Sojourner Truth probably never said Ain't I a Woman in that famous voice
The speech everyone knows was published twelve years after she gave it, rewritten in a Southern dialect and built around a repeated question. The earliest report contains no such line. Sojourner Truth grew up in New York speaking Dutch, and kept a Dutch accent for the rest of her life.
She was born Isabella Bomefree around 1797 in Swartekill, in Esopus, New York, one of 10 or 12 children of enslaved parents; her father's nickname came from the Dutch for tree, a nod to his height. At nine she was auctioned along with a flock of sheep for $100, and she passed through several owners before John Dumont of West Park bought her in 1810. Dumont promised her freedom a year ahead of New York's emancipation, which was completed on July 4, 1827, then backed out.
Late in 1826 she left with her baby daughter Sophia, later saying she had not run off but walked off. A couple in New Paltz, Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen, took her in and paid Dumont $20 for her remaining time. When she learned that her five-year-old son Peter had been illegally sold to Alabama, she sued in the New York Supreme Court and won him back in 1828, among the first Black women to defeat a white man in court.
On Pentecost Sunday, June 1, 1843, she renamed herself Sojourner Truth, convinced the Spirit was calling her to preach, and set off with a few belongings in a pillowcase. At the Northampton Association, an abolitionist community in Massachusetts, she met Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and gave her first anti-slavery speech. Garrison privately published her dictated Narrative in 1850. She paid off her house by selling portrait cards captioned with the line that she sold the shadow to support the substance.
Her 1851 address at a women's rights convention in Akron was first reported a month later by Marius Robinson, who was present, without the famous refrain. In 1863 Frances Gage printed a very different version with the question repeated four times, and that became the standard text. During the Civil War Truth recruited Black soldiers for the Union, and afterwards pressed unsuccessfully for land grants for freed people. In 2009 a bust in the Capitol Visitor Center made her the first African American woman with a statue in the building.
Source: Sojourner Truth
