Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance

Abstract

“I don't read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations,” proclaimed Sojourner Truth in her war against the arts of reading and writing as sites of white supremacist power that dehumanized and made invisible the lives of African American women, children, and men (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols., 1881–1922, vol. II, p. 927). Mindful of how her oratory and language were distorted in print, Truth maintained a lifelong determination “to be reported in a grammatical and smooth way, ‘not as if I was saying tickety-ump-ump-nicky-nacky’” (ibid.). Categorical in her rejection of textual misrepresentations of her speeches and songs that were beyond her control, Truth turned not only to narrative production by working with white female editors she trusted and respected—including Olive Gilbert and Frances W. Titus—but also to photographic portraiture. If the collaborative research undertaken by Zoe Trodd, John Stauffer, and myself for Picturing Frederick Douglass (2015) establishes Frederick Douglass's pioneering status as the most photographed black or white U.S. male of the nineteenth century, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's wonderfully original and powerfully compelling Enduring Truths confirms Truth's status as the radically innovative black female experimenter of the genre.