Possible Impossibles: Four Pedagogies for the Present and Pressing Moment

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

NOTES

Notes

1 Sojourner Truth could not read or write, and thus she delivered her speech extemporaneously. There are at least two different accounts of the famous speech. The first was reported by her friend Marius Robinson, editor of the Anti-Slavery Bugle, a few days after the speech. The second was reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard by the organizer of the Akron conference, Frances Gage, 12 years later, in 1863 (Brezina, 2004; Mabee, 1995). The latter has become the accepted version attributed to Sojourner Truth, and it is the one included in the 1875 edition of Truth’s autobiography, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which had been originally published in 1850, prior to the 1851 speech.

2 In Frances Gage’s account, Truth’s words were rendered as if she had spoken in a Southern dialect. However, Truth was born and raised in New York, and Dutch was her first language. It is likely that the Southern inflections in Gage’s account were added for dramatic effect and did not reflect Truth’s actual speech pattern (Brezina, 2004). In this editorial, I have chosen to use the spelling conventions of “standard” English when quoting from the accepted version of the speech. I am well aware of the politics involved in this choice. On the one hand, Gage’s inflected version is part of the historical record; on the other, it is highly unlikely that it represents the way that Sojourner Truth actually spoke, and that it reflected Gage’s own racist assumptions about what a Black woman should sound like. Page numbers for the passages quoted refer to the accepted version of the speech, as it appears in Truth’s 1875 autobiography, which can be found online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/truth75/truth75.html.

3 There is some debate as to the extent to which Frances Gage added words to the speech. In fact, Carleton Mabee (1995) argues that the key phrase “ar'n’t [ain’t] I a woman?” was likely added by Gage (see also Brezina, 2004). Mabee (1995) also notes that Truth was quite involved in the preparation of both versions of her autobiography, and although she could not read or write, it is unlikely that she was unaware of any changes made by Gage. In either case, the exercise of imagining a White woman like Gage posing the question makes the power of it being asked by Truth all the more evident, even if it’s Truth’s shadow that speaks.