Sojourner Truth

Painter develops Truth's biography in three phases, which roughly coincide with the history of slavery policy in the US over the course of the 19th century. The first concentrates on what could be called her socially preconscious experience as a slave born in rural New York and the impact that obtaining her freedom had on her development. It includes details of how her experiences shaped her perceptions of the varieties of human experience and such abstractions as justice, truth, freedom, and slavery. This section of the text takes her life through the Constitutional abolition of the slave trade in the North and her own manumission, as well as the way personal experience affected the emergence of a wider social consciousness (and conscience).

The second part of the narrative, subtitled "A Life," shows the shaping of Truth

. . .
of multiple cultural, political, and social transformations. Painter's picture of the young Truth as a courageous but naïve citizen emergent reinforces the sense that she had no particular idea of becoming a famous activist and political symbol when she was freed. She seems to have been oblivious of slavery as a feature of public policy, though she was acutely conscious of personal-power relations. It was as an individual mother, not as an activist woman with an agenda, that she sought to reclaim her son Peter from the Alabama planter to whom he had been sold. She understood that she was not being taken seriously by the solipsistic Gedneys and that the planter, Fowler, treated Peter brutally. She seems not to have recognized that their attitude was likely as much a result of the power of slavery to construct social relations as any personal animus. Thus when the planter beat his wife Eliza Gedney to death, she had "contradictory" feelings, mourning for the self-absorbed Gedneys despite their cruelty toward her. More tellingly, however, "she recognized--as the Gedneys had not--that a man who would abuse a black child so cruelly could murder someone white, even one of his own, especially a woman" (Painter 35). Psychologically naï
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1828
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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