ABSTRACT
In a provocative book on Sojourner Truth, the nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, the historian Nell Irwin Painter (1996) concludes that there is no “real” Truth only a series of representations by various authors who turned Truth into a legendary hero that they could use to support their own cultural politics. Unmoored to any verifiable facts or any account from Truth herself, Painter writes, “the idea of Sojourner Truth has been available for several purposes and been put to a multiplicity of uses” (p. 263). The legend, symbol, and myth of Sojourner Truth has taken on a life of its own, and it continues to take on new meaning. White, liberal biographers of Truth in the post-Civil War era saw the “essence” of Truth in her famous meeting with President Lincoln. In this myth of Truth, she is an Enlightenment thinker, a Europeanized African American woman dedicated to the universal moral principles of human freedom and equality before the law; and she comes to the White House to thank the Great Emancipator for freeing the slaves. In the twentieth century, black biographers represented Truth more militantly, as a defiant, angry woman, speaking before primarily black audiences, pressuring the government to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Truth was rediscovered and reappropriated by black women’s studies scholars in the academy such as bell hooks (1981). The phrase attributed to Truth-“Ain’t I a woman?”—was used to critique the primarily white, middle class orientation of the women’s movement. In the face of all of this, Painter finds that the “truth” about Truth is that she lives an “invented” life, a life “consumed as a signifier.” She floats outside history, “a symbol without a life” (p. 263).
