ABSTRACT
A national legend, Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883) has been publicly remembered through statues, memorial plaques, and the creation of tourist attractions to celebrate her life of political commitment. Probing the notions of official memory and postmemory in the representation of Truth’s bodily features, this chapter addresses the following questions: what contradictory forces go into the continued transmission of her image and the production of a symbol? How has her memory been passed on within the context of current efforts to salvage America’s slave past? It juxtaposes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s comparisons of Truth to statues, Cumberworth’s Marie à la fontaine, and Story’s Libyan Sibyl to Tina Greene’s 2008 rendering of Isabella as a young slave girl. As a genre, statuary relies on allegory: how can it render the slave child’s experience? What ellipses does it perform? What ideologies leave their traces even in the best-intentioned figurations? Next to these sculptures, the actual physical experiences of walking Sojourner Truth’s Freedom Trail in Esopus or touring the African American Heritage Trail in Florence, Massachusetts, upholds a contemporary aesthetics of vulnerability. They call on the visitors’ sensibilities and response-ability to commune with the past at the very site of memory.
