there's hardship.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
But I'm really excited about what people might be able to glean now that we have these records.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Not that I know of. I'm not sure. But, you know, she's a multilingual woman. So who knows?
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes, that's absolutely right. So the La Tourette's are as religious as they are wealthy, we could say. And they're followers of a religion that would come to be known as perfectionism.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
That's why I never get anything done. And so perfectionism is closely tied to the Pentecostal tradition, which I think, Desiree, some of this is going to resonate with you. So it's about spreading the gospel, living plainly, speaking in tongues, singing hymns, seeking miracles, fasting. washing each other's feet.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so the Lattarets began this holy club, which is essentially a church that they hold in their home. And they also minister in the community amongst some of the most downtrodden, prisoners, prostitutes. And Isabella begins to preach with this club as well. And she also works in the field. She begins to really craft her oratory style and
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
her spiritual conviction at this moment in a really amazing way. She becomes a housekeeper for Elijah Pearson, who is a successful businessman who would become a leading religious reformer.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And Pearson would claim to be a prophet, and he believed that he could cure illness and prevent death, so much so that when his wife Sarah died, likely the result of the extreme fasting that the community had been engaged in, he attempted to pray her back to life, right? So Isabella, yes, is enmeshed in a society of deep religious devotion.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Not at all. She is so convinced that she wept for joy and kissed his feet. Okay.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Oh, man. It didn't hurt that he styles his hair and clothing to look like those chromatic images of Jesus that were circulating at the time. So he's very much trying to play the part.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes, she does. And in 1833, she follows him to a commune in Westchester called Kingdom of Matthias.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She does. Yes. She does. She does. Yes. And members of this organization, cult, if you will, it's what it is. They sign over thousands of dollars in property to Matthias. And he styles himself as a prophet chosen by God. And he believes that he is the only prophet.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So Elijah Pearson, who has a lot of money, also a prophet, he becomes kind of edged out, even though he still remains a member of the community. But it's Matthias who is the one who is speaking the word. He takes what he calls a spirit match. He's legally married to another woman, but takes on this other woman as his spirit match. He styles himself the father.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So he very much wants to be the head of everything.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes. And so she, you know, begins to or attempts at least to defy him. But he uses physical abuse and punishment against, you know, his followers. And so it's a real tough situation that she finds herself in and is marginalized in this community.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Matthias. He gets in trouble, actually. He's alleged to have poisoned Elijah Pearson, who dies after a prolonged illness. And so it makes the newspapers. And this actually even brings side eyes, for lack of a better word, to Isabella. A family, the Folgers, accuse her of trying to poison them. So they both need lawyers. And she gets a lawyer for herself. She gets a lawyer for Matthias.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She tries to get all these statements. She even goes back to DeMont to get a character statement. This is a really tough moment. It's all over the newspapers. And Matthias eventually kind of abandons Isabella, goes back to his wife. And so that's really how the whole thing kind of comes to an end, that particular chapter. So she's once again having to kind of start over.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes. So on June 1st, 1843, the day of Pentecost, she claims to have experienced the Holy Spirit calling her to travel and preach. At that point in time, she had been known more frequently as Sojourner, but that's when she really adopts the surname Truth because she believes that she is as true as God's word. God is with her.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Sojourner Truth is one who travels to preach God's truth, and she spends several months on the road trying to convince audiences to seek salvation before Judgment Day, which she predicts would occur in March 1844. So it is imminent. And so there's a huge expediency to her work at this moment.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She does. And she travels around New England. She's preaching. She doesn't speak to her children or family about this decision. And she gave her employer at the time only one hour's notice before she sets out on this new path.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, so it's a kind of education, civic organization focused on women's rights, liberal education, abolition. She doesn't immediately love it. It's kind of a stark kind of place that people bathe in a river, right? So it's about this kind of like essential kind of living. But she believes it gives her equality of feeling, liberty of thought, and the largeness of soul.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so this is a utopian community that's a stop on the Underground Railroad. And it's really where she begins to cultivate relationships her kind of feelings around anti-slavery and women's issues particularly. So it's a huge moment for her and her development as a speaker.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, I mean, the headline act is, well, you know, Frederick Douglass is just starting out. And so there's tension. And they disagreed on these kind of philosophical things that also, I think, bled into their personality differences. So Douglass really stressed the importance of education.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
He taught himself to read and write and really wanted to be this sophisticated public orator, right, who styled himself on the figures that surrounded him. Sojourner Truth, right? She's Sojourner Truth now, right? She was illiterate. She never learned to read and write. And I think by this time in her 30s, she was okay with that. She wasn't trying to change.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And she had this more kind of homespun, accessible type of demeanor. And, you know, Douglass would say something not so nice about her. Douglass would write about how she would publicly point out his mistakes and also call him to the carpet for things that he would do in terms of prioritizing black men over women.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Douglass really believed that truth was trying to really make him look bad in the public.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, so Sojourner needs the money, right? She's giving it all the way to Matthias and these other types of institutions that she's involved in. Yeah, so she narrates her life story to Olive Gilbert, who's a friend of William Lloyd Garrison, so the noted abolitionist. So it's the narrative of Sojourner Truth drawn from her book of life, and it's published in 1850.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And even though the narrative is about Sojourner Truth, right, she is a person who can't read and write. So she's narrating her life story to Olive Gilbert. And Gilbert's voice is actually very present. And at one point, you know, kind of implores the reader, you need to buy this book. This woman has spent her money poorly. Her daughters are not taking care of her.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Like the only way that you're going to support this woman is if you buy this book.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes. So in 1853, Sojourner Truth approaches Harriet Beecher Stowe for this endorsement. She gives it. And then 10 years later, Stowe will publish this article titled Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sybil. And the piece actually suggests that Truth had died. So she has to come out later and like, you know, tell the people I didn't die. I'm still around. Okay.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
It also is notable because it depended on inaccurate, heavily racist stereotypes. Yeah, it really gains notoriety and really contributes to a particular narrative of Truth that is less sophisticated than the real person. But at the same time, Stowe is hugely credited with furthering Truth's celebrity, right? So this article makes her hugely popular.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She's able, from the money sold on the book, to buy her own home, actually. So in addition to the Harriet Beecher Stowe endorsement, the fact that it only cost 25 cents, which apparently at that time, I know nothing is affordable. So the book is flying off the shelves. Right. And allowing her to make this money.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes. Yes. So she said, you know, in saying this, she's really trying to get him to think that only when God is dead will violence be the answer. So she at the time is very, you know, against violence. She believes that, you know, prayer, faith, faithfulness to God's word is what's going to see African-Americans and slave people through this moment.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so it's this, again, another example of this ideological tension between these two people.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So she has a lot of audiences, but actually the media is very uneven about its coverage of her. So oftentimes she's not mentioned by name in the papers. And so if we're looking at it from the historical record, it's very hard to tell. Yet we also have narratives of people speaking about what a great orator she is.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so it's very clear that whenever she is speaking, that she's really, that the audience is raptured by her. She's known for, she sings to them. She has this powerful speaking quality. And she's also really funny and apparently very sarcastic. And so and she's able to really infuse this wit and this humor into her speaking engagements where she's talking about these issues, right?
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Like, you know, slavery, abolition, women's inequality, right? Very serious things. But she's able to do so in a way that really invites audiences in.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
I will also say that I gave this speech as a kid on the news, on the morning news at 6 a.m. So it's very dear to me, but it is a complicated history. So Truth gave this speech, or is purported to have given this speech, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention that was held in Akron in May 1851.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And in this speech, we do know that Truth spoke about how she could do as much physical labor as a man, about how Jesus was the Son of God and of a woman, argued very humorously that women were valued in the eyes of God in a way that men were not. She says she's plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could heed me. And aren't I a woman?
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So that's the part of the text that's often attributed to her. The article was written by an organizer of this convention called Frances Dana Gage. It is believed that she writes this directly in response to Stowe's more stereotypical and damaging kind of depiction of truth in that Libyan civil movement.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so Gage here is making a specific point about the intersection of a kind of women's ideology or political orientation in that of a kind of black pride or kind of black ideology. Right. She's trying to bring these things together that you can be both black and woman. She does so in adopting a dialect that was not truth.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Much of the kind of practice of the time for particularly writers who are trying to elevate the abolitionist cause. is that they're translating the kind of oratory of enslaved or formerly enslaved people into broken dialect. And it's offensive, right? Particularly to our kind of modern ear. It's also inaccurate. That's not how Truth spoke. We've made it clear today, right?
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She was of Dutch heritage, right? She had a Dutch accent and spoke like many people in her region. In one line, then that little man in black dar, he say woman can't have as much right as man. That would not have been the speech.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
That is correct. So the woman that we will come to know as Sojourner was actually born Isabella Bonfrey. And while there is no exact date for her birth, we know that she was born around 1797 in Ulster County, New York, which is a rural area about two hours north of New York City.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, so she becomes a huge figure in terms of trying to galvanize support amongst black Americans, particularly to the union cause. And so she works very hard to recruit black men into the union army. Her grandson, right, also enlists. And so that's a huge moment. And she speaks with President Abraham Lincoln online. about what is to come for Black Americans.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And she comes to really support the war. She sees it as necessary, as religiously, morally necessary for the country. And she becomes really interested in what's going to happen for people after the war. But in terms of her work for the Union Army in particular, she's collecting food for troops. She's using her photographs to bring awareness to the war cause.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
and really trying to popularize the notion that this is an important endeavor for black Americans to be engaged in.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, there are conflicting accounts here. Yeah, thank you very much for that. So Truth would describe Lincoln as amenable and someone who greeted her as an equal. But she would attend this meeting with her friend and colleague, Lucy Coleman, who would later describe Lincoln as tense when he met Truth. And Coleman alleges that Lincoln actually addresses her, Truth, as he would a washerwoman.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so as actually not recognizing Truth's stature and importance.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Isabella was the youngest of 10 or 12 children born to the enslaved couple James and Elizabeth, and she was nicknamed Belle. And the young bell was enslaved on a northern farm. Unlike the southern plantations that pervade historical lore, northern slavery was much more small scale. Most people owned one or two enslaved people who labored on small scale farming or domestic work.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes and no. So she becomes really part of these circles, right? So she is with leading women's rights and suffrage figures. So in 1872, she joined Susan B. Anthony in trying to vote in a presidential election. She's turned away. She's touring New York State. And by this time, you know, in 1870, she's in her 70s and she's lecturing daily, sometimes twice a day. She participates in
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
in efforts to try to get land for Black Americans, even though that's never really kind of supported by Congress. So she's really has and is developing grand political ambitions, right, well into her later years, and really has what, you know, we will know to be really powerful interlocutors.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
But, you know, I would say, you know, going back to something that we discussed earlier, right, we often know their names and know more about them than we do about truth. So there's certainly an unevenness.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So mostly like not quite a reservation, but wanting to have the kind of 40 acres and a mule kind of conversation, right? There was a kind of brief dream of this, but it wouldn't become a realized. But I do think it's a kind of testament to her vision that she anticipates that the Civil War will leave much undone for black Americans.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So. she's very much part of a conversation that's going on. But I think because of her proximity, right, she's one, in addition to Frederick Douglass, who's actually meeting the presidents. And so she has a unique position to actually be effective and to talk to them firsthand about this.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so while, you know, it's not necessarily a discourse that she starts, she's a really effective administrator in terms of getting that message out there.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So she has various bouts of illness. She tries to travel locally. By this time, she's in Battle Creek, Michigan. So she's relocated again. And she really finds refuge and community in Michigan. It's a place that she really comes to love. But, you know, she's very sick. And during this time, she continues, though, to give speeches.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She continues to draw audiences, and her speeches are printed very widely. But unfortunately, she dies on 26th of November, 1883, at home. at around the age of 86. And she is eulogized by her many colleagues, including Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. So her long frenemy will come back and speak of her upon her passing. Oh, that's nice.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So although slavery was relatively small and small in this area, northern slavery in New York State, slavery in particular, where Isabella will be held, was very central to the international slave trade. So her early life, she's on a farm, she's owned by a family who owns about six or seven people, which makes that family very wealthy and notable for the time.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So, you know, Sojourner Truth, she is what we know to be this really great figure. But a lot of her life exists, you know, at the edge of myth and reality. There's so much about her that we can't know, we won't ever know. Like what she really sounded like, right? A lot of that comes from the kind of narrations of others.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And because she is someone so kind of shrouded in myth, I think it's important for us to really sit with what she did and what we can know based on what she did, right? We know that she is a woman who was deeply religious, who stepped out on faith to self-emancipate herself, who moved about in these various kind of avenues to live the life that she wanted for herself as a free person.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And we know that that she really tried to thread this needle between a faithfulness to her race as a black woman, but also to her gender as a woman who wanted to seek equality. And this is not an easy balance to contend with at the moment at which she's doing it. We have examples today of how hard that is for some people. And so there's so much about what she said that we'll never know for sure.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
But we know that she worked tirelessly on behalf of black people, on behalf of women to improve their lives. And so I think if we know that, we know as much truth that is important and possible to know.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So this is like the milieu in which, you know, she begins her life.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Actually, Isabella's birth date is very significant because it's the year that the cotton gin is invented. And it's the cotton gin that really allows Southern slavery to take the shape that it does, because it allows this kind of mass cultivation of cotton, which will revolutionize the industry and require much more human labor to cultivate those crops.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
You remain the best student.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Northern slavery, by comparison, you do have in the early years of the 1600s, people are definitely growing crops. But by the time that Isabella is born, it's very much shifted to where it's much more skilled labor, where you might see enslaved labor being deployed in homes,
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
You see at the time that she's born a real kind of shift, right, in the kind of power of slavery in the United States, but also the ways in which slavery will become to look very different between the two regions.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So when the colonel was alive, the parents were allowed to basically farm on a small scale in conditions that we would liken to sharecropping, which actually doesn't really take formation until later. But essentially, Elizabeth and James live on their own in a cottage where they farm a small tract of land that was rented from the Hardenbergs.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And in exchange from that land, they would have owed them labor, but also credits towards whatever it cost to cultivate that tract of land. We could conjecture that possibly at some point in time that the parents could have been able to purchase that land outright. But those dreams are really dashed when he dies and his son takes over. And the son is really trying to make money.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And that involves selling the young Isabella away at the age of nine. So her parents are frequently depressed, going into bouts of kind of emotional hardship because many of her siblings are sold away. So when Isabella grows up, she only knows her brother. And so it's this constant fear that our parents are going to have that their children will be sold away.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And this happens when Isabella is nine.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Right, that's correct. So she's sold for $100 alongside a flock of sheep. And the Neelys are an English-speaking family, and Isabella only spoke Dutch. And so she had a hard time, as you might imagine, and so she can't comprehend the instructions given to her. And on top of the language barrier, the Neelys are generally cruel people, and they make life difficult for the young Isabella.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And she faces violent and cruel punishments that she would later recall in her later life. and bear the marks of this abuse on her body for a long time.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Right, but her father, so Isabella's father, he is an older man, and he is some distance from his daughter after the sale, but he doesn't lose track of her. And this makes it very different than the relationship that he's able to have with his other children. So he travels a distance and actually implores the Neelys to sell Isabella.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so she sold again, right? in 1809 to a tavern keeper called Martinus Shriver. And she spends about 18 months with the Shrivers, where she works at an inn. She makes beer, she picks herbs, she fishes, she farms. And she would claim that it's the Shrivers who taught her to curse, which is a very interesting development for a woman who would be known for her piety and religious devotion.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
She's sold to John and Sally Dumont. And she would spend the longest time of her enslavement with the Dumonts, about 17 years in total. So she arrives around the age of 12, roughly, and she's there until... about the age of 30. And it's during her time with the Dumonts that Isabella would do farm work for John, but she also performed housework for Sally.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so she gains a reputation for the hard work that also characterized her father. And she also has a stunning physique and figure. She's just under six feet tall. She's a very tall, statuesque woman. So she's doing the work of several people, which really gains her the kind of compliment and the admiration of John Dumont. And she begins to care very much about how Dumont feels about her.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And that is in stark contrast to her feelings about Sally, who she resents more so. And where Dumont might praise Isabella in her work ethic, Sally is a lot more critical.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
So she is actually forced to marry another enslaved man owned by the Dumont family called Thomas. But interestingly enough, this is not the first man that she falls in love with. She actually falls in love with a young man named Robert, who was owned by a neighboring family. And Robert and Isabella very much loved each other. But Robert's owner did not want him with Isabella.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And Robert actually defies his enslaver and goes to see Isabella, and he is beaten within an inch of his life, which really kind of breaks his spirit to continue to kind of disobey. And so that relationship ends, which allows Isabella to be free to partner with Thomas. We don't know a lot about Thomas, but they have a general affection for one another, and they have five children together.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Diana, Peter, Elizabeth, Sophia, and a fifth unknown child.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be back. The gang is back together.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yes, that's absolutely right. Desiree Birch, you remain my best student.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Yeah, no, she's racking up the degree. She's a credentialed woman. But to get back to your point, you know, Isabella gets her freedom, but it's not an easy feat. So in 1799, New York State passes the Gradual Emancipation Act.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And according to the act, children born to enslaved women after July 4th, 1799 are born free, but are required to serve a period of indentured servitude ending at 28 for men and 25 for women. And they do this because state leaders were very concerned about the state instantaneously losing its labor force, right? And so they wanted to transition away from slave labor.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
In 1811, the state of New York announces that enslaved people born before 1799 will be free on July 4th, 1827. But it retained the provision of the 1799 Act. for children born after 1799. Essentially, Isabella is poised to be free, but not her five children.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
Right, absolutely. And so because of the act, the children are basically going to be laborers for the owner of the mother until they reach 28 for the young men, 25 for the women. Isabella tries to bargain for her own emancipation in 1826. and an early emancipation, which Dumont grants on the condition that Isabella would, quote, do well and be faithful.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
And so if she does well and does her work, he agrees to free her one year early. So on July 4th, 1826. However, when that date arrives, Dumont went back on his word and argued that Isabella... Oh, who needs to be faithful? Not Dumont. Not Dumont. And so one of the reasons that he makes this claim is that she has an injury. She hurts her hand. And so she can't work at the full capacity.
You're Dead to Me
Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher
But she has these strong feelings of fairness and wanting to do right by him. These are feelings that she would later forget. kind of narrate. And so she sets a time. She works into the autumn of 1826. And so she spends 100 pounds of wool by hand in addition to doing much of this outside labor. And she's beginning to turn that wool into yarn that could be used for these various projects.