Sojourner Truth 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History Chicks – Sojourner Truth 2025

Episode Release Date: February 26, 2025

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Introduction and Historical Context

In this episode of The History Chicks: A Women's History Podcast, hosts Susan and Beckett delve deep into the life of Sojourner Truth, one of history's most remarkable African American women. Celebrating her contributions during Black History Month, the episode aims to present an authentic portrayal of Truth, challenging the myths and misconceptions perpetuated over time.

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Early Life and Enslavement

Sojourner Truth, originally born Isabella Hardenberg in 1797 in Hurley, New York, was the 11th child of James "Bom Free" and Betsy Hardenberg, an enslaved couple owned by Colonel Johannes Hardenberg. New York, once a significant slave market, still permitted slavery in 1797, reflecting the complex regional dynamics of the institution.

Beckett notes, “Her father was a first-generation slave, stolen directly from Ghana, and her mother descended from people taken from Guinea” (02:54). This recent tie to Africa distinguishes her lineage from many other enslaved individuals whose ancestors had been in America for generations.

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Life Under Different Masters

Under Colonel Hardenberg, Isabella—later known as Belle—experienced the harsh realities of slavery. Their household was far from idyllic; Hardenberg had lost multiple wives and children to sales, instilling a sense of insecurity in Belle from a young age. One poignant story shared by Susan recounts how Belle's brother Michael was forcibly taken from the home, emphasizing the constant threat of family separation (07:11).

In 1799, New York enacted a gradual emancipation law, freeing those born into slavery after July 4th once they reached a certain age. Belle narrowly missed this cutoff, prolonging her period of bondage. Upon Colonel Hardenberg's death, his son Charles inherited the estate and relocated the entire household, forcing slaves to live in cramped, deplorable conditions in the cellar—a stark contrast to any semblance of family life they once had (09:14).

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Sale to the Neelys and Subsequent Hardships

Belle’s life took another grim turn when she was sold to John Neely, an English storekeeper who didn’t understand her native Dutch. Communication barriers led to severe mistreatment, including physical abuse and relentless demeaning tasks. At just nine years old, Belle was auctioned again, fetching $100—a meager sum that barely covered her value as property (15:33).

Despite the cruelty, a beacon of hope emerged when Bom Free, Belle's father, visited and promised assistance. However, circumstances led to further tragedy when Bom Free himself succumbed to starvation, leaving Belle isolated and desperate (20:38).

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Activism and Legal Battles

Determined to reunite with her grandson Peter, who had been sold to the Deep South, Belle harnessed the fledgling American legal system to fight for his freedom. Her courage led her to court multiple times, notably succeeding in one of the earliest cases where a Black woman challenged a white master in court. This victory not only reclaimed Peter but also set a precedent for future legal battles against slavery (27:13).

Belle’s activism extended beyond personal battles. She became a prominent speaker, intertwining her faith with her fight against slavery and women's rights. Her eloquent speeches, such as the renowned "Ain't I a Woman?", challenged societal norms and advocated for equality across both race and gender lines (80:28).

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Legacy, Misrepresentation, and Final Years

Sojourner Truth's legacy is multifaceted, blending her relentless fight for freedom with her role as a pioneering women's rights advocate. However, her story has often been overshadowed by myths and misrepresentations. For instance, her famous speech has been altered over time, with later versions diluting her powerful messages into more palatable forms for broader audiences. Additionally, false accounts, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal of Truth, have perpetuated stereotypes that undermine her true impact (84:47).

Despite these challenges, Truth's unwavering commitment to justice never waned. She continued her activism well into her later years, advocating for the rights of freed slaves and women until her death in 1883 at the age of approximately 86. Her gravestone bears the inscription, “Is God dead?”, a misquotation that has ironically overshadowed her true sentiments of faith and resilience (116:34).

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Notable Quotes

• Susan on Terminology: “...we would use enslaved and enslaver. It puts the people on the same level of humanity...” (00:25)

• Beckett on Belle’s Heritage: “Her father was a first-generation slave, stolen directly from Ghana...” (02:54)

• Beckett on Legal Struggles: “This was her book of life, which was her scrapbook that she carried around...” (100:48)

• Susan on Legacy: “...there's two stories. There's what happened to her and the person she was, which can stand on its own as being extraordinary.” (114:51)

• Beckett on Speech Alterations: “Mrs. Gage rewrote during the Civil War, 12 years later in dialect from the Deep South...” (87:57)

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Conclusion

Sojourner Truth's life was a testament to resilience, courage, and unwavering dedication to justice. From her harrowing experiences under different masters to her groundbreaking legal battles and powerful speeches, Truth carved a path that would inspire generations to come. The History Chicks podcast effectively sheds light on her true story, advocating for a more accurate and respectful remembrance of her contributions to American history.

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Note: Timestamps are referenced in the summary to correlate significant quotes and events discussed during the episode.

Transcript

[Susan]

Welcome to the History Chicks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

[Beckett]

Hello and welcome to the show. Today, in honor of Black History Month, we are bringing you again the story of an OG Sojourner Truth, who has often been so very misrepresented by both her contemporaries and those that came after her.

[Susan]

This episode is from 2017. And like in life, when we know better, we do better. You are going to hear us use the term slave and the term master. Now, in 2025, we would not use those terms. We would use enslaved and enslaver. It puts the people on the same level of humanity, except one group is having horrific treatment done to to them against their will, and the other is consciously making a decision to do that treatment to another human being. Let me also talk about our boys who were 12 at the time, and now they're 20. And life is about change, isn't it? And now, without further ado, on with the show.

[Beckett]

Sojourner Truth is most famous for her women's rights speech entitled Ain't I a Woman? There's a certain irony in the fact that most of what everyone knows about her is just not the truth. All the end. Let's talk about Sojourner Truth.

[Susan]

But first, let's drop her into history. In 1851, Rigoletto premiered in Venice. Moby Dick and the New York Times were first published. The refrigeration machine, the telescope, the Yale lock and the sewing machine were all patented. A fire destroyed 35,000 volumes in the US Library of Congress, and another one destroyed one quarter of San Francisco. The first America's cup sailing race was held in the waters off the Isle of Wight. Mary Shelley and James Audubon both died. And on May 29, 1851, a formerly enslaved woman named Sojourner Truth gave a speech at a women's rights convention that's still being discussed today.

[Beckett]

Isabella Hardenberg, who at the time of her birth was most likely just called Hardenberg's. Isabella, was born sometime in 1797 in Hurley, New York, a town about 90 miles north of New York City. She was the 11th child of James Bomfrey and Betsy, who were an enslaved couple owned by Colonel Johannes Hardenberg. You're like New York. I thought slavery was the deep self. Don't we all have that picture, you know, gone, the wind. We've all seen it. Cotton plantations, the Civil War. Well, when Isabella, her parents called her Bell. So can we?

[Susan]

I hope so, because that's what I wrote in my notes.

[Beckett]

Okay, so when. When Belle was Born. There were actually two northern states that still allowed slavery. New York and New Jersey. New York, once New Amsterdam, that's New York City to you and me, had been a major slave market only a hundred years ago from here. So Bell's papa himself had been stolen from Ghana. He is literally a first generation slave. Her mother was the daughter of people who had been stolen from Guinea. So it's a much, much more recent tie to Africa than most of the other people we talk about.

[Susan]

Yeah. And you don't think about the north having that many slaves because it wasn't dependent economically on having them. You know, the cost of their operations didn't matter. They used them mostly for domestic help and help on their farm. So the number of slaves that they owned was less. But, you know, it doesn't matter. You own one, you might as well own 100.

[Beckett]

You know, the, the fight against slavery actually had begun right after the Revolutionary War. I. We just don't talk about this in history. You don't learn about this. Abolitionists had been fighting to put the removal of slavery into the Bill of Rights, blocked by mostly rich landowners, like Susan said, for economic reasons. Of course. It seems like what it always is. Well, let each state decide. Ended up being the Revolutionary War position, because you know what, they're only loosely gathered together as a country anyway, and you don't want to make people mad and leave the group. Right. So, okay, fair enough. In order to stay together as a group against Britain, who we just left, we're going to let each state decide on this one. But all over the north, activists, mostly Quakers, so 10 points for the Quakers, were chipping away at slavery. So chipping away, chipping away legislation here, pressure there. And so within the 20 years following the Revolutionary War, they had succeeded in whittling its influence down north of Maryland. So we just have the two states left that still have legal slavery. It's still these major Dutch landowners, though, like Colonel Hardenberg, owner of Bell, that were opposing progress. And in the south, you can just forget it in the south because the cotton gin had just been invented. And you know what that means. Cotton became king. These planters needed a lot of labor. The south was hardening up on all this free labor. You know, can you see the seeds of the Civil War here? Because I sure can.

[Susan]

Oh, yeah. And it's not that far off from the Revolutionary War. You know, we're talking 1797.

[Beckett]

Let's go back to New York. Let's join our story. James, who was always called bum free, which means a Free tree, I guess.

[Susan]

Yeah. I think it was implied that because he was very tall and very strong, and he reminded people of a tree trunk of a tree. He looked like that. So they called him the Dutch word for tree, and it changed into bomb free.

[Beckett]

Hmm. Okay.

[Susan]

Well. Which is so ironic that they added the free to the tree.

[Beckett]

Well, and then Mama Bet, as Mama was called, had been given a little house on the ground. So they plant a little garden. And so you think, well, maybe this is going to be, you know, the whole benevolent owner story, the idealized, oh, we're just a big, happy family story. Baumfrey had lost two previous wives, and I'm not sure how many children to them being sold away from him. That is not domestic bliss. Mama Bette herself had given birth to 10 children before Belle.

[Susan]

She only had one of those siblings living at home still. Her brother Peter, who was the youngest boy in the family. All the rest had been sold off by Colonel Hardenberg.

[Beckett]

This is where the narratives diverge, because Belle may have been the only child in the house when she was born. So either Peter is older or younger, and no one really knows for sure exactly. He appears after her in Charles Hardenberg's inventory.

[Susan]

Oh, I see.

[Beckett]

It doesn't necessarily matter. There's no sense of security if you're older or younger. So. So. So we don't know, in fact, what happened to most of Belle's brothers and sisters. Did they die? Some were sold. But I do want to tell you one story. This is a story that Baumfrey and Mama told Belle often as a young child. And I wonder if it's to prepare her for the inevitable separation is all I can think.

[Susan]

Well, after you've survived your children being stolen and sold away from you, you learn to harden yourself, maybe a little bit, totally preparing her for it. So Mama Bette would tell Belle stories about her other children, specifically one about a brother named Michael. It's so heartbreaking. He was about five years old when a sleigh pulled up in the front of the house. He saw his sister be carried out of the house in a box and put in the sleigh. And he realized that that was going to be his fate as well. So he ran back into the house and tried to hide, but unfortunately, he couldn't. He was pulled out kicking and screaming and put on the sleigh and taken away and never seen again.

[Beckett]

The strange white man with a fancy horse that was so exciting to see turned out to be a terrifying monster. He just walked right in the house, pulled Michael out and took him away, which is kidnapping, obviously, in any other time and place from here. The fact is, the children had been sold and there is nothing Mama Bet and Bom Free could do. Imagine that. I mean, if you have children or grandchildren, imagine a stranger coming into your house, picking them up, and society thinking that was okay. Not only is there no one to tell, everyone's going to look at you like. And your tears are thought to be ridiculous if you're the mother of these children, even punishable by a beating. And this is not the first or the second or the fifth child you'd lost this way. And then you have another baby. It's just. I can't even process this.

[Susan]

No, no. I mean, the feeling. I'm not defending this at all. The feeling was that the slaves and, you know, black people did not. They weren't a whole person, that they didn't have the same type of emotional connection to their family. They really did look at them almost like livestock. And it's as horrifying as that is, you know, that's what they told themselves to justify this kind of action, which.

[Beckett]

Is sort of ridiculous if they're farmers, because if you take a calf away from a cow, both sides of that equation are real sad. I just. I. Anyway, moving on from that, she told her other stories. That's just the most illustrative one I can get to about what's been happening to this family for years and years. So a few things happened. When Belle was around 2 years old, New York State passed a law, and it took effect on July 4, 1799. So anyone born into slavery on or about that date was to be freed at the age of 28 for men and 25 for women. She just missed the cutoff. That's a bummer. This was sort of a compromise. The Quakers were at it again and the abolitionists that weren't Quakers. Sort of a compromise that had to be agreed upon in order to push, ultimately, the end of slavery in New York. So the realists among them realized that gradual reduction of the labor force is going to be the only way they're going to get people to agree to it. So the second thing that happened was Master Johannes Hardenberg died, and his son Charles inherited his father's estate. And he didn't want to live there. He just built this big, grand new mansion. And so the livestock and all the slaves were transported to the new place. And this is how low these human beings were regarded. There are no cozy little houses at the new place. You know, goodbye, garden Goodbye. Any pretense of family life. 12 people were forced to live in the cellar.

[Susan]

Now, the only light came in from very thin, thin windows. There was a dirt floor with wood planks put on it. But still, when it rained, that floor is going to get wet. I grew up in a house like this. It was built actually about this time. And the cellar, I. It had a certain smell. It was always musty when it rained. We actually had a little creek that ran through our cellar, and that's what this family is growing up in. And they're all in this dark, dank place, and that's their home.

[Beckett]

And the family actually was able to stay together. And I'm sad to say that is low bar.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Beckett]

For a period of about seven years, the family worked in the house and on the land and were able to stay together. Mama missed her other children so dreadfully and told Belle and Peter all about them. I think, to have her children, Belle and Peter, bear witness, I guess, to these children. So they stayed in the family, in the hearts of the family. Does that make sense? It just. It seems like a long shot to ever think they would ever meet again.

[Susan]

Mm. Well, yeah. You know, Belle never learned to read or write, so they couldn't write down their stories at all. And it's just oral traditions. And that's. I think that's what Mama Bette was doing. She would talk about the stars at night and how she looks to them and knows that there's a God up there looking down on them and looking down on all of her children. Those are the same stars that they were looking at. She was kind of giving Belle and Peter a way to kind of deal with the emotions of the situation, like.

[Beckett]

Maybe putting into their minds that when inevitably, you go away from me, all you have to do is look up at the stars and know that I am looking up at those same stars. Thinking about you. That makes me feel pretty sad.

[Susan]

I know.

[Beckett]

I don't know why that got me so much. That really makes me feel upset.

[Susan]

Oh, no, you can cry.

[Beckett]

Well. And I just think you wouldn't be human if that didn't make you feel upset. I guess.

[Susan]

I don't know. Yes, you're right. I'm not crying. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make me upset to think about it. And. Yeah, I mean, I send my kid to college, and I'm a mess, and he's just an hour and a half away, so. And I know I'll be seeing him in his laundry.

[Beckett]

There's no good News here. The inevitable happened When Belle was around nine years old, Charles Hardenberg died. Mama and Bom Free tried to prepare their children for separation. And they said all they could. They gave them all the rules they'd need for survival around white people, namely, you know, wear a mask at all times, don't show emotion. Just be obedient and trust to God because he is going to be the steadfast friend that can travel with you when I can't. So the heirs didn't want Bumfrey. He was an old man, considerably older than his wife, living in the cellar, had aggrieved a lot of medical conditions.

[Susan]

They wanted to do something with him. So what they did is they freed him and they let Betsy also become freed so she could take care of James.

[Beckett]

This might sound benevolent, but I don't think it was. The state of New York had passed a law that no one could free a slave unless you gave them, I think, posted a bond of about $200 when you did it, or if you could prove they had a way or a person to take care of them. Because slave owners had just been turning out old slaves willy nilly when they were no longer useful. That's pretty cruel. You would not do that to actual livestock, would you? The absolute minimum humanitarian thing they could do, really. And still the heirs found a way around it. That's why they freed Mama, too, because that's the loophole. You take care of them. And now I ask you, what were they supposed to do? They had nowhere to go. They had no skills. The fear must have been extreme. And they begged. They begged to stay. They begged for mercy is how I read it. And the heirs let that go a while and then said they could stay in the cellar as long as they continued to serve the family. But now that they were technically free, we can just throw you out at any time. Also, you have to buy your own food and clothing. People are dirt bags. I cannot come to grips with this.

[Susan]

You know, they were going to sell Peter and Belle all along, and that's exactly what they did. Nine year old Belle was put on the auction block. And to make her more attractive for people to purchase, she went with a herd of sheep for $100, which is less than $2,000 in 2017. I'm sorry, that's the one that's getting me. Oh, we're going to be a mess by the end of this thing. Yeah, I can't. The terror. You know, her mom had been telling her these stories all along that couldn't even start to prepare her for that and the terror and the fright. Now, I don't even know if we've mentioned this before, but the Hardenbergs spoke Dutch, so their slaves spoke Dutch. It was the only language that they knew. So she's in this world where there's all this stuff going on around her and she can't understand it.

[Beckett]

So her new master, a storekeeper named John Neely, who was an Englishman, sort of realized that there is a major flaw in his new purchase. Right. As far as he's concerned. I mean, where would Belle have ever been exposed to English, I ask you? And Mrs. Neely was full of rage about this. I mean, she communicated with Belle like the stereotypical American in films. Like maybe if you scream it louder, Sauce pan, you know, like, this is a broom. It's not gonna work. And Mrs. Neely would slap her right across the face when she didn't understand something, which I can tell you is not a very recognized method of language education.

[Susan]

No, it's not. No, it's not. And she was their only slave, so they thought they had someone to do all their domestic work, and she couldn't even understand their commands.

[Beckett]

The Neelys were having a hard time in their business. Their store wasn't boycotted by the Dutch population. Exactly. But why would you go to an English shop if one of your own is available? Kind of. And so Mrs. Neely was kind of enraged at the Dutch people. And so here's this. Hot coals of fire every time her servant says one word of Dutch. And there's nothing stopping you from taking, taking out all your anger on this little nine year old girl. So Belle later described this period of her life as war. She would try anything. Like she tried to kind of pre clean, pre do anything to do ahead to stave off the abuse. It doesn't work. They just take advantage. I don't know. You know, one day she was sent to the barn and Mr. Neely ripped the shirt off her back and beat her until she fainted with metal rods he'd tied together and heated in the fire. And she is 11 years old at the time of this meeting.

[Susan]

Okay, you got me again. I, I, I. It's probably the mother in us, right?

[Beckett]

Not long afterward, along comes Bom free for a visit. He can't help noticing that his child is standing in the snow with no shoes on, that she's shivering in the cold with no warm clothes and definitely the spirits knocked out of her. But it's not until he gave her a hug when he Was about to go, and she shrieked. And then he saw her back. Did his head hang down? His poor daughter. I mean, his poor daughter. What could he even do? He's free, but what power does he have? And he promised he would help her. And I do not know how he did it. I don't know. But along comes a local tavern owner named Martin Shriver. And he's sort of a roughneck individual, I would say, kind of hard in the way. Like, think of ye olde England barkeep. Like a guy that would throw a glass at your head and tell you to get out of his tavern. I think he had a sideline as a fisherman with a vocabulary to match.

[Susan]

Yeah, exactly. So you're combining two kind of rough, stereotypical, you know, occupations.

[Beckett]

Well, and his wife matched him. They were peas in a pod. And all of this, when I was reading it, I was like, bom free. What are you thinking? I was super nervous about this. Like, I almost bit my nails off. This guy who really doesn't even believe in slavery, really, he bought Belle from her abusers for $5 more than they'd spent. And I don't think he got the sheep with either. You know what? They taught her to speak English, this couple. She had plenty of nutritious food. She had shoes. She had warm clothes and a safe place, A comfortable place to sleep. Not a fancy place, but she worked behind the bar and picked up quite a vocabulary of swear words. She also had, you know, she helped out.

[Susan]

She learned how to make beer. She learned how to fish. She ran errands. The family was rough around the edges, but they were very kind. They treated her like a human being, which she never really had.

[Beckett]

Well, she started smoking a pipe. But if that's the worst thing, you know what? Hooray.

[Susan]

That's right.

[Beckett]

She was actually better off here physically than she'd ever been in her life. Now, emotionally, yeah, that's a whole other thing. She's still not free. And mama had worked herself to death. Literally, literally worked herself to death trying to keep herself and her husband fed. She had slipped into a coma and died in the night. And now her old, weak, nearly blind papa was in a desperate situation. The family shunted him angrily between the heirs houses. Sometimes he had to walk five or 10 miles to get to his new temporary home. And Belle couldn't help him. Bom free was farmed out to this other couple to take care of another loophole situation of older slaves basically being thrown out into the world. And one by one, the caretakers died. And bom free. Starved to death. Starved to death all alone. And Belle never found out until it was too late. Almost two years passed in the tavern, and all that good food must have worked its magic, because in that short time between 11 and 13, Belle grew to almost 6ft tall. At 13. I know Jed has a friend like that. Like, you saw him in fifth grade, and everybody was the same height. And now you're like, who is this man?

[Susan]

That's the age when they just shoot up and they start to look like adults, you know? I'm watching my baby go through it.

[Beckett]

You are, too. Not as much as, you mean. Your son's gotten very tall.

[Susan]

He has, which is kind of funny, since I am very short. He surpassed me. I think he was, what, 10?

[Beckett]

It's not like we're giantesses. Well, I don't know what's gonna happen, because my husband did not. Okay, between the summer, between, gosh, I want to say sophomore and junior year, like, he. He left a small, nondescript boy, and then he worked bucking hay all summer in the hot, hot sun and grew, like, 14 inches. And when he got back, it was like, who's the new guy? Yeah, your.

[Susan]

Your husband's very tall.

[Beckett]

Yes. So I don't know, but not until 14 or 15.

[Susan]

Well, Jed's getting up there, isn't he?

[Beckett]

He's taller than me. Like I said, that's a lower.

[Susan]

Like, yeah, your bar is even lower than mine, but not by much. Like, an inch.

[Beckett]

Okay, so back to Sojourner for just a second. So we are operating in the tavern, and a customer named John Dumont offered to buy Belle for $300. That's a significant amount of money. I had read that the barkeep had had a vague notion of freeing her when she was 18, but you had to have all that money to go with her if you did that. And it was all in the distant future. It was kind of a nebulous plan. And. Oh, my gosh, that's a lot of money. That's like a year's worth of income, kind of. That's. So it was done. It was done. Belle was sold to this man, this Dumont, and traveled with him to his farm in New Paltz, which is about 10 miles away from the tavern. And John Dumont is already her fifth master.

[Susan]

This is probably a good time to take a break, and when we come back, we'll hear about what happens at the Dumonts. Beckett. I learned something.

[Beckett]

Oh, well, that's really good.

[Susan]

I know. Every day. Gotta learn that one thing I Had no idea that a pillowcase could have anti aging properties. Blissey's silk pillowcases do. I've been using them for my hair. I did not realize they're improving my skin as well.

[Beckett]

They're antibacterial. They're hypoallergenic. They're naturally cooling and breathable. There are so many benefits. All. All. The pillowcase not only improves your hair, it leads to better sleep.

[Susan]

And it's silk, not satin. It is 100% silk, and that makes all the difference in the world because I had tried a satin pillowcase before, and it did not do for my hair what these silk pillowcases do.

[Beckett]

And as someone with mermaid hair, you gotta be really careful about frizz or you have to embrace it. And so I chose to use a blissy pillowcase to try to combat the frizz rather than embrace it as my friend.

[Susan]

Yeah, I don't think frizz is my friend.

[Beckett]

Because you're a listener. Blissey is offering 60 nights risk free, plus an additional 30% off when you shop at blissy.com historychicks that's B L-I S S-Y.com historychicks and use code historychicks to get an additional 30% off.

[Susan]

Your skin and hair will thank. And we're back. Belle is about 13 years old. She is her full height of 6ft tall. She's strong, and she's just moved into a new family, the Dumonts.

[Beckett]

There were 10 other slaves at this farm and also a group of white servants, mostly maids, housemaids. Hired girls is what they were called because this is not Downton Abbey. And like any new hire at any new company, all of the other slaves let her into the ways of the corporation. Mr. He's all right. You do your work, you're okay. He's not a man for anger or loud words or beatings. He just likes to get along. But Mrs. Woo, you know, you just. She is full of fire. And you just stay out of her way. Which was easy for them to say because part of Belle's new job was to work in the kitchen.

[Susan]

Mrs. Dumont is not a fan of Belle.

[Beckett]

Sure enough, micromanaging, fault finding, yelling, also actually telling all of the white hired girls to see if they can, and I quote, grind that bell down. Gross.

[Susan]

One of those girls that Beckett was talking about, her name was Kate. And for a while, Belle would put the potatoes on to cook. And then when they were done, they were gritty and the water was dirty, and Belle kept getting in trouble for it.

[Beckett]

And Belle's like, well, I don't know, maybe the dirt leeches out or something. I swear to I wash them. And so she would wash them extra carefully the next day and put them in. And then she had to go milk the cow. Timing is everything, milking a cow. And she'd come back in and sure enough there'd be dirt all in the. No matter how hard she scrubbed, the potatoes came back dirty. And 10 year old daughter of the house, Gertrude, decided to do a stakeout.

[Susan]

Kate got some ashes from the fire and dropped them in the potatoes.

[Beckett]

Gertrude told her parents and stopped at least one of the strains of torture in that house. And Belle never forgot it. She felt so grateful.

[Susan]

It was a minor victory, but she knew she had a ally in the house. And Mr. Dumont was kind of an ally too, which puts him in a weird position. She had this really weird attachment to him that was kind of bordering on worship. She just wanted to make him happy.

[Beckett]

I am just going to say here, and this is a G rated podcast, that there are some veiled references to indelicate situations in her later biography at this point. Since Belle never learned to read or write this narrative, this biography was dictated to someone who wrote it down, who is a quite conservative person, a lady. And so we can imagine the details, I suppose. I am sorry to say they are not at all uncommon. We don't have anything direct, although one source I read actually put forth the theory it was Mrs. Dumont and not Mr. Who was involved in sexual abuse of Belle. And that would be something we have not run across before. Neither option is something that should ever be connected to a 13 year old girl, to anyone. That's all we're gonna say about that.

[Susan]

That's, that's more than enough.

[Beckett]

For a period of time, Belle tried to cope with her new surroundings like she had at the Neelys. Like, if I'm super good and I work harder and faster than anyone else, I'm gonna avoid the harsh treatment. And soon the other slaves really, really resented her. Like she's super teacher's pet. She made life hard for all of them by tattling.

[Susan]

Her peers were like, you know, slow down, you can't. This is not good. You're making us all look bad.

[Beckett]

She was lonely for quite a long time. Even after she modified her ways, it took everyone a while to trust her again. She talked at this point to the only friend she had left, the God her mother had told her was always watching, and asked him what I believe is a very logical question. Why don't you stop slavery? Why is this happening? And the man who acted as the slave's preacher had a very thoughtful answer to this. I think he said that God doesn't like to change evildoers right out. He wants to give them a chance to turn around by themselves. And that he didn't always answer prayers immediately, which was not a good enough answer for me, of course, but that's.

[Susan]

Exactly the answer that I was thinking in my head when I had heard that. Yeah.

[Beckett]

Yeah. So, you know, it gave her a sense of relief that maybe this God was someone she could tell her troubles to. And so important, especially when you're alone. And she found this little place, a little tiny island in a stream that was hidden by branches and bushes. And in, you know, successive years, she wove little walls out of reeds and things. And it was a genuine little hidey hole on that island. Little waterfall, a little stream. And that is where she talked to her God, who was more like a father figure and a friend than any God that the Christians of the time were praying to. This was more of a personal friend.

[Susan]

Right. Because she didn't. She didn't have any Christian training.

[Beckett]

Well, and so we travel through the years, through the years, until one holiday week, which is a holiday I've never actually heard of, seven weeks after Easter. You may have heard of this holiday as Pentecost, or if you're a reader of Jane Austen era literature, as Whit Sunday. It's one of those words that you just kind of, you know, I'll get you married by Whit Sunday. I don't know what that means. Well, the Dutch word for it is pinkstren. Well, by now, though, it's. It's been corrupted to the word pinkster. And it was an established African American celebration. A week off for real, and you could travel to see relatives who'd been sold away. There was traditional food, a certain kind of sausage, gingerbread. There was hard cider for everybody. It was a drinking festival, dances and music that had a lot in common with West Africa. Lots of drums, lots of clapping. Because you still have first generation captives here that are coming to these Pinkster celebrations and kind of educating their fellow slaves in the ways of the mother country. I just didn't realize how close to Africa these particular people were. Like some literally had been born there. I. I was.

[Susan]

Oh, I know.

[Beckett]

Surprised.

[Susan]

I know, because usually we talk later, you know, like civil war.

[Beckett]

They.

[Susan]

There's been generations. Yeah, it really sounds like a fun celebration. They'd make these huts and they'd all stay on. Like, it was like camping. And I think the really coolest thing about this is, is they took it from the Dutch. You know, it was the Dutch holiday, and they kind of appropriated it. I think that's fantastic. And there was, like, subtle little digs in there about. They would mock their masters and things, but it was part of the traditional songs and dances and games. So, yeah, it was. It was a big. Oh, my gosh. The word in my head is hootenanny. No, it was a very, very special week in the lives of these people.

[Beckett]

You know, all holiday aside, all the fun drinking and the big bonfire in the woods and everything, no one was the boss of you for that week. If you wanted to work that week, you were paid for it.

[Susan]

Yeah, them apples.

[Beckett]

It was a very exciting time. And I'm thinking probably the only time in their whole lives that a slave could feel like a person with agency into their own lives. And I.

[Susan]

And community, because they, you know, they all came together. These are people that, a lot of times, they spend their whole lives, you know, mostly on their farms, not interacting with slaves from other places. So.

[Beckett]

Yeah. So it was maybe during one Pinkster week that Belle met a man named Robert, also known as Catlin's Robert, a man from a nearby farm. And they fell in love. Belle was about 17 years old, and they kept seeing each other after Pinkster was over. But Robert's master freaked out because any babies that were born to a slave mother were the property of the mother's owner. And so Robert's master found him a wife on his own farm. He was supposed to never see Dumont's bell ever again.

[Susan]

They set up a sting for him, and they told him that Belle was sick. So Robert went to her side. But when he got to the house, it was just his owners standing there waiting for him with a rope in one hand, and they beat him right then and there. John Dumont had to get involved because he thought that the treatment of Robert on his property was going to kill the guy. He's like, I don't want your blood shed on my property. You have to go, you know? And he loosened the ropes on him and walked Robert home. But Robert never saw Belle ever again.

[Beckett]

I thought that was interesting, that Dumont followed Robert home to make sure that Catlin didn't kill him.

[Susan]

Yeah, I hate that we have to, like, put these degrees. He did have some type of compassion.

[Beckett]

It's a weird thing I keep running across, too. It's like different degrees of horrible, kind of.

[Susan]

I know.

[Beckett]

I Mean, even the good white people in these stories are not that good.

[Susan]

No, I know. I totally.

[Beckett]

But what. What a pass you reach when you have to say, well, you know, he's keeping these people like animals in a zoo, but at least he doesn't let people kill other people on his property. So we don't want to fall into the trap that Dumont is an angel. Case in point. Perfect timing. Dumont assigned Belle a husband from among his other slaves. You know, what could they do? What could they do? He even had an actual preacher marry them. And I had thought that slave marriages had no force of law, really. Like, if the owner wanted to change things up, they did. But, no, not in New York State. I guess what I was thinking of is, like, we all do. Slavery in the Deep South. In New York, once a slave couple was married, you couldn't separate them. Yes. And they could transfer property to each other in a will.

[Susan]

How about that?

[Beckett]

They were kind to each other, this Tom. That was her husband's name. The love of Tom's own life had been sold, and he had run away to look for her. And he had managed to stay away a month before he was brought back and whipped. And so he certainly understood his wife's sadness, I think. Not an awesome basis to base your marriage on. But they got along okay. And their first child, Diana, was born about a year after the wedding. And I have to say, according to all these sources, old Diana has three possible fathers, as far as all my books are concerned. You'll read that it was Robert's baby. Definitively, they'll say you'll read that it's. No, it's her husband Tom's baby, also definitively. And you'll also read that it is Mr. Dumont's baby.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Beckett]

When Belle was 20 years old, a law was passed that closed that age loophole. So in 10 years, all slaves over 28 had to be freed on July 4th. Everyone born before 1799. Remember that? That deadline she had just missed. That sucked. Now it was like a light snapped on in Belle's head. 10 years. 10 years. 10 years with glorious freedom at the end. I can do this. And she sort of described it as the feeling she got when she arrived at a Pinkster celebration, but for her life, like the anticipation, looking forward to freedom. Belle And Tom had four more children in these 10 years. Elizabeth, Peter, and baby Sophia, and either Hannah who lived, or Thomas that died, or James that died. It's so crazy. Well, so we've got the 10 years. And at year eight, Dumont told her that if she worked harder than ever for him, he would free her a year early. You know what? And Tom. And I'm going to give you a cabin. How about it? And she took that bet. You are on, Chachi.

[Susan]

You know, like, I'd like to have a house of my own where I can be with my family. You know, Another thing she's praying to God for.

[Beckett]

And she nearly worked herself to death. She cut her hand pretty badly on a scythe, which is a big, giant knife.

[Susan]

And a big, giant, curved knife.

[Beckett]

Yeah, yeah. And it really didn't have a chance to heal properly because she just kept driving herself onward. I'm 100% sure it got infected. She was there. She did it. And the deadline passed. And nothing. No word, no keys to the cabin, no congratulations. There's not a folder of paperwork. And so Bel walked in to see Dumont, and she confronted him. Okay. Have you lost track of time? The time has come. I'm medium respectful right now. And so he weaseled out. He weaseled out of it. And what he told her was, you're hurt. Your hands are hurt. Are you really telling me that you think you did enough work to justify this extra year? When, in fact, he had literally been bragging to all and sundry that she did the housework and then did more work in the fields than any man on the premises? Well, the truth is, his crops had been wiped out the previous year. Almost everyone's crops had been by a pest called the Hessian fly. And it was so bad, in fact, that Thomas Jefferson himself had been looking into it. Preachers were saying from the pulpits that this fly was God's punishment for society's sins. This natural disaster is because God's mad at us, um, financially. He was in a pickle, this Dumont. And I hope, hope, hope, hope, hope that he had not been playing some sort of sick game with her. I really hope that he meant to up until he couldn't. And my feeling is, honestly, if he had been honest with her and said, look, the Hessian fly did this thing, I think if she'd been treated like a human and asked for her help, she might have had a better reaction to it. It was more respectful of him to have treated her that way. But instead, he had to act like she had failed and put it all. And she knew she had not failed. She knew it. She wrote later on that she felt rage just boil up in her when he was talking, but that suddenly, suddenly, it was all gone. It was more of a feeling of contempt, which, of course, at the time, she had no words for. So this is her writing a lot later, like almost power. Bel just walked away from that conversation. But from that moment, she in her mind, considered herself a free woman.

[Susan]

And she did do a little more work for him, thinking, well, I'll just finish, I'll do something else, and then I'm going to go. She spun another hundred pounds of wool, trying to make him satisfied. She prayed, of course. And then finally, God did tell her to just walk away. So one morning before sunrise, she packed up her clothes, wrapped up her youngest baby, Sophia, and did just that. She walked away.

[Beckett]

She was trying to work it out. She couldn't take the children with her, really, because by law, they were still slaves for, you know, somewhere between 18 years, 23 more years in the case of some of the little ones. And, you know, she determined she had to take the baby because who was still nursing. Okay, I'm going to work as a free woman to help my family. That's my role. That's what I'm going to do. If she left at night, that would be sneaking. That would be dishonorable. And in fact, I think that's why she finished all that wool. Like, you know what you are not going to be able to say of me that I left any loose ends. I did the same thing. I quit my job upstairs and I came downstairs and finished my project. We are pathological in that way, I guess, Bel and I, But I really admire that. It's like no one's going to be able to say to me that I sneaked or that I slacked. I'm going to do this the right way. So if she left her in the middle of the day, though, people would notice and they would come after her too soon for this whole scenario to be of any use. And so she determined she's gonna wait for the sun to come up like she's on the road, because she can get far enough away before anyone notices she's gone that she can put her plan into action. So down the road she went. She headed for the house of a local Quaker man who had once stopped her on the road and told her that God did not intend for her to be in bondage. And I think he meant all the hers, you know, like, not just her. Her Quakers were the staunchest abolitionists of all, but. But she remembered him, this guy, and she took it as a sign from God that he would help her, that she remembered him just at the right time. And so she got to his house and he was too Sick to help her on his deathbed. You'll read. So perhaps his last worldly act was to direct her to another Quaker family about four miles further down the road who might be able to help her.

[Susan]

And this was Isaac and Marie Van Wagener. And in the past, they had helped runaway slaves get to freedom to get established somewhere else. And, you know, they were like a lot of these Quakers. Beckett's been saying over and over again, they were staunch abolitionists. So they did take Belle and Sophia into their house. They gave her an actual room with a real bed. The first time she slept on a bed, they gave her a job. She was going to be making some money. You know, it sounds like all dreamy, but, you know, it wasn't that simple. Dumont did come after her.

[Beckett]

Everybody knew about the Quakers. This does not take a great leap of detective work on his part. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

[Susan]

No. And it's a small community. He knows. He's like, well, if she didn't go here, she probably went there.

[Beckett]

So when Dumont came to that house and he saw her, he said, well, Belle, you've run away from me. And she goes, no, I didn't. I didn't run away. I walked away. Because you didn't keep your promise. Yes, this is from her autobiography. And he said, well, you have to go back with me. She said, I won't. And then he said, I'll take the child then. And she said, no, you won't. And that's. That's when the Van Wagener stepped in with their cash.

[Susan]

What the Vicky Wagner said is they would pay for both Bel and Sophia for the remainder of the year that she was supposed to be working off. And he took the deal. $20 for Belle and $5 for Sophia. She was free. It was in her head. It was in her heart. And after they exchanged that cash, it was in her life.

[Beckett]

I keep thinking that I can't psychoanalyze Dumont from here, but he probably just saved himself the trouble he was sensing with this scenario, because things had changed. $20 is better than having to chase her all over the country. And.

[Susan]

Well, and Bell telling him, no, you know, that didn't happen. She was always obedient, and he could see that wasn't the same Belle that he had, you know, been the master of for all those years.

[Beckett]

She lived happily with the Van Wegener's, who I don't think ever legally freed her. Exactly. But functionally, she was treated like a free woman, very respectfully, very kindly, and that's Novel enough. She listened to Bible reading in this house is where she became a committed Christian during her time with them. But then Mr. VanWagener came home with some horrible news. Dumont had sold Peter Bell's only son, sold him to a man named Dr. Gedney, who was taking him to England. My heart. He was five or six years old. Only that is bad enough, but it gets worse. The doctor who was going to go to England realized that 6 years old is too young to be a body servant, you think? And so he just left him with his brother in New York and didn't take him to England at all. And the worst news of all, they had sold him to their sister Eliza's new husband as kind of like a wedding present for Eliza. A little piece of home to go with the new bride to her new home in Alabama. It's the Deep South. It's every slave's nightmare. There's no freedom day at 28 for anybody. And Belle could never get him back from there. And she, she went to the Dumonts. A characteristic response. Mr. Said, you know, hey, I don't know anything about it. I thought he was going to England, frankly, you know, blah, blah, blah. And Mrs. Dumont said, don't you have enough children to worry about? Still all this fuss for one little. And then listeners, she used the N word. She went to the new bride's mother and said, I want my child back. And the response was to laugh and say, yeah, I want mine back too. Them's the breaks, you know, Like, I don't want my child living in Alabama either. But that's where her new husband's taking her, so get out of my house.

[Susan]

But she had the law on her side. There was a New York law that said that no minor child could be sold into a slave owning state. So Bell knew that this, it wasn't just ethically wrong, it was legally wrong too.

[Beckett]

But you know, you can always count on the Van Wagoners. They have a network and they have.

[Susan]

That's right.

[Beckett]

They're brainful. And they made some plans, okay? Since Peter was the property of that husband who had lived in Alabama, the sellers had committed a crime. It carried a 14 year sentence or a large fine. And the slave in question would be freed upon his master's conviction. This was high stakes for both sides. You know what I mean? She won the case. That's the point. She won the case. She was one of the first black women in the United States to ever win a case in court, especially against a white man. Are you glad she didn't know that going in, though. Like, that's too much pressure.

[Susan]

That was totally working to her benefit because if she had known what kind of stakes she was up against, I don't know that she would have done it.

[Beckett]

Like people starting a new podcast.

[Susan]

Yeah, that's right.

[Beckett]

Ahem. Ahem. Who have no idea what's ranged up against them.

[Susan]

It's like, let's get a microphone. I have a computer. We can.

[Beckett]

Yeah. So, yes, there is power in not understanding.

[Susan]

Beckett, do you know that phrase slow your roll?

[Beckett]

I do.

[Susan]

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[Beckett]

Oh, yeah?

[Susan]

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[Beckett]

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[Susan]

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[Beckett]

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[Susan]

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[Beckett]

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[Susan]

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[Beckett]

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[Susan]

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[Beckett]

Treat yourself to honey love, because you deserve it. So the constable was sent to serve a notice to appear with Peter, a servant to the man named Solomon Gedney, who had sold Peter to his sister's husband. They served the papers to the wrong man, and Gedney slipped out of town. Now, unbeknownst to Bell, Gedney's lawyers had basically said, dude, you better go get that boy from Alabama and bring him back. They're looking to make some scapegoats around here because of this law. So close to the freedom day, they want to slap some wrists, and it's not looking good for you. I think you better get the boy and bring him back. Well, Belle doesn't know that in the spring, here comes Mr. Gedney, and guess who he's got with him. Yes, Peter. The order was given to the right man, and he posted bond. But she was told she'd had to wait three more months for the next session of court. And this was almost too much to bear. A passing stranger, a random man on the road, pointed her to a man named lawyer Demaine's house. He's your man. He can do it. You badger him until he takes your case. And for the rest of her life, Belle thought that this man, the man on the road, was an angel sent from God, if not God or Jesus himself, that this man was an angel, because there is no reason a random white man she'd never seen before would ask about her case and point her to the exact man that could fix it.

[Susan]

Well, I think that's a pretty solid argument that he was sent from God, at least.

[Beckett]

Well, he sure did, this lawyer domain. He returned from the courthouse with the news that Peter wanted to stay with his master. What? Everyone met in the judge's chambers to hash this out. And Peter was hanging on to Solomon Gedney's legs and saying he didn't want to leave. And he was crying, and that lady's not my mother. And evidently, the judge saw this had all been rehearsed. So if Peter had been a better child actor, she may never have gotten him back at all.

[Susan]

No, but she did.

[Beckett]

As soon as Mr. Gedney left, Peter told everybody that his master had threatened the worst whipping of his life if he didn't say what Master had told.

[Susan]

Him to say he was already covered in scars and scabs from his previous beatings. You know, he had been beaten right up until the time he's getting in that courtroom to drive the point home that, yeah, there's bad things are going to happen if you don't tell them what I want you to tell them.

[Beckett]

She could not believe it. He had a scar on his cheek. He had marks on his forehead. His back was an oozing mess of old and new scars. His shirt was stuck to the old scabs. And she just cried and cried. It's like, what kind of a monster does this to a six year old child? And she, I think, forgot her Quaker religious training and went back to her old ways of talking to God like a friend or a father figure. And she yelled into the air, God, render unto these who have done this double the torments her mother's heart was breaking like. Was there no one nice to you? Was there no one? And Peter told her he used to crawl under the porch after a beating, and Ms. Eliza, this is the new bride, would squeeze under there and put medicine on his wounds in secret in the middle of the night. Now, so what does this tell you about Eliza's own life, the situation she'd probably found herself in?

[Susan]

Oh, yeah.

[Beckett]

Not very good. Well, not very long afterward, the news came that Eliza's husband, Peter's old master, the monster, had beaten his wife to death.

[Susan]

That's the sound of that sinking in. Yeah.

[Beckett]

Yeah, he. He was committed to an insane asylum. And Belle felt responsible and fell to her knees like, oh, no, no, that, that was too much God. I didn't. I didn't mean for it to be that much like, she kind of felt like, oh, no, I've called down a curse. That's the power of that kind of religion. Oh, no.

[Susan]

Yeah, I know. Well, that's what she asked for.

[Beckett]

Yeah, well, talk about prayers being answered. I guess she got one.

[Susan]

Yeah, she did. And it says a lot that she was so compassionate, you know, because she could have just said, oh, too bad. You deserve it.

[Beckett]

I think she was More sorry for Ms. Eliza, who'd actually tried to help her child. I don't know that she was that sorry about the man. Yeah, well, Belle and Peter went back to the Van Wagoner's, and she began to dress as the Quakers do in solemn grand black. And she began to refer to herself as Belle Van Wegener. She made peace with her old master Dumont. All of her daughters now lived there with him anyway. And Everybody was cordial again. Again. I wonder, do I get the sense that he was the father of any of her children? They have such an interesting relationship.

[Susan]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Beckett]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Susan]

We'll never know. I mean, there's no way to know.

[Beckett]

Well, Peter was getting into trouble, getting into great amounts of trouble. And a woman at their church suggested that they might move to New York City. You know, a lot of former slaves had gone there after Freedom Day. There's a lot of work in a big place like that, and there's a growing black community. And Pel's like, just leave. I mean, just go. I. The concept was so strange to her. You know, no one could tell her not to go. She could just, you know, you make a decision and you go. It's like in college, as you slowly realize, and it does take a while, that there's no authority figure that is going to tell you when to come home at night or even going to care when it happens. It's a weird scenario.

[Susan]

And again, it was around Pinkster, and Belle had kind of a religious epiphany. Beckett had said that the Dumonts and her were back to talking conversationally and, you know, friend, like, she had a vision that Mr. Dumont was gonna come and get her to bring her back to his place to see her family. And it came true. Oh, my gosh. I knew you were coming. So she's getting into his carriage, and suddenly, it's like a flash of white light hits her, and she's overcome with this feeling of being with God, and she passes out. When she woke up, Dumont was gone. But she had a newfound faith. She had more strength to her faith, and that gave her the strength to say, yeah, you know what? I don't have to stay here in Ulster County, New York. I can go to New York and make a better life for me and for my son.

[Beckett]

So they went, and Belle had never seen a building higher than three stories before. And there's so many people and so much rushing. And a white lady she'd known back home had gotten her a job as a servant and a family. And Peter went to school for the first time, and it was just a whole new world. She was 32 years old. One day, she was gathering her things after church when a strange couple approached her and said, we heard from some friends that you were here, and we came to find you. I'm your sister Sophia, said the woman. And I'm your brother. Michael, said the man.

[Susan]

Michael? The Michael?

[Beckett]

Yes.

[Susan]

Under the table. Michael.

[Beckett]

Yeah. And Sophia, who she'd named her baby after. Golly, these people were in their 40s and the siblings had never met. But of course, Belle knew all about these guys from all the stories. Like, what about Nancy? She asked Michael. Nancy, who got put in the box. And it turned out that Nancy and Belle had been friends at church. It kind of blew her like that. Nancy, the one who just died, was my sister. Slavery did such horrible things, and they just cried and cried and spent the whole day together. And I think that Mama Bette would have been very happy that some of her children were able to reunite because of her stories.

[Susan]

Oh, yeah, exactly. That would have been the best outcome possible. Right. When she's telling Belle these stories and anticipating her future, that was the best possible outcome. And it happened. And if you are a person of faith, you can't help but think that God put you people together. He made your situation the way it was, that you could meet up. I mean, she couldn't help think anything about that.

[Beckett]

Well, now, evidently in this story, we can't have a boring, nice time for five minutes because we now open a very contentious, rumor filled, hole filled narrative during some work that Belle was doing either at a place called the Magdalene Asylum or for its owner at his house, the Magdalene Asylum, which has been listed as simply a homeless women's shelter. But I think. How shall I put this? It is a fallen women rehabilitation zone.

[Susan]

She put in her narrative, they quote, they get the woman off the street. And that was as nice as they could, you know, as gentle as you could put it. Yeah, the Magdalene Asylum or the Magdalene Laundries, they're called by the same thing. They don't have a very good reputation as history goes on, but at this point, they were still fairly new to New York. So maybe they were still on the, you know, the straight and narrow. They weren't into the abuses that came later in history, so.

[Beckett]

And Belle only worked there because some of the white reformers wanted her to go to Five Points. There's a very bad slum area of New York. If you watch Gangs of New York, Five Points is where most of the action takes place. Not a very good place to be. And of course, the white reformers wanted to go down to Five Points and preach and sing songs. And Belle's like, what these people need is a good meal and a good whipping. Frankly, she did not think going to Five Points was the way for her. And she wanted to do something more practical. I'm going to feed some people. If that's all right with you. And so she went to do something else. And so at some point during her work there, Belle got involved with a cult called the Kingdom, founded by the owner of that asylum and this crazy grifter. They set up shop in the woods after having convinced a band of followers, some of whom had a lot of money, that they were the personification of God in the one hand and John the Baptist on the other hand. And people put all their money, some considerable amounts of money in a communal pot when they joined the community. And Belle, yeah, not having anything material to contribute, she was allowed to join if she did all the housework.

[Susan]

We look at this and we're like, how did she fall in with that crowd? Well, when she saw his name was, his real name was Robert Matthews, he went by the prophet Matthias. He had long hair and he wore robes and he was very charismatic. And she really thought she was looking at Jesus right in front of her. He had a way about him that he could convince people to do things like give up their money and take communal baths and, you know, move in with him and help him.

[Beckett]

When she first moved to New York, she worked for a couple that was so religiously grim that Puritans would have loved them. Plain clothes, no coffee, no tea. They practiced. I had sort of a new movement in Christianity called perfectionism. That was the idea or philosophy that you could yourself become free of sin on earth by willpower, by changing yourself into a better person with the help of God. You didn't need an intercessor. So they would have these meetings and they would preach to each other. And I quote, the effect of Belle's preaching was so miraculous that even learned people were running after her. And it did not follow mainstream Christianity at all. Now, the fact that she had been steeped in an offshoot of Christianity that wasn't mainstream may have helped slash hurt her when it came time to join the Kingdom. Also another offshoot. I am just not going to get too much into the day to day life of the cult. I tell you what, we'll give you a link. Books have been written about it, but let's just say that Belle was in the process of leaving. She had gotten the old job back as servant to that family and had really exited when one cult leader died, poisoned, some said, by the other one. And then it all came out. What was going on around there. Communal marriage, let's say, in the G rated podcast, blackmail, theft. Belle was a very visible former member, the only black woman there, in fact. And the Newspapers had sort of a field day. They found it hard to believe that she was ignorant of all that was happening, all that had gone on, and she maintained that she had been even worse. Two members wrote a scandalous novel which featured, quote, a black maid, a witch who had brought evil into an innocent holy community. Honestly, it even blamed the black maid for the murder. You know how those kind of stories spread, especially if they're super juicy like this. And excerpts of it were published in the newspapers, and everyone was thinking it was her, that she had killed this guy, that she had been a part of all these nefarious practices. And she was urged by her employer to take the authors to court, also the newspaper, more importantly, because they had all the money, right. It was character assassination. And she didn't need to put up with that.

[Susan]

No, not at all. And she went around to all of her former employers and got letters of that stated her character. She's trying to reinstate her name. She's trying to make her name clean and make a separation from the whole Kingdom story and all the slander that's being thrown her way. So she, again, she went to court, and the former Kingdom members were convicted of slandering her.

[Beckett]

And one of her defenders. Now, keep in mind, this is someone who was on her side, didn't fully believe that she had not been involved in a lot of the things that had gone on. And he just said, if circumstances do not force her to tell all she knows, it'll be very hard to get at it. And I am going to say to him and the world that that was the slave mask. That was the. You got to keep it all to yourself. That she had learned from a small child. And honestly, we will never really know the details of her time with the Kingdom. I'm so fascinated with cults. I just. How can they take people and, like, break them down and build them into something else? I.

[Susan]

Because they find their weakness. Now, Belle had been looking for her church. She'd been looking for a community of believers, and she was finding situations of racism within the church where she wasn't welcomed. She wasn't felt welcomed into churches. So she's looking for a place that she can worship. And here comes prophet Matthias, who's all for her worshiping with him. And what he's saying kind of has a ring of truth to it. And she. I mean, I can easily see how she fell into that. Bought it hook, line, and sinker. And why she was closely aligned with Matthias because she was so loyal. I mean, she'd Done that with her previous masters. He was kind of another master figure. Right. So, I mean, that's how she got that close. How could she not have seen something? She lived there.

[Beckett]

Right. I don't know what to say.

[Susan]

What she did walk away with is more of. More trust in her faith. And she did find another church that allowed women to preach. And that's where she got even more experience up on the pulpit. And people just loved her. She was also spending a lot of her time volunteering to help her community. So Belle's trying to get her life back on track, and she realizes that Peter was steering himself way off course. He couldn't keep a job. He kept getting in trouble. He was arrested for theft. He would start classes to become a seaman and get a career like a trade school. But then he would just stop going. So he was going nowhere fast. And he was not turning out to be the upstanding man that she had hoped he would be. The only option she saw was to send him off on a whaling ship when he was 18. And the idea was that he would come back from this whaling ship, experience a stronger, more faith driven, upstanding man. So Peter did go off to sea. She received several letters from him. Again, she couldn't read them. Somebody had to read them for her. But at one point, the letters just stopped.

[Beckett]

Well, he doesn't seem to have gotten any of the ones she sent back to him. Like he thought. I think that she had either forgotten about him or. Or died. I mean, she did get a few of his, but he never got any of hers.

[Susan]

No.

[Beckett]

And the last letter she got from him ended like this. I hope you do not forget me, your dear and only son. I hope you all will forgive me for all that I have done. Your son, Peter Van Wegener. And honestly, his ship came back after years. His ship came back without him on it. And Belle never saw him again. Though it must be said she often looked at the stars and wondered if he was looking, too.

[Susan]

This is probably a good time to take a break. And we're gonna find out what Belle does next in her life alone.

[Beckett]

What have you done, Ms. Susan? To get ready for a job interview in particular, like, I know we're thinking about our resume. What questions are they going to ask us? We might have even tried on new outfits. But there is kind of a secret worry that kind of runs through the whole morning. Really. Oh, yeah.

[Susan]

All that stress, sweat. I need some deodorant.

[Beckett]

Right.

[Susan]

And Lume has been my go to deodorant. For years. I have a current rotation. I like both the spray and the stick solid. And my current Lumi wardrobe rotation looks like Sweat Control plus deodorant in lavender and sage and want it unscented so I can smell my perfume. And then other days, I like the spray in a soft powder scent.

[Beckett]

Hmm.

[Susan]

Yeah, that's very cool. I smell different every single day.

[Beckett]

There are several deodorant product options in the rotation. Solent deodorant stick, which was formulated and powered by mandelic acid to stop odor before it starts. A sweat control deodorant that controls odor and sweat for 72 hours.

[Susan]

Any of these products you can use anywhere on your body, from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.

[Beckett]

All of their products are baking soda free and paraben free. And in addition to Susan's favorite lavender sage, they also have fresh scents like clean tangerine or toasted coconut. Well, Lume's starter pack is perfect for new customers. It comes with a solid stick deodorant cream tube deodorant, and two free products of your choice like mini body wash or deodorant wipes. Also, free shipping.

[Susan]

And as a special offer for our listeners, new customers get 15% off all Lume products with our exclusive code. And if you combine that 15% with an already discounted starter pack, that equals over 40% off their starter pack, use code chicks for 15% off your first [e-mail] that's code chicks at L U.

[Beckett]

M E D E O D O R A N T. Please support our show and tell them we sent you Smell Fresher, stay drier, and boost your confidence from head to toe with Lumi. And we are back. We are back. So Belle is at a crossroads in her life. There's no one to depend on her anymore, no future with her children, really, as far as she knows, that's a dream that has to be put away forever. She would pray and pray for guidance. That's her usual M.O. and she wrote that one night she believed she heard a message from God as clear as if he had spoken it in her ear. Go east, it said. And the very, very next day, she gave in her notice. And at 46 years of age, she set out on her new adventure. And outside of the city, which she took care not to look back upon as if she were in the parable of Sodom and Gomorrah, she did not look back at the city. She stopped outside to ask for a drink of water from a Quaker woman. And the woman asked her name, Sojourner, said Belle. And there seems to be some doubt as to where exactly the sojourner part comes from. A sojourner is a person who stays only temporarily in a place, possibly. I looked this up in a Bible search. I was trying to find a verse that was applicable. I'm. What? How do you think this sounds? For we are mere strangers before the O God, and sojourners, as were our fathers. That was First Chronicles 29.

[Susan]

Yes, that sounds very logical, because she has always heard. Again, can't read. She's always heard the Bible, so words might have stuck to her from hearing it.

[Beckett]

She had a mind like a steel trap for that book, too. She knew it backwards and forwards. It was almost like she had, you know, biblepedia in her head. She had a verse for every purpose. And the last name, Truth. Now, that word truth, it appears a lot all over the place. That's hard to Google search. But I do have a good one. You tell me again. It has given my greatest joy to find some of your children walking in the truth, just as the Father commanded us. And then how do I say two John verses, one to four?

[Susan]

Yep. Yeah, you say it just like that.

[Beckett]

Okay. Very good. I have learned something. Check.

[Susan]

Okay.

[Beckett]

Well, Sojourner Truth, she was not Hardenberg's Belle or Neely's or Schreiber's or Dumont's Bell. She was never going to be anybody's Belle ever again. And so she won't be ours anymore either.

[Susan]

Nope. And her name kind of really does describe the life that she's hoping to have. She wants to go around and she wants to be a preacher. She wants to preach in one place and then go on to the next and preach there and just spread the word of God. A traveler spreading the truth. Perfect.

[Beckett]

Now she wouldn't be alone. There were nearly a hundred women, both black and white, in the United States that were what they call itinerant preachers. So she was kind of joining their ranks. A lot of churches, as Sojourner had found when she arrived in New York, a lot of churches didn't allow women to preach. Hers was a very rare example. And women, frustrated with wanting to deliver their message and not having a venue to do so, took to the road. So she is joining a sisterhood of other preachers. It wasn't something she invented or something that would have been regarded as completely unheard of by the people she met. So she walked from place to place in a way I think would never work these days. I think people are Just too cynical. Although I did read a book called A Walk Across America, which I highly recommend actually, where a guy. This is from the 1970s, though, a guy named Peter Jenkins, went place to place and worked to make money to get to the next place. And I think. I just think we're too cynical these days for even him to pull that off, don't you think?

[Susan]

I don't know. There's a singer named Amanda Palmer who's married to Neil Gaiman. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And she has a history of couch surfing. You know, her and her band, they go from one house to the next and they perform and then, you know, rely on the generosity of their supporters to house them and then they move somewhere else.

[Beckett]

So I saw her TED Talk when she was talking about that, actually.

[Susan]

Oh, yeah, Amazing. Yeah.

[Beckett]

Well, I stand corrected then. Perhaps there is room for the itinerant lifestyle. Well, months into this journey, she came across a religious meeting. Lots of white people listening to a preacher, tents, tables of food. And it reminded her of the Pinkster holiday, but how the white people celebrated it at home. Not her kind of Pinkster calmer. Let's say it was a lot less joyful of an occurrence. So imagine you're sitting there at your meeting and you see this tall black woman dressed as a Quaker coming down the road and just listening, just listening. And she was there in the morning, too, and in the afternoon. She was familiar by then. You kind of get used to having her around. She asked to speak to the group and she would start. Well, children, she said, and I love that. Doesn't it make you feel like hooray, you know? Yeah.

[Susan]

Like you're listening to your mother or someone who cares about you.

[Beckett]

Yeah. And she would say, I speaks to God and God speaks to me. And she would give a religious speech to the people about, usually about this time, about God's hand of protection on us all. And she would follow this with a few hymns. She had an amazing speaking voice and an amazing singing voice, and everyone would join in. Sojourner traveled from meeting to meeting and she would speak about God and increasingly commonly, at first at her audience's request and then at her own initiative to talk about her experiences with slavery. And she was an excellent and vivid storyteller. The audiences far and wide fell into tears when she would talk. Her reputation spread out before her to the point that people were running to shake her hand when she arrived, or in some cases, of course, waiting with clubs and sticks, depending.

[Susan]

One time, she was the only black person at a white revival meeting. And a group of white hooligans kind of overtook the group and sended. And sent everyone scattering, including Sojourner, who ran and hid. She knew that as the only black person there, she was going to be a huge target. But while she's hiding, she's thinking, I'm a target, but I also have God on my side. So she comes out of her hiding and she approaches these people, and she does exactly what she's always been doing. And she speaks to them like people. My children, do you want to hurt me? And they turned, not in the bad way, but in a good way. And they were. They were enthralled. They lifted her up onto a wagon so that she could give her speech. And she was singing. And she was singing so much, she was getting tired of it. And they said, just one more. Just one more. So she gave them one more song, and they went on their way happily and hopefully converted. As far as she's concerned, like, she'd sing. And the hymns that she was singing weren't in any hymnal anywhere. She was just. She just made them up. And according to every single source I saw, she was mesmerizing. So she had that factor that just made people not only be drawn to her, but to hang on every word that she said. And every song that she sang, you know, they said she had a very deep voice. So this imposing figure with this deep voice, spreading this message of love with that charisma that she had. I think that would be very moving. It's easy to see how her reputation spread very quickly.

[Beckett]

And her legacy often omits the religious beginnings of her travels, her religious beginnings, of her speech making. She did start out as a preacher.

[Susan]

When she's at these meetings, she's also having people read the Bible to her. She found that when adults read and she would ask them to read this particular passage again, they would interject their thoughts on it. They wouldn't just read it. They'd say, well, Sojourner, what this means is. And she didn't like that. She wanted to come to her own conclusions. So she had children read the Bible to her because they just read the words just like she asked. I'd love that. Although at this point, you know, she might actually be able to recite it, but, you know, she just wants to keep hearing the word of God and probably hearing it out of the mouths of people who she's trying to reach is. But it's a good method to get them involved in the words.

[Beckett]

I have a weird question. I'm actually Scared? No, no, no. I, I just wondered how difficult it is as an adult to learn to read. I, her work through her whole life was so dependent on words, on ideas, and on passing those ideas along. And it just seems astonishing to me that at any point, at no point did she, as far as I can read, attempt to learn to read or have anyone teach her to read or write.

[Susan]

Yeah, she learned English. I mean, English wasn't her first language.

[Beckett]

Right.

[Susan]

She, she picked it up at a young age and, you know, fairly quickly in the bar, so.

[Beckett]

Well, I'm not saying this was an uncommon situation. I, I would bet that, you know, especially in rural places, a lot of people couldn't read and write, but, but just for someone so involved with this work, it just seems a little surprising to me that no attempt was made this whole time. Anyway, that just struck me.

[Susan]

I totally agree with you. I don't know, maybe she had a learning disability. When she looked at the letters, they were, maybe or something she did wear glasses. I mean, maybe her sight wasn't good. I, I, I got nothing. I don't, I don't know. So what she's doing is she set out from New York and she's kind of following the Connecticut river up north, stopping here and there and giving speeches and staying with people and moving on to the next place. She ended up crossing paths with a group called the Millerites. She kind of hung with them for a little bit, but she didn't buy into their message. These guys were just fire and brimstone. Bad things were going to happen. Jesus was coming back and he's coming back soon. And when he does, the rest of you lot are going to spend eternity in hell if you don't turn your lives around right now. And her message was so much more loving, so she didn't exactly mesh with them, but the people in their group had asked her to speak at their meeting sometimes and she did so while.

[Beckett]

She could, you know, respect their devotion to God, she did not approve of the cacophony.

[Susan]

Yeah, she might also at this point, having already been drawn into a couple cult like situations, she probably saw a lot of similarities, a lot of red.

[Beckett]

Flags is what you're saying.

[Susan]

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. But you know, she's not going to give up an audience. Right. She could change their lives if they listen to her, what she's preaching.

[Beckett]

So either the Millerites pointed her in this direction or she found it herself as an antidote to the, to the Millerites, because this was the polar opposite of what was going on around there. Her travels brought her to the Northampton association of Education and Industry. And this is one of the man. This period of time, there were almost 300 utopias. Ideal places where people would all get along. And sure enough, human nature always comes to bear and they always fall apart.

[Susan]

Yeah, but those golden years are very golden.

[Beckett]

Yes, I guess so. The principles of the Northampton Institute were that they were to create a society in which the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, of color or condition of sect or religion. A natural, really for prominent abolitionists to use as a hub both men and women, actually.

[Susan]

William Lloyd Garrison and our favorite rooster, Frederick Douglass, frequented the Northampton community. So they were. I mean, those were spokes in the abolitionist cause. Sojourner had been traveling through Connecticut and got up to Massachusetts, which is where Northampton is. It's north of Springfield. And it became winter, so she kind of needed a place to stop. Not only did it ideologically work for her, but, you know, physically it was a good place for her to be. At this particular point, you know, where.

[Beckett]

She almost ended up at Fruitlands, which is Louisa May Alcott's father's utopia. We could have had a whole other different story. I think that is astonishing that we had a near miss on the. On the who's where, you know, in history type of thing. So, yeah, you've got conductors of the Underground Railroad there, magazine editors, newspaper publishers. Frederick Douglass, we have referred to him before, just such a refined speaker that his detractors denied he'd ever even been a slave. His speeches were all just propaganda. You know, he's a shill. He's an actor. And so he wrote his autobiography, the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. And Sojourner had her friend Olive read it to her. It made a great impression.

[Susan]

While she was at Northampton, she was able to work with these intellectuals, people who she hadn't really come across yet. She was able to refine her speaking style and kind of take her message to a different level, where she not only talked about faith, but she took on an abolitionist and women's suffrage message woven into her preaching.

[Beckett]

She felt like this place gave her, and I quote, liberty of thought and speech and largeness of soul. It's being around these people who had a cause that just. It wasn't about them. It was about the greater good. It was about society. It was about freedom and equality, and it was very energizing. Well, guess what happened about this time. Her friend Olive Gilbert read her a newspaper account of an event we've covered before during the Elizabeth Cady Stanton episode over in Seneca Falls, New York, the first women's rights convention had happened. So Sojourner and all the people at the Northampton community folded all these issues together. Abolition, women's rights, temperance. I don't know how she felt about that. Remember her bar keeping days? I actually have no idea. They're all just human rights is their point. And her friend Olive Gilbert offered to act as her scribe. So if Sojourner wanted to write her story too, you know, I'll be your able assistant. I'll write it down for you. And sure enough, the narrative. Does that sound familiar? Narrative of Sojourner Truth. A Northern Slave was published when Sojourner was 53 years old. It didn't do super well in the marketplace because she's, after all, not a known name at this point. But she began to sell copies of her book after her speeches. Just like every independent band in America sells their cd. Do they still do that now that there's not really CD players anymore?

[Susan]

Oh, I don't know.

[Beckett]

Well, she was invited to speak at the first national women's Rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she was a little baffled as to the direction the women were headed. You know, they were talking about bloomers and, like, who gets to keep the jewelry after the divorce and stuff that she's just like, I, you know, I don't really care about this. So her speech at this place boils down basically to, well, you know, sisters. I'm not sure what you're aiming at here, but if anyone here feels like they want more rights than they have right now, you aren't going to get them by sitting here talking about it. You have to go take them.

[Susan]

Unfortunately, like Beckett had said, these utopian communities often end up collapsing, and that's exactly what happened. But she had had such a good relationship with the people that they built her a house and they gave her the mortgage. So at this point, she has a house. It's like something she's always dreamed of, Right? She wanted to be in a house with her children. And she's finally, at 53, got her own house, but she's also got a mortgage. Selling the narratives at her speeches came in handy because she needed not only to pay back the publisher for the books, but she also needed to pay her mortgage.

[Beckett]

I love that she has a little house at last. Her own little house.

[Susan]

I know. Even though she wasn't there very often.

[Beckett]

Yeah, but it's a base. It's somewhere to keep your heart in, you know? And now the most famous episode in sojourner's professional life. Maybe a speech she gave at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention. Convention. The popular narrative states, Sojourner walked into this room late, this tale goes. And so with no chairs, she went to sit on the stairs to the platform. And the whispers went around the room. You know, was a black woman going to speak at this convention? Later accounts kind of say that the room erupted in, you know, anger and blah, blah, blah. And Ohio was a pretty evenly matched pro and anti slavery state, although it was officially a free state. You know, some people weren't down with this. Right. Half these men in the room were here. And so the tale goes to mock the women, in fact, for wanting their rights at all, to tell them they were unchristian and womanly. And more importantly, can we not derail this women's suffrage issue by involving race now, too? And it was a big division within the movement. Do we or do we not involve race? Does it make it more complicated? Does it make it less possible to pass? Now, that said, for the supporters of women's suffrage in the room, I just can't imagine they would not want to hear someone speak. I don't think anyone's hissing, do you?

[Susan]

I read more things that debunked that.

[Beckett]

Yeah, I can see, talking of surprise, like, oh, I didn't know. I didn't know that was happening because she's not in the program as a speaker, But I can't see people standing up and screaming, you know, get the N word out of here. Or whatever. Like, they like to dramatize it later. I just don't think that happened.

[Susan]

No, there was too many people that were there for the right reasons.

[Beckett]

Yeah.

[Susan]

So I don't think that they would do that. This whole event was kind of organized by a woman named Frances Dana Gage. She was kind of part of the Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton crew. She was also a writer. She wrote fiction, she wrote poetry, and she also wrote nonfiction for newspapers.

[Beckett]

This facilitator of the convention was one of the earliest activists to call for, I guess, what would I call it? The removal of race and gender as considerations for anything, for voting, for property rights, for, like, life in general. Wow. Amazing. She was ahead of her time. I mean, basically, anybody who disagreed didn't know who they were dealing with.

[Susan]

That just totally supports the room not being angry because she wouldn't have been angry.

[Beckett]

Right, right.

[Susan]

Yeah. Yeah. And she's, like, the voice of the whole thing. She's the organizer of it.

[Beckett]

Mrs. Gage introduced Sojourner Truth, and I Have been at corporate meetings where I'm introd, not knowing I have to give a speech, and it doesn't feel that awesome. But Sojourner got up with no notes and delivered an electrifying speech. Now, this is known to history as the Ain't I a woman speech. That is how you will see it everywhere. It's not exactly how it was delivered. There was an account given by a man who takes notes for a living, a journalist at the time this speech was given, who actually notated it down a lot differently than Francis Gage, liked to publish that later.

[Susan]

And he was also a friend of Sojourner's. She was staying with him. So, you know, if anybody would know, you know, her message and the way she speaks, it would probably be him.

[Beckett]

So the original to me seems much more educated, I guess, much more powerful than the version that comes later. For example, she starts, may I say a few words on this matter? She says, I am women's rights. I have as much muscle as any man and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man. I can eat as much too, if I can get it. I'm as strong as any man. But the version that came later, 12 years later, the marketing version, the viral version, since that's really what you're going to hear now, is actually a construction of Frances Gages.

[Susan]

Right. Because like I said before, she was a writer. Her version is much longer than the one that ran in the anti slavery bugle just shortly after the speech was given. And it's got so many literary devices in it, it just doesn't sound like the type of speech that she would have given. It sounds like one that has been edited. As a writer, that's what I'm gonna say. This is the lines that she has that kind of corresponds with that. She says, and ain't I a woman? Look at me, look at my arms. I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could head me. And ain't I a woman?

[Beckett]

And I'm sorry to say that Mrs. Gage rewrote during the Civil War, 12 years later in dialect from the Deep South. And I am gonna go out on a limb here and say this is the blackface version of the real speech.

[Susan]

Yeah. Yep. In the speech it says, I have borne 13 children and seen most sold off to slavery. I don't think so.

[Beckett]

And it's just. I mean, I can't even barely stand to read it. We'll provide you the text of both. And it's like women needs to be helped into carriages and lift over ditches and have the blessed place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or gives me any best place. And ain't I a woman? I don't think. I mean, number one, she used to speak Dutch, so if she had an accent, it would be more Germanic in nature. Don't you agree?

[Susan]

Oh, completely, completely.

[Beckett]

So, you know, Ohio's the furthest south she's ever been. It's really bumming me out kind of in this moment and researching this to have it altered like that. But, okay, let's meet in the middle. It was, in either version, a pretty radical concept. Women's rights for every class and race with voting for all women.

[Susan]

And by every account, it was delivered in a very charismatic manner, and it was an extremely powerful speech, if not the best one of the entire conference.

[Beckett]

Now, I read an article that disbelieved that people would laugh during Sojourner Truth's talk, especially this speech. They took offense that the account said that people laughed. And I am going to link you to Alfre Woodard giving this speech. Now, I'm sorry to say it's the latter speech, the more famous, the Ain't I a Woman? Speech. But Alfred Woodard delivers it so well, and there is laughter throughout the auditorium. Sojourner Tooth had a gift. She could deliver hard messages, hard truths in a way that made people maybe a little more comfortable, more accepting. She got in with humor and stayed for the medicine, I guess.

[Susan]

Yeah, she was very witty. She gave retorts to people, you know, snappy comebacks. So why wouldn't she put that in her speeches? She delivered her speeches in a very natural manner. I think they were laughing.

[Beckett]

Well, I do, too. And. And I guess I am brought back to the modern day. I don't know if you're familiar with a comedian named Tig Notaro, and if you wrote down on a piece of paper everything that Tig Notaro said, that's not funny. But by her manner, by her gestures, by her pauses, by her pointing at people in the audience or taking a moment with a word, you can change the whole meaning. Tig Nature is a hilarious person. And so Jonah Truth had that gift, too. And I just have to say, of all the versions of the speech that I have listened to, I think Alfre Woodard, to me, performs it the best.

[Susan]

We're gonna link you to another website that actually has several women reading this anti slavery bugle speech who are actually Dutch American. So they have that accent. They're younger women for the most part, but it kind of gives you an idea of how her accent would have sounded.

[Beckett]

Perfect. Good. Yes.

[Susan]

Yes. I thought it was very fascinating.

[Beckett]

Well, all right. There's the major incident that everyone's. If you've heard of anything she's done, it's this speech. Foreign. The start of a new year is the perfect time to get organized, set goals, and prioritize what matters most. And for me, one of my top priorities is my financial wellness. It feels more important than ever right now. And thanks to Rocket Money, my goals feel achievable. Rocket Money shows me all my subscriptions right in one place and helps me easily cancel ones that I forgot I'd been paying for. I get roped in to one show and then I watch that show and I forget that that clock is still ticking.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Beckett]

Rocket Money also pulls together all my spending across all my different accounts so I can clearly track my spending habits and see where I might want to cut back.

[Susan]

And while sticking your head in the sand on that is something that's a little more comfortable, you really need to do it. And, you know, especially at this time, I am still in my New Year organizational mode. I just did my sock drawer yesterday. And finances with Rocket Money is definitely something I'm doing as well.

[Beckett]

It's like spring cleaning, but for your banking.

[Susan]

Oh, my gosh, it absolutely is. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions. It monitors your spending, and it helps you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Very important.

[Beckett]

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[Susan]

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[Beckett]

That's RocketMoney.com HistoryChicks RocketMoney.com History History Chicks At 60, she bought another house in Harmonia, Michigan, just outside of Battle Creek. And I, I'm like, why the spa? Like, no, it's just one more example of the kind of communal living, the kind of people she liked to be around. Idealists. This was another one of those places if you watch the Road to Wellville for a little hint into what was going on inside the Battle Creek Sanitarium. But guess what her daughters Diana and Elizabeth and their families moved to Battle Creek too. And I, I was waving my hand in the air like, yes, like I thought that dream was dead, of having her family around. And for a while it was just what she'd always dreamed of, you know, sitting on the porch, playing with grandchildren, smoking her pipe and talking to her daughters in the evenings. I. Okay. A little brief period of the dream has come true. But the Dred Scott decision came down. The Supreme Court ruled that a slave was not a citizen, but was property and property could not sue for its freedom. And so she felt like she had to get back out on the speechification trail. She couldn't let this issue grow cold. They had to keep the momentum, the momentum for anti slavery. Couldn't be allowed to die. She couldn't rest on the porch. But what she could do is take a member of her family with her. And so she took her little grandson Sammy to be her man for reading, her man for writing. And basically someone to love, I think, someone to talk to.

[Susan]

I just, I see this old grandma walking with her. I mean he was very young at the time. Was it like 10 when he goes off with her, traveling together and he's handling behind the scenes stuff, making sure she gets where she needs to be and making sure she eats and making sure they have a place to stay and he's 10. I just. It's so adorable. Yes, it was wonderful for her when she was in Harmonia with her daughters and their families. But traveling with Sammy must have also given her, you know, made her heart feel good.

[Beckett]

When the war began in 1861, blacks were not allowed to serve in the Union army. She was actually detained for 10 days in Indiana once for advocating for the north to arm black soldiers before the Civil War. Detained perhaps for her own protection because a lynch mob was out to get a hold of her and the local authorities had to put her in jail for her own protection. And so it was not until, gosh, years later when black soldiers started to be allowed to join up. It was a special unit called the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Frederick Douglass sons joined, as did another one of sojourners grandsons named James Caldwell. And I think this is the regiment you see talking to Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the Daniel Day Lewis Lincoln movie. Oh, talking about why they want to fight. On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. All persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state. The people were off. Shall then be in rebellion against the United States. Shall Be then thenceforward and forever free. The celebrations after that.

[Susan]

Woo.

[Beckett]

Let's call it ultra pinkster. Though the joy could not be contained. It was a glorious day. And then Sojourner had a stroke. A stroke. And her death was mistakenly reported in an abolitionist newspaper. And Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, who had met the author a long time ago, wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly called the Libyan Sybil, which is written in dialect. Again, I have a face that is a happy face with a straight line for a mouth. It's basically a biography. And I find it honestly, sort of offensive. Patronizing, maybe?

[Susan]

Yes, it's, it's. It's stereotypes. A woman that defies a stereotype.

[Beckett]

Okay. Part of it says she's standing tall like her native palm trees. Okay. Mrs. Stowe, Sojourner was born in New York, and the official tree is the sugar maple.

[Susan]

Well, she says in the piece that she was obviously full African. No, there's. There's things in this, in her piece, and we will link you up to it. It's. It's on the Internet, but you can read the whole thing. And it's just like, peppered with things she clearly made up. She had met Sojourner one time in. How many years ago was it? 10, 12 years before this. And Sojourner had been visiting her to get a review from her of her narrative so she could put it in the book and sell more books just from that one conversation. When Harriet was in Italy, she ran across a sculptor named William Story, and he was creating a series of statues. He was, according to Harriet, he was enthralled by the story and modeled this one statue, Olivian Sybil. And he says that he based it off of her. It doesn't look anything like her at all. I mean, there's lots of photographs of Sojourner Truth out there. And this doesn't look anything like her, but he feels that it was his anti slavery sermon in stone. The name kind of followed her around because of this. And the whole article is so inaccurate.

[Beckett]

Well, I don't know. I guess people thought it was charming because. Well, imagine Mrs. Stowe surprised when she got a thank you letter. Though Sojourner Tooth objected to a lot of the content. She felt like a prop, like a caricature. And I, I really do admire her pushing through that. I mean, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was a respected abolitionist. She was famous. She was on the right side, globally speaking. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, she was A co worker in the cause. And I imagine that. And I have no. I mean, somebody tell me. I imagine that unconscious insults from friends might actually hurt worse than actual insults from enemies. And I'm sure it still happened.

[Susan]

Oh, yeah, no, I. I agree with you. This article, as well as the speech, the gauge speech, came out within weeks of each other. Sojourner's name was thrust into the world. I mean, she just reached another level of fame because of these two things happening. And the irony is that neither one of them accurately depicted her. You know, later on, when she was asked about the article, Sojourner would suggest that people purchase the narrative and they can get an accurate biography of her. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. She sold those narratives. She was. I mean, when she's still speaking, she's still got to make money. Right? So she's selling the narrative still. She's selling her picture, like on a. Like a baseball card kind of thing of her merchandise, you know.

[Beckett]

Oh, yeah, she sold them for 25 cents. She had gone to a photographer and gotten a bunch of what they called carte de visite. But I guess you can get like six or 12 poses out of one bit of film by covering up pieces of film. So you can hurry and change your pose and get a little variety type of situation. And underneath she had printed, I sell the shadow to support the substance. And the shadow is what she meant by photography, like, I am selling my shadow. And so that is how she fundraised. I think the carte de visite were.

[Susan]

A quarter, which seems like a lot to me.

[Beckett]

Yeah. But I almost think any of these events where she would have spoken, there's an element of charity in the background anyway, so, you know, you might buy something like school auctions. You can go buy something for cheap that you are paying triple for at the auction because you feel like you're giving to a good cause.

[Susan]

Yes, I know. I. I love the Boy Scout popcorn.

[Beckett]

Since the Emancipation Proclamation, droves. Droves of former slaves had been arriving in Washington, D.C. we touched on that in the Elizabeth Keckley podcast, didn't we? So these slaves had made it away, away from. But what were they going to and what were they supposed to do? I mean, these are people who always had to follow orders. Most had no skills. Many were in poor health. Think how badly Sojourner's papa had ended up. Sojourner and her grandson Sammy and many others went there to work to provide food and shelter for these people and to provide publicity for people to give them money to buy supplies Something super bad was happening. People were coming into these camps and stealing children to take back to Maryland, I. E. Back into slavery. Yeah. And women came to her, came to Sojourner Truth with what was happening. And she's like, you can't let it happen. You're not a slave anymore. You have to stop them. And she confronted some men that said to her old woman, you stay out of our business or we'll put you in jail. And she said, if you try that, I will make the United States rock like a cradle. So, you know, she has been marketed as a little mammy figure, kind of. Yes, sir, you know, sir. And I think that's doing her a disservice because these direct quotes that we get that aren't in speeches that have been rewritten by well meaning people, they're powerful. Like things she says to Dumont, like, I'm not going back. You're not taking my child. I will move to New York City. You know what I mean? Like, she has a will sometimes. She gave more pointed speeches than her audiences ever gave her credit for. Like, she made no allowances for, quote, nice white people. She even said in one of her speeches that God would execute his judgments on white people for their oppression and their cruelty. And I'm not entirely sure she meant whipping. I mean, completely.

[Susan]

She. She was. Can I say ballsy? Sure, sure. I won't say that other B word. Bad. At. No, I know. You hate that word so much. It is nowhere in my notes. That word never appears. Yeah.

[Beckett]

No, to all selves. Beezy hates the word badass. Well, because what is it? What does it even mean? I don't know. Literally.

[Susan]

Yes, I mean literally. It can't be. It's an idiom.

[Beckett]

Right?

[Susan]

Isn't that what those are? I'm fully aware that that's on your long, long list of words.

[Beckett]

Someday I should post that list that I don't like.

[Susan]

Yeah, you should, because you texted it to me once and it was quite long, and that was a while ago.

[Beckett]

I was like, I think that's only a third of it.

[Susan]

Yeah, yeah. And there's been more because words have come up since then. And you're like, oh, that's.

[Beckett]

No, that's funny. Okay, so here we go back, back to the Freedman's village. We had talked about Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's African American dressmaker. She was doing the same thing at the same time. There's no indication that they were friends. Exactly. But Elizabeth Keckley used her pole in the White House to Get Sojourner a meeting with President Abraham Lincoln. And Sojourner fully intended to go in there and give him a fiery speech about doing something for all the people in Friedman's village. But when she was introduced to him, she felt very sorry for him. So the story goes, his face was tired and sad. And here's how the story goes. This is the published story. He. He was all slumped over as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. And she made a light conversation. Well, I had never heard of you before. They wanted you for president, but I think you're the best one we've ever had. And he said, I heard of you. Your name's every place. Like, hey, she got a smile. You know, Washington was better than me. Jefferson's better than me. Those are the best presidents. And she said, they never did anything for my people, sir. And she and he had quite the conversation. That's how the story goes. I like the thought of it. I like the thought of this idealized story. Two such different people that had the same goals.

[Susan]

Yeah. And there is evidence, because he signed her Book of Life, which was her scrapbook that she carried around. His signature is in there, so she felt comfortable enough to ask him for that. Right?

[Beckett]

Yeah. He wrote for Anti Sojourner Truth, a. Lincoln. And then the dates. Yeah, she. She carried that thing everywhere. And I wish I knew where it was. I can't find it. I hope it hasn't been consigned to the fire like so many other papers of history. But press clippings, memos, notes, autographs of famous people and not famous people. Now, the real story might not be so glorious. Evidently, there was a room full of men that he tore himself away from reluctantly to come see her. The conversation was not quite as sprightly as it has been portrayed. Maybe an account from someone else in the room said he was only minimally polite to her. So I just don't know.

[Susan]

And we have no evidence of either way. Right.

[Beckett]

Seriously, now, his relationship with Elizabeth Keckley, I believe, had changed. Perhaps how he saw black women in general. And Anne Elizabeth Keckley's vouching for was pretty important, I think, and valuable. So it probably was somewhere in the middle. You know, the onlooker could have misinterpreted his tiredness as irritation. And Sojourner interpreted it as, you know, God holding the world up by the sheer force of will. History is interpreted so many different ways. But they did meet. They had a conversation. He signed the book. That's all we Know six months later, Sojourner, unfortunately, was among the crowd of people who filed through to see Abraham Lincoln in his coffin. The next president, Andrew Johnson was not a kindred spirit, as Anne of Green Gables would say. He was polite. We don't know what happened. But she did not have him sign her book. Sojourner's third and last court case of her life involved a segregated streetcar in Washington, D.C. after the war. There was a sort of de facto, quote, negro section at the back. Does that sound familiar already? She was mad about that. Like, what did we just fight for, really? And then one day she got on ahead of her white friend, and the conductor manhandled her out of the car and dislocated her shoulder.

[Susan]

So again, she used the law. She reported the crime. The driver was arrested and charged with assault and battery. He lost his job, and Sojourner took the case to the court. And again, she was successful. So this is three times that this former slave has used the court system to bring people to justice. I love that.

[Beckett]

Now, the streetcars had only just been desegregated, by the way. So this was all new to everyone. This whole, like, having people on the same streetcar as you. And maybe we have to give them a little time to adjust. But it's interesting, isn't it, that their immediate solution was very similar to what was happening in the South. You know, separate but not equal. Yep, that should sound familiar, too. Well, that's all starting, but they had no idea who they were dealing with when they got.

[Susan]

That's right.

[Beckett]

That's right. Well, Susan B. Anthony got in touch with Sojourner truth after the 15th amendment was passed, which gave the vote to black men, but no women at all. And the abolitionists, many of whom had been women, and those are the ones that had worked. I mean, they worked the hardest. They felt betrayed by the men in their cause. I mean, they were really. I mean, even Frederick Douglass considered it done. Okay? It's a done deal. The proper people have their rights now. So Susan B. Anthony asked her, will you sign my women's rights petition? Mrs. Truth wrote Susan, And Sojourner wrote back. Remember, this is Sammy writing back. Really, he's the writer. But there was a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women. And if colored men get their rights and not colored women, theirs, you see, the colored men will be masters over the women. It'll be just as bad as it was before. So I'm for keeping this thing going while things are stirring, because if we Wait till it's all still. It's going to take a great while to get it going again.

[Susan]

Wow. She was a prophet.

[Beckett]

Yes. Yes. So she is on that track, too. So the speechification continues. And she went to see a third President, Ulysses S. Grant, with a proposal for him. What if the government were to provide homestead in the undeveloped west for former slaves? You know, sir, many of them do know how to farm. That's one thing they know. And. Well, let's let them do it. Help them out. Help them to not be dependent upon you. Give them a way to support themselves. And Grant did sign the book of life, so he must have been good in the room, I think. But when Sojourner didn't see any action, she took her cause up to Congress, where there was one senator, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said, I'll sponsor a bill. If you can get enough signatures so I can show my colleagues it'll be popularly supported. So she went out on the road with that scenario, too.

[Susan]

So she was a lobbyist?

[Beckett]

She was. She was. This is part of the speech. Well, it's part of the speech she actually gave on the eighth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was like part of another celebration, but she used that platform to work for this particular cause. Now, some people say, let the blacks take care of themselves, but you've taken everything away from them. They don't have anything left. I say get the black people out of Washington. Get them off the government, get the old people out and build them homes in the west where they can feed themselves. Lift up those people and put them there. Teach them to read part of the time, teach them to work the other part of the time. If you do that, they will soon be a people among you. And that is my commission. See, we don't need any dialect, do we?

[Susan]

We don't, no. Nope. That's a powerful statement.

[Beckett]

And when she came back to Washington, D.C. triumphant, with thousands of signatures, someone in the office told her that unfortunately, Senator Sumner had died and no one else would take it up.

[Susan]

It's so sad. I mean, she's in her 70s at this point, and she's just spent all this time and energy trying to get this thing going. She thinks she's going to be doing something great, and it just. Just falls just like that.

[Beckett]

Okay, so I have to tell you, there was a little bit of a effort, not perhaps caused by Sojourner herself, but a generalized movement to make this happen for yourself. There was something called the Exodus to Kansas right around this time, after this disappointment, where tens of thousands of black people, former slaves, migrated to Kansas out of the Deep South. They took it upon themselves to go. And Sojourner couldn't take credit for that. But she thought it was a great thing that people were taking initiative and taking their fate in their own hands and not waiting around for someone else to decide to give it to you, just to take it. It really fit her philosophy.

[Susan]

But Sojourner had other things going on in her head, in her heart. Her Sammy, her 24 year old grandson, was extremely ill. She went back to Michigan to help him, to care for him. She went into debt to provide him medical care. And then sadly, she went further into debt to provide his burial. Her companion for most of his life, I mean, he started with her when he was 10 and he was gone.

[Beckett]

I almost think that was her substitute, Peter.

[Susan]

Yes.

[Beckett]

And she swore to her family that she was going home to die because she was so sad she didn't. She tried to vote in the 1872 presidential election. This is Ulysses Grant's second term along with Susan B. Anthony, who got arrested for that.

[Susan]

Yeah, and we only hear about Susan B. Anthony, we never hear about Sojourner Truth doing it.

[Beckett]

She continued to work for almost another 10 years into her 80s. She was still working for women's rights. But In September of 1883, when she was 86, not a hundred, not 104, not 110 as she had been marketing herself, she was admitted to the Battle Creek Sanitarium by Dr. John Kellogg, one of the inventors of corn flakes. Yes, those Kellogg's. But Sojourner Truth went downhill fast.

[Susan]

She had told her family, the spirit calls me, I must go.

[Beckett]

And in the early hours of November 26, 1883, Sojourner Truth died. She was buried in Battle Creek, Michigan. And her gravestone reads, in memoriam. Sojourner Truth, born a slave in Ulster County, New York, in the 18th century, died in Battle Creek, Michigan, November 26, 1883, aged about 105 years. Carved into her gravestone and then under it the phrase, is God dead? Now, we didn't cover that exactly. She's misquoted on her own gravestone. Frederick Douglass had at one point lost his patience and he had a fire in his belly and he started advocating violence. And Sojourner's response to him was, is God gone? Like, can we not trust him? Basically, are we not going to trust that God knows the right path? And everyone misquoted her as saying, is God dead? And that frankly, before the ain't I a woman? Thing came about was the most famous thing that she was quoted as saying.

[Susan]

That's the thing that really struck me about her story is there's two stories. There's what happened to her and the person she was, which can stand on its own as being extraordinary. And then there's this legend, you know, of her, this myth, all these misquotes and misattributions and just mischaracterizations of her.

[Beckett]

Well, and it still, it bothered me that people were willing and still are willing, I think, to co opt her Persona or make her Persona for their own purposes. I think. And I'll something I learned from this story, I don't know about learned because I think I kind of knew and I think it still happens. But the most enlightened of abolitionists are still full of racism. Maybe unconsciously it's also true today, like paternalism, I guess, or superiority. Like we have to come save them at the same time, not regarding them as full humans.

[Susan]

Yeah, I totally agree. And the thing is like nowadays, because the world communicates in a way that we have never communicated before, we can hear someone say, no, that's not right. You know, before we'd be surrounded by people who thought exactly the same way. And now we can get a different perspective. I just want to think that those abolitionists who spent so much energy and time making the world better, if they had gotten that perspective, that they could, you know, they could change their mind. There's nothing wrong with saying I did something wrong.

[Beckett]

I'm going to go there too. Because guess what happened. Years after she had left, after all the girls had left, Dumont came out against slavery. Old Dumont, Master Dumont said, like you said, he said he was surrounded by people that thought the same thing as he. And he hadn't been around anyone who thought differently. And now that he had read more and talked more with more open minded people, he realized that he had been horrible, that he had been not a very good man. And he regretted it. And he thought anyone who really thinks about it could never be for slavery. And I, I repent. Yeah. So in the end it all came back. So of all the white people in the story, I guess that's the right one to be redeemed.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Beckett]

One thing I learned during this show was all about northern slavery. That's something that no one ever talks about. And I don't know why I didn't connect these two things. That is a similar story in the most famous book slash movie, 12 Years a Slave that just came out. He was a free Black man from New York who was illegally sold into the Deep south and trapped there for 12 years. And I can't believe I didn't connect those. But that would have been her son's fate if she had not used the court system to go after him. So we have reached the end of the actual story of Sojourner Truth. It has been a new experience reading about her. I have learned a lot.

[Susan]

It's so hard to pick people. I mean, everybody on the list is so worthy. Can't wait to learn about all of them. But you and I know we were trying to decide between covering Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth for this particular episode. And I'm glad we went with her because I think her story isn't known as. Well, you know, Harriet's still in the news. You know she's going to be on the money, right?

[Beckett]

Oh, but get this, get this. Sojourner Truth might be on the money, too. Yeah. I just read an article where the $10 bill is due to be reissued on the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which is in 2020. They're going to be on the back. Women of the suffrage movement. Like, I think Elizabeth Cady Stanton might be on there. Susie B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, maybe Lucretia Mott. I'm not sure. All right. And now it is time for media. And as usual, we'll start. Start with books. So we'd be remiss to not just start with the original narrative of Sojourner Truth. I would say either the very, very earliest edition you can get your hands on or the very, very last edition you can get your hands on. Does that make sense? And an annotated version would be better. I have a 93 I compared.

[Susan]

There was two I was reading online. And I have a book called Slave Narratives. It includes Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner's narratives, which I thought was really as a book to read, actually as a book to have. I think this would be a great one. Obvious they were edited over the years and things were added. And I think at one point, there was a bit of her. Her book of life was in as part of the narrative.

[Beckett]

I really do wish that someone would unearth that thing.

[Susan]

Maybe we just missed it. Maybe there's a place in Michigan that might actually have it.

[Beckett]

Okay, very good.

[Susan]

I have to say, the world is light on adult books that are devoted to Sojourner Truth. The one I read was Sojourner Truth, A Life, a Symbol by Nell Irving Painter.

[Beckett]

Yeah, that's. I'd Say that of all the adult books is the best one and one of the most recent. Nell Irvin Painter.

[Susan]

Yeah.

[Beckett]

And then there is a YA level that I really liked called Sojourner Truth, Ain't I a Woman by Patricia C. McKissick and Frederick McKissick. And I would say definitely that is a seventh and eighth grade level. And it, what shall I say, skates over or properly age appropriately, introduces some of the rougher concepts in her story. And then I kind of went on a little bit of a limb. I did some background reading. There is a book that is near to be a textbook. It seems like it might be a doctoral dissertation called the Essence of Liberty. Free Black Women during the Slave Era by Wilma King. It is a little dry. It is not a storybook. You are going to wonder why I recommended it. It is over half endnotes and footnotes. But I think there's some nuggets of awesome that can be gained out of there. I think I really found it good background reading. And then, of course, because I'm a nerd, I also read a lot about Frederick Douglass because he intersects her story and I'm sorry to say, was not that sympathetic to her. He felt like he had brought himself out, had elevated himself by his education and his dress and his deportment and his friends. And he really didn't have a lot of time for Sojourner Truth and her simple prose, I guess.

[Susan]

Yeah. In my head, I gave him blame for her name kind of dropping down. And there was a division between the educated black people and not. And he's. He kind of helped make that happen.

[Beckett]

Right, right.

[Susan]

Not to lessen his contributions, but yeah.

[Beckett]

But in this context, that's what I was a little disappointed to realize when I delved a little deeper into their connection. But it is, again, good background reading. And then I had a children's book that I had left in the car. So I had Susan look it up. The name for me.

[Susan]

I know it. It's called Sojourner Truth. Step, Stomp, Stride by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney.

[Beckett]

The. The illustrations there are very bright and cheerful and, I don't know, walk the children through why she's famous and the energy that she brought to everything.

[Susan]

The children's book that I liked was When Harriet Met Sojourner by Katherine Clinton, illustrated by Shane Evans. And it talks about when Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth met. There's no record they. They met, but there's no record of what they talked about. So there's no way to know. But this is just what might have happened. And it says it in there.

[Beckett]

So good concept. I like it. Yeah.

[Susan]

Yeah, I liked it too. And there was a couple, like compilations that I really kind of liked and I steered off, which took me away a little bit from Sojourner, but so be it. Black Genius Inspirational Portraits of African American Leaders by Dick Russell. The revised edition includes new material on President Obama. You know me with pictures, but it's very thick book and I actually got a little bit out of character. Is Destiny Aspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Be Remember by John McCain. What? That's what I said. That's why I pulled it off the shelf with Mark Salter. So he didn't do it alone. But yep, yep, a bunch of stories about people we should know.

[Beckett]

Well, good. I do not have any more books.

[Susan]

If you are online, what I was talking about earlier with all the versions of women who were Dutch, American women reading the speech is called the Sojourner Truth project. It'[e-mail] and there's both versions of the speech on there as well as these videos. I thought it was really cool. It was very well done, I thought.

[Beckett]

I think that's very cool. And again, I'll link you to Alfre Woodard reading Ain't I a Woman.

[Susan]

Oh, yeah, it's on YouTube. Yeah, there's a article about the Pinkster celebration. They still have a reenactment of it in upstate New York at the Sleepy Hollow Park. Now, there's actually two places where she has kind of a memorial. The one that I kind of liked better is in Florence, Mass. That's when she lived in her Northampton years. It's her house and a statue and there's an African American heritage walking trail. But the cool thing that I liked about this is there's a video of it online. So there's a guy, he takes you on a tour, he does the tour for you. You don't have to go to Florence, Mass, unless you want to, because it's beautiful. And also in Battle Creek, Michigan, there's the Sojourner Truth Institute of Battle Creek. As far as I can tell, their website hasn't been really updated too much, but it has a virtual gallery of some Sojourner Truth memorial art and memorabilia. And they claim to have the largest collection of artifacts and records. So maybe her book of life is there. I will look, look it up between now and when this post so you can look on the show notes and see if we found it.

[Beckett]

There is a website, easily remembered, sojournertruth.org that has a large collection of records and photos of artifacts online, including a, I guess a family tree. What do you call it when your person is the one and you go forward like their descendants, not their. Not their ancestors. But they're just saying, I don't know, family tree, family roots. I don't know, I don't know. Whatever the opposite direction is, they follow her family that direction on one page that I'll link you to. But really the whole website is full of interesting things. And there is a movie being made, an independent movie called Seed of the Free. I'll link you to the director's website, jensighogan.com it is still in the production stage. In fact, I think they just got done casting in the summer. So we'll see how that goes. They are going for the Michigan Film Prize, so good luck to them. And if it comes out anywhere, including online, we can update you on one of the social media pages. I have a page that talks about Thomas Jefferson and his investigation into the Hessian fly epidemic. Yeah, a little fly caused all that trouble. I also have linked a history of the streetcar in D.C. since it ended up in court. And then kind of a good basic timeline for her life at newpolz. Edu. So we will post all of those in addition to the texts of the anti woman speeches and also the Libyan Sybil. And then I tried to read this book about the kingdom, you know, the prophet Matthias and salvation in 19th century America. If. Well, you know what, we'll link you. And if that's your rabbit hole, I found myself like things I don't want to know department. So if you would like to read that, then I'll send you to that link too.

[Susan]

I don't think we've announced that we had put up the chronological listing of all the episodes. It's a tab at the top of the page. We had a listener who was extraordinarily organized and she gets full credit on.

[Beckett]

That tab chronologically by the life of the person, not by when we released them.

[Susan]

You can print it off and put it on the refrigerator and cross them off as you listen to them, if you like to listen to them in chronological order.

[Beckett]

And that's it for Sojourner Truth. Let me close with a quote from the narrative. Through all the scenes of her eventful life may be traced the energy of a naturally powerful mind, the fearlessness and childlike simplicity of one untrammeled by education or conventional customs. Purity of character, an unflinching adherence to principle, and a native enthusiasm which under different circumstances might easily have produced another Joan of Arc. Thanks for listening.

[Susan]

Bye.

[Beckett]

Woo. That was a long one. Thanks for sticking it out until the end. Hey, tell a few friends about us or leave a review for us in itunes, now known as Apple Podcasts. Links for the things we talked about today [e-mail] and you can always catch one of us in all the usual social media locations. Special thanks to James Harper of Harper Active for all of our break Music the End Song is Worth the Fight by Marie hines courtesy of music.meo.com.

[C]

Wipe the darkest shade away Happiness your saving grace Ignorance won't clean, the slave won't find your final resting place don't circle around the task at hand.

[Beckett]

Or take.

[C]

A far way you can stand Disregard the reprimand needing more than second hand there's bigger pictures to paint, More horizons to trace something bigger, better in searching, reaching, burning, bleeding black and white Deeper oceans to swim Unpredictable whims and you're learning, you're learning Freedom's worth the fight Dreams touched with apathy Leave the land and set them free Scaling walls in disbelief oh you can't clown what you can't dream there's bigger pictures to paint, More horizons to chase something better Searching, reaching burdens leading black and white deeper oceans to swim Unpredictable winds and you learn, you learning Freedom's worth the fight Tied up and bound in the cords of our conviction Got my bag of tricks in pocket full of luck watercolor paint by number A reminder of another telling me to stay in line but I'm suffocating There's bigger pictures to paint More horizons to chase Something better in searching, reaching, burning, bleeding black and white Deeper oceans to swim Unpredictable winds and you learn and you learn it there's bigger pictures to paint More horizons to chase Something better and searching, reaching, burning, bleeding black and white Deeper oceans to swim Unpredictable winds and you learn if you learn it how to change break away from it all Freedom's worth the fight.