Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

So far, among the slave narratives I've read, Sojourner Truth may be second only to Frederick Douglass as a significant historical figure. But her narrative is very different from Douglass's and the others. Most of them are first-person straightforward (more or less) recountings of life events. This has no other name connected to it than Truth's, no "with" or "as told to" or anything to indicate who is writing. A cryptic headnote indicates she never saw a proof of the manuscript before it was published. There are many obvious omissions. It's the first slave narrative I've read by a woman and I suspect certain delicacies are the reason for some of the gaps. Besides involving a woman, this one is also different because she was a slave in the North, owned in New York before that state changed its laws in the 1820s. At first I thought the focus was again going to be on the tragedy of families torn apart. After the New York laws change, Truth sues her former master for custody of her son, a landmark case. She also became an abolitionist and Christian preacher, taking her wonderfully evocative name in her 40s (she lived most of her life as Isabella "Bell" Baumfree). As the 19th century went along, more and more of these narratives served a kind of propaganda purpose. It's perhaps more obvious here because it's handled so clumsily. Then her story is followed by a densely worded 15-page appendix—with a byline, Theodore D. Wald—that thunders about the evils of slavery, helpfully elucidating some points of Truth's biography, but mostly preaching loudly to the already convinced. Or that's my sense of it anyway. By 1850, when this was published, polarization around the issue was well calcified, and mostly people only talked futilely past each other. I remember when this kind of entrenched division was harder to understand, but we are more and more living it again. In many cases in many ways it seems fair to call the situation a Cold Civil War. Therefore, the appendix has some reflexive interest in seeing the arguments against slavery made when there were still arguments being made for it. If we've truly moved past that, I guess we've seen some progress.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)