Undoing Slavery by Kathleen M. Brown

Author:Kathleen M. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

An Enslaved Mother’s Song

For most of her career as an abolitionist speaker and itinerant minister, Sojourner Truth made motherhood a key feature of how slavery robbed her of her personhood. Not without reason. Alone among abolitionists, Truth was both the child of an enslaved woman and herself an enslaved mother. We can see both risk and calculation in Truth’s carefully cultivated public image as a respectable and virtuous woman. Contemplating Truth’s scrupulous grooming of that image, her reputation for speaking candidly is even more amazing, even if, with Nell Painter, we conclude that the speech in which she repeated a rhetorical question, “Ain’t I a woman?,” was possibly apocryphal.100

Not all of Truth’s public performances were as subject to appropriation and repackaging as her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. One well-documented occasion, her attendance at the inaugural meeting of the Pennsylvania Progressive Friends on May 22, 1853, offers a glimpse of Truth’s own carefully chosen performance of motherhood. The Progressive Friends had split off from the main body of Quakers in Philadelphia over continued activism against slavery, including their participation in the Underground Railroad. Truth had been in Philadelphia in the months before the meeting, spending time with William Still, Lucretia Mott, and other abolitionists. She had spoken to a PFAS meeting twice, in January and May, with the second appearance coming just days before the Progressive Friends gathered at the Old Kennett Meetinghouse. Addressing PFAS in the ethnoracial language of the day, she appealed to the Anglo-Saxon race to work on behalf of the oppressed African, a necessary capitulation to the contemporary usage that reflected the overlapping meanings of race, nation, and lineage.101

The hymn Truth chose for the Progressive Friends Meeting was in many ways typical of the repertoire of abolitionist music. “O Pity the Slave Mother” was a well-known song published in the Oberlin Social and Sabbath School hymnbook in 1846. William Wells Brown included it two years later in his compendium of abolitionist hymns, The Anti-slavery Harp.102 The enslaved mother Truth invoked in song had a flesh and blood presence in her child’s life despite describing herself as kinless:

I Pity the slave-mother, careworn and weary,

Who sighs as she presses her babe to her breast;

I lament her sad fate, all so hopeless and weary,

I lament for her woes and her wrongs unredressed:

O who can imagine her heart’s deep emotion,

As she thinks of her children about to be sold;

You may picture the bounds of the rock-girdled ocean

But the grief of that mother can never be known!

The mildew of slavery has blighted each blossom,

That ever has bloomed in her path-way below;

It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom,

And chilled her heart’s verdure with pitiless woe;

Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression;

Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay;

No arm to protect from the tyrants aggression—

She must weep as she treads on her desolate way.

O, slave mother, hope! see—the nation is shaking!

The arm of the Lord is awake to thy wrong!

The slave-holder’s heart now with terror is quaking,

Salvation

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