Person · 1797 CE – 1883 CE · Enlightenment and Revolutions
Sojourner Truth
- Also known as
- Isabella Baumfree
- Isabella Baumfree
- Isabella Baumfree
- Isabella Baumfree
- Isabella Baumfree
- Isabella Baumfree
The woman who would call herself Sojourner Truth began her life speaking Dutch in the hilly lowlands of Swartekill, New York.
She spoke with a heavy Low Dutch accent, a linguistic inheritance from the Hudson Valley lowlands where she spent her first thirty years. She never learned to read or write, yet she possessed a rare, commanding authority of voice—deep, resonant, and entirely free of the southern slave dialect that white writers would later retroactively thrust upon her. When she spoke, she drew upon the sheer physical reality of her life: she was a six-foot-tall woman who had spent decades clearing timber, hauling stone, and spinning wool. Decades after her escape, when she stood before audiences of white reformers who often viewed the struggles of Black Americans and the struggles of women as entirely separate spheres, she embodied the physical refutation of their assumptions. As her biographer Nell Irvin Painter would observe, in an era when most Americans reflexively conceptualized slaves as male and women as white, she stood as a towering reminder that among the Black are women, and among the women, there are Black.
She was born Isabella Bomefree around 1797 in Swartekill, a hilly Dutch-speaking enclave in Ulster County, New York, some ninety miles north of New York City. Her parents, James and Elizabeth, were the property of Colonel Hardenbergh. Her father, a tall man captured from the Gold Coast of modern Ghana, was called "Bomefree," the Dutch word for tree; her mother, "Mau-Mau Bet," was the daughter of enslaved people from Guinea. The world of Isabella’s childhood was not the expansive cotton plantation of the American South, but the cold, insular slaveholding culture of rural New York. Her first memories were of a dark cellar where she slept with her parents on damp straw, and of the agonizing stories of her older siblings sold away to distant buyers. When Charles Hardenbergh died in 1806, the nine-year-old Isabella was auctioned off alongside a flock of sheep, sold for one hundred dollars to a cruel tavern keeper named John Neely. Neely beat her daily, once with a bundle of rods, for her inability to understand his English instructions. By 1810, after another brief, harsh ownership under Martinus Schryver, she was purchased by John Dumont of West Park.
For sixteen years, Dumont’s farm was the crucible of her life. He subjected her to repeated sexual abuse, which in turn provoked the relentless, hostile harassment of his wife, Elizabeth Waring Dumont. Isabella sought solace in a brief, doomed romance with Robert, an enslaved man from a neighboring farm. When Robert’s owner discovered the relationship, fearing that any offspring would legally belong to Dumont rather than himself, he and his son savagely beat Robert in front of Isabella until Dumont intervened; she never saw Robert again, and the memory of his battered face haunted her for the rest of her life. She was subsequently married to an older enslaved man named Thomas, bearing five children: James, who died in infancy; Diana, the product of her rape by Dumont; and Peter, Elizabeth, and Sophia.
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