Sojourner Truth was born a slave, with the name Isabella, in New York sometime around 1797. The youngest of 10 to 12 siblings, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth in the 1840s. She lived with her parents and her one brother who had not been sold away in a damp cellar under a small hotel that was operated by the man who owned her. At the age of nine she was sold to a neighborhood farmer who beat her. She escaped in 1827 and later worked for the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. After the Civil War, truth worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau, an organization established to help slaves after emancipation. Because she could not read or write, Truth related her story to a biographer. The following is a selection from her autobiography, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
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Isabella was married to a fellow-slave, named Thomas, who had previously had two wives, one of whom, if not both, had been torn away from him and sold far way. . . . In process of time, Isabella found herself the mother of five children. . . . Think, dear reader, without a blush, if you can, for one moment, of a mother thus willingly, and with pride, laying her own children, the ‘flesh of her flesh,’ on the altar of slavery. . . .
[The man who owned Sojourner Truth promised to free her one year before the state of New York frees all slaves, but she injures her hand. As a result, her owner refuses to free her because he says she has not done her full share of work.] . . . But Isabella inwardly determined that she . . . would leave him . . . and one fine morning, a little before day-break, she might have been seen stepping stealthily away from the rear of Master Dumont’s house, her infant on one arm and her wardrobe on the other . . . a cotton handkerchief containing both her clothes and her provisions [supplies]. . . .
A little previous to Isabella’s leaving her old master, he had sold her child, a boy of five years, to a Dr. Gedney. . . . This man disposed of him to his sister’s husband, a wealthy planter, by the name of Fowler, who took him to his own home in Alabama. . . . The law expressly prohibited the sale of any slave out of the State,—and all minors were to be free at twenty-one years of age. . . .
When Isabella heard that her son had been sold South, she immediately started on foot and alone, to find the man who had thus dared, in the face of all law, human and divine, to sell her child out of the State; and if possible, to bring him to account for the deed. . . .
[With money she received from some local Quakers, Sojourner Truth pays a lawyer who promises to get her son. Mother and child are soon united.] She commenced [began] as soon as practicable to examine the boy, and found, to her utter [complete] astonishment, that from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the callosities [calluses] and indurations [places of hardened skin] on his entire body were most frightful to behold. . . .
“Heavens! what is all this?” said Isabella. He answered, “It is where Fowler whipped, kicked, and beat me.”
