Why write an essay on the well-known Sojourner Truth, especially well-known in New York? Well, my motivation is none other than a long-felt comment about mankind's inhumanity towards mankind, and I use her to illustrate the rare power of honesty and truth.
The Dutch-speaking family of Colonel Hardenburgh, of Swartekill, just north of Rifton in Ulster County, were slave owners. One child of their slaves -- Isabella -- was born there somewhere between 1797 and 1800. Although most families held no slaves, the wealthy Hardenburghs had about seven, including Betsey and James -- a tall straight-standing honest man -- parents of Isabella.
Isabella's mother, Betsey, instilled in her children the importance of truth, and her own deep faith that God sees and witnesses everything.
Colonel Hardenburgh died when Isabella was an infant, and his slaves were passed to his son Charles, who lived nearby and ran a hotel and farm. The half-dozen slaves lived in his cellar, sleeping on loose floorboards with some straw, where in wet weather they could hear the water swirling beneath them.
According to the Pulizer-Prize winning Carleton Mabee, Isabella possibly had a dozen siblings, most of whom had been sold away before Isabella could remember.
When Isabella was about nine, still only speaking Dutch, she was sold to an English-speaking family by the name of Nealy, nearer to Kingston. Her parents, whom she hardly saw again, were freed by the Hardenburghs, on account of her father's age and infirmities, with the idea that Betsey, who was younger, would look after James. Sadly, Isabella's mother died first, and, blind and helpless, her father was abandoned, to live alone in a shanty in the woods, where, one winter, too feeble to keep a fire going and covered with vermin he froze to death. [Ref.1., p.3.]
When Dutch-speaking Isabella was unable to understand Neely's orders he would whip her, and much later in life she showed her upper body scars to a largely belligerent audience.
At eleven she was sold to a tavern-keeper in Port Ewen, and then at thirteen to the Dumont family, farmers in West Park, township of New Paltz. Mr Dumont found her to be strong and energetic, and praised her hard work. Then, as a farm-hand teenager she found herself attracted to a slave on a neighboring farm, Robert, but Robert's owner, a cruel Englishman by the name of Catlin, or possibly Catton, forbade them to see each other, beating Robert almost to death, because he intended that Robert would marry a slave girl on his own farm.
At about seventeen Isabella married an older slave, Tom, on the Dumont Farm and in the next dozen years found herself to be the mother of four children who would survive.
Slavery was abolished in NYState in 1827, when Isabella was about 29. Dumont had promised her he would free her a year early, but reneged on the promise, and so she left, walking with her baby Sophia -- leaving her other children to be looked after by Tom back at the Dumonts. (Her 5 year-old son Peter had recently been sold.) By midday she found herself at the Van Wagenen house in Bloomington, who said she could work for them if she wanted to. Dumont soon found her and demanded her back, but the kindly Van Wagenens paid him off, and she stayed with them, at last free, for about a year.
Her little son Peter had been sold out-of-state -- which was illegal -- to a slave owner in Alabama. The story of how this tall, very black, majestic woman walked barefoot to the Kingston court and insisted on getting him back is too long (as is the rest of her life) to be fitted into a four-minute essay.
Unable ever to read or write, she managed to travel as a now-free person to women's rights meetings, and address often hostile groups over large parts of the country, before dying in her mid 80s.
Thus, just one illustration of mankind's inhumanity, up against truth and courage.
References:
1. "Sojourner Truth", by Carleton Mabee (with his daughter Susan); New York University Press, 1993.
2. "Narrative of Sojourner Truth", as told to various people. One example is edited and with an Introduction by Margaret Washington, Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, NY, (1993); another is from the Schomburg Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers, Oxford University Press, (1991).
Dr. David Nightingale is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the State University of New York at NewPaltz and is the co-author of the text, A Short Course in General Relativity.
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