Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Sojourner Truth was born enslaved in New York, spoke Dutch before English, and could not read or write, yet she became one of America's most powerful speakers. She dictated this life story to Olive Gilbert, telling of hard labor, losing her children to sale, winning her freedom, and preaching and singing her way across the country. Her faith and humor shine through every hardship. Her voice still sounds strong on the page.
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree, enslaved in New York in a Dutch speaking household, and she never learned to read or write. Freed when New York ended slavery, she won back a son who had been illegally sold south, remade herself as a traveling preacher, and took the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. This narrative, published in 1850, was dictated by her to her friend Olive Gilbert, and she sold copies at her lectures to support herself.
The thirty short sections tell her life as she told it: her parents' memories of the Middle Passage, her masters kind and cruel, her religious awakening, her walking freedom, her courtroom victory, and her work for abolition and women's rights alongside the famous reformers of the day. Certificates of character from respectable citizens close the volume, a formerly enslaved woman's credentials in a skeptical world. Her voice, humorous, shrewd and deeply religious, survives Gilbert's pen remarkably well.
Truth became one of the most recognizable Americans of her century, and this plain book is where her legend begins. Readers of slave narratives, women's history, or American religion will find her unforgettable: illiterate, as she said, but not unlearned.
Sojourner Truth, born enslaved as Isabella in Ulster County, New York, could not read or write, so she dictated her story to Olive Gilbert, and the Narrative appeared in 1850, sold at her speaking engagements. Its thirty sections follow her enslavement, her walk to freedom with her infant daughter, and her religious awakening. It offers a remarkable voice of faith, endurance, and moral authority.
Sojourner Truth could not read or write, so this narrative, published in 1850 to support her by its sale, was dictated to Olive Gilbert, whose plain third person telling keeps close to the facts Truth gave her. There is no preface: the book opens directly with her birth and parentage, as Isabella, enslaved in Ulster County, New York, to a Low Dutch family.
Thirty headed sections carry the life in sequence: her brothers and sisters, religious instruction in a household where prayer was punished, the auction, her parents' deaths, marriage, motherhood, a master's broken promise of freedom, her escape, and the illegal sale of her son, whom she recovered by suing in court, among the first Black women in America to win such a case against a white man. Later sections follow her religious experience, her years in New York City, the Matthias delusion, her taking of the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 and her departure to preach, closing with certificates of character from 1834 and 1850.
It is a short book and an essential one: a Northern slavery narrative, ending not with escape alone but with a vocation.
Edition: Edition of 1850. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 1674.
The first chapter
THE subject of this biography, SOJOURNER TRUTH, as she now calls herself-but whose name, originally, was Isabella-was born, as near as she can now calculate, between the years 1797 and 1800. She was the daughter of James and Betsey, slaves of one Colonel Ardinburgh, Hurley, Ulster County, New York.
Colonel Ardinburgh belonged to that class of people called Low Dutch.
Of her first master, she can give no account, as she must have been a mere infant when he died; and she, with her parents and some ten or twelve other fellow human chattels, became the legal property of his son, Charles Ardinburgh. She distinctly remembers hearing her father and mother say, that their lot was a fortunate one, as Master Charles was the best of the family,-being, comparatively speaking, a kind master to his slaves.
James and Betsey having, by their faithfulness, docility, and respectful behavior, won his particular regard, received from him particular favors-among which was a lot of land, lying back on the slope of a mountain, where, by improving the pleasant evenings and Sundays, they managed to raise a little tobacco, corn, or flax; which they exchanged for extras, in the articles of food or clothing for themselves and children. She has no remembrance that Saturday afternoon was ever added to their own time, as it is by some masters in the Southern States.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1850. Sojourner Truth died 1883. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
Starvard