Sojourner Truth

Notes from Ms. Truth’s speech

• Setting: 1851, Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio
• “Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?”
• “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?”
• “Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?”
• Bars: “Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
• "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”
• …”now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.”

Brief thoughts on the through-line from Sojourner to Fannie Lou Hammer

Both Sojourner Truth and Fannie Lou Hamer arrived at the same threshold by different roads — and both refused to be turned away. Truth raised her bare arm before a room in Akron and let a life of labor and loss speak for itself. Hamer walked into the 1964 Democratic National Convention and laid her suffering on the table without apology or decoration. A century apart, they were making the same demand: I am here. I have always been here. You will not look away.

What binds them is the body as testimony. Neither woman reached for abstraction when the truth of their lives was right there in the room. Truth didn't argue her humanity — she demonstrated it. Hamer didn't cite statistics on disenfranchisement — she described her own screaming. Both understood that the most unanswerable thing is a witness, and that power flinches most not from ideas but from eyes that won't close.

And both were told, in ways spoken and unspoken, that they were too much — too raw, too plain, too loud. Both responded by becoming, in that very excess, the moral center of the movements that tried to manage them. History keeps returning to them not despite their refusal to be polished, but because of it.