Sojourner Truth

the Novel

Sojourner Truth
They Once Called Her Isabella
by
Forest Hairston

Isabella, they called her Isabella on the day she was born into slavery. On that day it was1797, in a lonely place that someone chose to call Hurley, Ulster County, New York. She could be Isabella but only for a moment that would slowly wither into its strange oblivion. Isabella, a name so oddly profound for the child born to become Sojourner Truth. Still, Isabella, was a beautiful name, yet though handed to her among the drudgery of bondage. A place and time that rebelled amidst her unconquerable saintly emotion. As it was to be, so acted upon by the will of God, in 1828, the state of New York emancipated every degree of slavery. And abruptly Isabella was freed.

She was free to walk away from her shackled bondage and never look back. But her master renown for being ignorant and cruel had sternly denied educating his slaves. And so even for free illiterate Black people, it was extremely hard to walk away and be free. Isabella and many of these freed African people were like children lost somewhere in a foreign world. And so, in 1829 Isabella arrived in New York City penniless and hungry. Yet the mystic voice inside her mind and the beauty of love had already consumed her saintly soul, and Isabella began preaching in the streets.

People would gather all along the avenue to hear Isabella preach and talk about God and his Holy goodness. And fervently with tears and the emotional chagrin of a slave haunted by the cruelty inflicted on her, she talked about the evil of slavery. But in the year of 1843, she was deeply touched by the word of God. Suddenly, she woke up one morning and her bedroom was drenched in bright sunlight. She got up, looked at herself in the mirror on the wall, smiled and Sojourner Truth set Isabella free.

Black History

Black Legacy

Sojourner Truth was a Black woman, who professed that she had heard the word of God. Perhaps so, but who could deny that she indeed was chosen to become even bigger than life. Sojourner went on preaching all along the eastern seaboard. She fought slavery and became one of the greatest known abolitionist of her time. She toured the country speaking out against slavery and other social degradation. People would come from near and far merely to listen to, or to even be touched by Sojourner Truth. In 1850, she grasped the women's rights movement and ardently spoke for the woman's cause. At the wake of the Civil War, Sojourner solicited money, gifts and all else that she could for the Black volunteer regiments. She wanted her Black men to stand up and be counted for. It was then, in 1864 that President Abraham Lincoln cordially received her into the White House.

Sojourner Truth was here at the awakening dawn of America. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Frances Anne Kemble, and still there was William Wells Brown, Sojourner knew these people quite well. They are all legendary faces. They were all there together fighting against slavery. And here somewhere finally, the long winding journey led the fabulous Sojourner Truth to Battle Creek, Michigan, where she lived and fought on courageously until November 26, 1883. Suddenly so gently, her old age touched the last breath that ebbed from her tired body. Yet still, the young slave girl named Isabella, nor the great lady, Sojourner Truth will ever die. Her spirit and her undying love will ever live on. And forever, her life is yet still about something called Black History.