Ain't I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth

Author:Sojourner Truth [Truth, Sojourner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241472378
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?’

Orange, New Jersey, 1874

The little company of Friends in Orange held a very interesting meeting yesterday morning in Association Hall, where they were addressed by two noted preachers, one a man, the other a woman, the former white and the latter colored. These were George Truman and Sojourner Truth. The former was the first speaker.

At the conclusion of Mr Truman’s address there was a short interval of silent meditation, after which Sojourner Truth, the venerable preacher and missionary, rose to speak. Her tall form was slightly bent with age, and as she faced audience, clad in the simple garb of a Quakeress, she looked like an aged sibyl pleading the cause of her people. At first her voice was somewhat husky, and a few words were scarcely intelligible at the other end of the room, but as she warmed up with her subject all signs of weakness disappeared. She said that she felt that she was called to her work, and that if we are inheritors of the kingdom of God there must be some work that is to be done by us. That was what she had been trying to do for twenty or thirty years. When she was enlightened by God’s love and truth she wanted to know, ‘Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? Now I want to go to work. Well, it came to me in the antislavery cause. I knew slavery was a curse. I had been a slave and a chattel, and I went to work then. After that there seemed to be a call for me to go to work for the poor and outcast, for they are as poor as any one on God’s footstool.’ She said she had tried for years to get the government to help her and give the old destitute people, left destitute by the war, and the young growing up in wickedness, a home.

She spoke of the misery and degradation she had seen among the colored people in the South, of the Black Maria full of them driving up to the Washington police court, of their being thrown into jails, and of their children growing up in vice and ignorance, and said that it was a shame and an abomination, and that the people did not know these things simply because they did not see them. She had heard it said that these evils would die out in time, but they would not die out, ‘they must be learned out.’ God looks down on these things and sees them, and we all ought to feel that the world should be better because we are in it.

She believed in being doers of the word, not hearers only, and in doing something to show we are workers in the vineyard. She lectured four years on this matter, and had got up a petition to Congress to set aside a portion of the public lands in the West, and put buildings thereon for a home for the destitute.

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