Nell Painter's biography of Sojourner Truth offers readers a richly rewarding experience for both the mind and the spirit. In keeping with the book's subtitle, she sets forth in appropriate detail two facets of this towering figure in African American history-her life as a slave, evangelist, and antislavery feminist; and her symbolic representation inAmerican literature and popular culture. Painter has skillfully crafted one woman's story into a powerful lens that brings nineteenth-century images of slavery, African American spirituality, women's experience, American religious movements, and social reform into compelling focus. Indeed, one can feel the historian educating herself about broad and largely unexplored landscapes in the study of black and female participation in nonmainstream movements in American religious history.

The book begins with the birth of the slave Isabella in upstate New York in the 1790s, and provides a sketchy but adequately documented account of her early life. Painter is attentive to the role of slavery in the economy of the slaveholding North and provides a helpful overview of the Dutch Calvinist subculture in which Isabella learned Dutch as her first language. Isabella's life as a slave included farming, household chores, and nursing. There are poignant accountsof her firsthand experience of many of the horrors of slavery, including brutal whippings, sexual abuse by male and female owners, forced separation of familymembers by sale, and unfulfilled promises of emancipation. Especially insightful is Painter's discussion of the slave mentality that manifested itself in Isabella's perception of the white persons who abused her as substitute parents akin to God. Isabella's marriage to Thomas, a fellow slave, lasted from 1815 to 1826, during which time she gave birth to five children.

In 1826 Isabella walked away from slavery, the marriage, and all but the youngest of her children. Her act of freeing herself was the fruition of the spirituality she cultivated by worshiping God in a brush arbor she had built for herself on an island in a stream. Her religious sensibility, Painter suggests, was "syncretic" and "very much in flux," a blend of West African animism, European paganism, Dutch Reformed Calvinism, and Arminian Methodism. In 1827, around the time of the annual Pinkster celebration (an Afro-Dutch carnival based upon the Dutch observance of Pentecost), Isabella experienced "pentecostal outpourings of the Holy Spirit." Her perfectionist leanings led to a dramatic testimony of sanctification, which occurred just as her former slaveowner had come to reclaim her from the home where she had found employment for wages. Her vision of her own sin in the "dread presence" of God caused her to lose consciousness. Her spiritual struggle culminated in a comforting and liberating vision of Jesus.

The effectiveness of this newly discovered power in resisting the evil of slavery was severely tested. Isabella successfully pursued legal means for the return of her six-year-old son Peter, who had been sold into slavery in Alabama. When she discovered that her child was covered with scars from head to toe as a result of having been brutally beaten, kicked, and whipped by his owner, she "called upon her God to 'render unto them double' for what they had done to Peter." Soon thereafter she received news that the same man had brutally beaten his own wife to death. The dead woman's mother, who had laughed at Isabella's appeal for help in bringing about Peter's rescue, lost her mind after her own daughter's murder. Painter errs in claiming that Isabella's curse was an act of witchcraft, having disregarded the fact that the curse invoked the retributive justice of God and not the forces of evil typically associated with witchcraft. In any case, Isabella took Peter with her to the city of New York, where she fully embarked upon her evangelistic preaching ministry in association with a succession of millenarian religious groups.

A milestone in Isabella's lifelong project of reinventing herself was June 1, 1843. On that Pentecost Sunday, she responded to the call of the Spirit to flee the wickedness of the city and take on the new name Sojourner Truth, befitting her role as itinerant preacher. Painter identifies significant places in NewYork and New England where Truth sojourned. Her travels included a period of residence in a utopian commune in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she first became involved in antislavery feminism. In 1857 she joined a spiritualist community of Progressive Friends in Michigan, and by 1860 she had settled in Battle Creek, where she died in 1883 at the age of 86 (according to Painter's estimate).

Painter's analysis of Sojourner Truth's emergence as a symbol consists of a detailed inquiry into a series of fabricated incidents and misquoted statements on the one hand, and, on the other, Truth's propagation of her own image in photographic portraits. Painter's discussion begins with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's article "Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl" in the April 1863 Atlantic Monthly. Stowe was by then an international celebrity, and her essay-in the preeminent American journal of its day-did much to spread Truth's fame. But, as Painter shows, Stowe's account was seriously marred by condescension and factual errors. While acknowledging Stowe's genuine admiration for her subject, Painter notes that "In 'The Libyan Sibyl,' Stowe and her family appear as people of culture who appreciate Sojourner Truth as a primitive objet d'art and source of entertainment."

Stowe's article was the source of the famous rebuke Truth supposedly uttered in response to Frederick Douglass's agitation for blacks to use force to gain their freedom: "Frederick, isGod dead?" Painter argues that Truth never uttered that rebuke, at least not with the intention of shaming Douglass in the name of Christian forbearance. Nor, apparently, did she ask the rhetorical question frequently ascribed to her in the writings of black and feminist scholars-and read and recited during Black History Month celebrations in churches, classrooms, and auditoriums all over America in remembrance of the great strength and courage of Sojourner Truth: "Ar'n't I a woman?" Based upon careful comparison of Truth's speech at the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention as presented in an article by white feminist Frances Dana Gage-published 12 years after the fact-and the minutes recorded by the convention secretary, Marius Robinson, where the question is never mentioned, Painter concludes that this famous phrase was Gage's invention.

But Truth was not a passive figure merely to be represented-or misrepresented-in the discourse of others. In an impressive demonstration of her creative insight as a historian, Painter shows how Truth projected herself in the format of cartes-de-visites, the inexpensive photographic portraits that became popular in the 1860s. Offering authentic representations of Truth's self-constructed identity as a respectable middle-class matron, these photographic images refute the contrived and stereotyped portrayals produced by her white feminist contemporaries: "Truth could not write, but she could project herself photographically. Photographsfurnished a new means of communication-one more powerful than writing. The photographs insist: 'I am a woman.' " The meticulous scholar retrieves and reproduces seven such photographs to drive her point home. Based upon her thorough overview of an amazing assortment of twentieth-century icons and images of Sojourner Truth, including T-shirts, lapel buttons, postcards, postage stamps, and a robot launched into space in 1995, Painter concludes that Truth has become "American material culture's female equivalent of Malcolm X."

This is a great book because it equips and encourages the reader to engage the historical Sojourner Truth, and at the same time to release the symbolic misrepresentations of her life and work without renouncing whatever deep convictions one may hold with respect to what she indeed stood for. Christian readers, for example, will surely dissent when Painter places Truth alongside Jesus in the company of "invented greats," and religious scholars might find fault with her use of the term pentecostal to describe Truth's spirituality, notwithstanding Painter's forthright acknowledgment of the obvious anachronism.

Painter's biography concludes with a provocative chapter entitled "Coda: The Triumph of a Symbol," a courageously transparent exploration of her own struggle to understand why even scholarly audiences have rejected her efforts to set the record straight. The apocryphal queries "Frederick, is God dead?" and "Ar'n't I a woman?"-as well as actual incidents, such as the time Truth bared a breast at a public meeting in response to the challenge of proslavery white men, who claimed that she was a man impersonating a woman-have been recounted and embellished to secure Sojourner Truth's exemplary status as a strong black woman who wielded word and gesture to bring important public proceedings to a halt in a "scenario of rupture." Painter describes her dismay at experiencing herself in such a role, functioning as a Sojourner Truth who silences other scholars with words that shatter prevailing images with the strength of scholarly conviction. ("Black women," she writes, "are not ordinarily speakers and consequently are difficult to integrate into ongoing business.") The biographer concedes defeat in the end; "the symbol we require in our public life still triumphs over scholarship." But in Painter's book, at least, scholarship prevails, bringing both person and symbol to light.

Cheryl J. Sanders is professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity. She is the author of Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (Oxford University Press) and Ministry at the Margins: The Prophetic Mission of Women, Youth, and the Poor, just published by InterVarsity Press.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.

Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 20

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