Abstract
In New York City on the first ofJune, 1843, a woman known as Isabella Van Wagner changed her name to Sojourner Truth and began an itinerant ministry. The date was momentous, for in 1843, June 1 was Pentecost, the Christian holiday that falls fifty days after Easter and commemorates the day when the Holy Spirit filled Jesus' disciples and gave them the power to preach to strangers. Pentecostals such as Sojourner Truth heed Luke's narration in the biblical book of Acts, in which the Holy Spirit made the disciples speak in tongues, in the foreign languages that let them teach people of all nations of the wonderful works of God. God said through the disciples already this was mediated knowledge that he would pour out his spirit upon all flesh, and men and daughters and servants would prophesy.1 Born into slavery in New York State, in the Hudson River county of Ulster, about 1797, Isabella took up her ministry in obedience to the Pentecostal imperative that had divided her life between slavery and freedom sixteen years before. The power of the Holy Spirit had struck her first in 1827, when emancipation in New York State, Pentecost, and the attendant slave holiday of Pinkster had virtually coincided. Isabella underwent a cataclysmic religious experience and the Holy Spirit, the power within Pentecost, remained a crucial force throughout her life a source of inspiration and a means of knowing. To the woman who became Sojourner Truth, knowing and being known were always of both material and epistemological significance.2
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