Practical Truths: Black Feminist Agency and Public Memory in Biographies for Children

Abstract

Biographies are an influential, though understudied, aspect of Western educational culture and American public memory. This essay examines how juvenile biographies about Sojourner Truth portray her as a model of human agency for young readers. Specifically, the essay argues that biographies published in the United States between 1967 and 2009 rhetorically construct versions of Truth's life guided by the agential tropes of consciousness, self-determination, and resistance. These tropes reflect values espoused by African American feminist traditions while also rendering Truth's story accessible to a wide variety of young American readers.

Keywords:

• African Americans
• agency
• feminism
• juvenile biographies
• public memory
• Sojourner Truth

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Valeria Fabj and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. She is especially grateful to professors Angela Ray and Darlene Clark Hine for their support of and contributions to this project.

Notes

I use the term creators to refer to all individuals whose ideas went into the creation of the text. While the most significant of these are typically named (e.g., author, illustrator, editor), others remain anonymous to readers. I choose this term in part to highlight the strongly collective aspect of producing books for children. I also use this term in order to mark the distance between the perceived intentions of the author and the resulting text.

Although I treat Black feminist thought as a single entity in this essay, its traditions and practices are not always coherent or unified. I echo these words of Patricia Hill Collins: “This portrayal is in contrast to my actual view that theory is rarely this smoothly constructed. Most theories are characterized by internal instability, are contested, and are divided by competing emphases and interests” (Black Feminist Thought viii).

The concept of transhistorical identification is adapted from Maurice Charland's concept of the “transhistorical subject” (133–50).

For an argument promoting interdisciplinary perspectives on children's literature from within that field, see Sell (1–3).

The term trade books refers to commercial, non-textbook works intended for educational or recreational purposes.

On the dramatic increase of both juvenile biographies in general and juvenile biographies of women and minorities, see Eaton (10). Here I do not mean to imply that these other movements created Black feminism in any straightforward sense. For more on the interaction of these three movements, see Giddings (299–324).

I refer to Sojourner Truth by that name after 1843. For events before that time, I refer to her as Isabella.

Biographical information drawn from Truth's Narrative, Painter's Sojourner Truth, and Mabee with Newhouse. I employ the latter two as my “historical” sources because their authors have deliberately taken up the cause of using archival research and traditional historical methodologies to deconstruct the myths about Truth that shape our public perceptions of her.

In referring to public education, I am thinking broadly about the vast system that includes but is not limited to public schools, public libraries, and the commercial publishing industry.

Historically, children's literature has been viewed as didactic literature. Scholars such as Margery Fisher and Milton Meltzer point out that this connection has especially sullied the legitimacy of children's nonfiction as a subject of serious academic inquiry (Fisher 9; Meltzer 175). Some historians of children's literature have argued that texts for children have been moving steadily away from a straightforward didacticism to a greater emphasis on the enjoyment of the reader (Sell 4). On the very general historical shift in focus from education to pleasure, see Hunt (10–11). Both Hunt and Perry Nodelman see the education/entertainment question as inherent to the field of children's literature (Nodelman, Hidden Adult 36).

In my view, the distinction between “public memory” and “history” is not intrinsic or substantive but primarily discursive. That is, scholars and members of the public choose a term based on its ability to describe certain values or qualities that they ascribe to the representation of the past, such as its facticity or liveliness.

This survey deliberately highlights themes that pertain to the purposes of this essay. In so doing, it glosses over the many nuances recognized by scholars who work at the intersection of rhetorical studies and memory studies.

Bishop describes the purpose of historical literature by, about, and for African Americans slightly differently but no less compellingly: “This strong emphasis on African American history functions both as a corrective to the historical neglect, distortion, or omission of that history in school curricula and a manifestation of the belief that knowledge of their history will function as anchor, compass, and sail for African American children as they undertake their life journeys” (249).

The American Library Association's Web site describes the purpose of the Coretta Scott King Award as the following: “To encourage the artistic expression of the African American experience via literature and the graphic arts, including biographical, historical and social history treatments by African American authors and illustrators” (“The Coretta Scott King Award for Authors and Illustrators: Submitting a Title,” The American Library Association, 2011, accessed 24 May 2011, <http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/emiert/cskbookawards/slction.cfm>).

Much scholarship testifies to Truth's symbolic role. In this work, she is part of woman suffrage; she is a “Blues-Bad-Preacher-Woman” (Douglass-Chin 2001); she is a “Wise Woman” like Oprah Winfrey (Brummett and Bowers 2004); she is part of the “abolitionist sisterhood” (Painter, “Difference, Slavery, and Memory”); she is a working Black woman.

Painter argues that such individuals are “known purely through the agency of others, who have constructed and maintained their legends” (Sojourner Truth 285). Unlike Painter, I think that Truth's memory is the result of a unique combination of her own agency and that of others. Truth was undoubtedly a shrewd agent in publicizing and promoting her persona. Sociologist Gary Alan Fine would say that Truth and other “reputational entrepreneurs” developed and promoted certain interpretations for strategic purposes (Fine 21).

A number of well-known writings on Truth illustrate this mixture. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe fashioned her own version of Truth in an 1863 Atlantic Monthly article, “Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl.” Although many of Stowe's images have influenced biographers such as Brown and even persist today, one of the most memorable is her telling of an exchange between a disheartened Frederick Douglass and Truth in 1852. In despair over the fight against slavery, Douglass suggested that the cause may have to take up arms, to which Truth reportedly retorted, “Frederick, is God dead?” Stowe tells her readers that this response created a palpable excitement among audience members and changed the direction of abolitionism. The phrase is etched on Truth's tombstone in Battle Creek, Michigan, and it is quoted in many biographies. However, as Painter tells us, the phrase originally reported was, “Frederick, is God gone?” (Painter, Sojourner Truth 160–62).

For other examples of a sudden realization or change in perspective brought about by this event, see Claflin (35–36) and Krass (36).

See, for example, Helen Frost's version of this moment, which explains the New York State legislation to free slaves, then states, “In 1827, Isabella became free” (11).

See also Trumbauer (9).

In the Narrative, the name change is all but swallowed up by descriptions of the reasons and purposes of Truth's new mission. It says simply that, “about an hour before she left, she informed Mrs. Whiting, the woman of the house where she was stopping, that her name was no longer Isabella, but SOJOURNER; and that she was gong [sic] east” (80). This passage reflects Gilbert's own nineteenth-century interests in Christian missions, but it also highlights the link between self-determination and responsibility that figures into subsequent texts.

Painter suggests that the name “expressed two of her [ … ] main preoccupations: transitoriness/permanence and distrust/credibility” (Painter, “Representing Truth” 462).

Other texts that make the name change a pivotal moment in Truth's life narrative include Adler (14–15); Krohn (16–17); Ortiz (43–45); Ruffin, Sojourner Truth (18); Swain (26–27); and Taylor-Boyd (19–20).

The phrase “I felt as if the power of a nation” is productively ambiguous. The “as if” indicates that Truth was employing a metaphor in her dictation to Olive Gilbert. This metaphor could have referred either to her incredible personal power or the power she might derive from a nation of those who identified with her just cause. Clearly, during Sojourner Truth's lifetime, such a nation only existed in people's imaginations.

For other examples of texts that appropriate the “power of a nation” phrase, see Bernard (70–71); Gillis (13); Peterson (32); and Roop and Roop (50–51). Although the Gillis and Peterson texts do not directly connect this phrase to Isabella's marginalized identity, the Bernard and Roop and Roop texts do.

During her lifetime, Truth acted as plaintiff in at least three cases: one in 1828 against Solomon Gedney, who had illegally sold her son Peter to a slave owner in Alabama; a civil case in 1835 against Ann and Benjamin Folger, who had maligned her reputation; and a final suit in the mid-1860s against a streetcar conductor who had injured her while she rode. On the first case, see Mabee and Newhouse (16–21) and Painter, Sojourner Truth (32–35). On the slander case, see Mabee and Newhouse (37–40) and Painter, Sojourner Truth (58). On the streetcar case, see Mabee and Newhouse (133–35) and Painter, Sojourner Truth (210–11).

For other examples, see Adler (11); McLoone (13); Ruffin, Sojourner Truth (14); Ruffin, Her Story (15); and Taylor-Boyd (15).

It can be tempting to designate each of these reports as “true” or “false.” However, when examining the two texts, it is important to keep in mind that regardless of the spatiotemporal proximity of each writer, both of these texts involve a process of invention meant to render a persuasive (or “accurate,” depending on the motivation) representation of Sojourner Truth. My texts for these reports come from Fitch and Mandziuk. The Robinson version can be found on pp. 107–08; the Gage version as it appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on pp. 103–04.

Reference to this speech has been complicated further in recent years, due to the growing public recognition of the questions surrounding the “authenticity” of Gage's canonical text. Many biographies since the turn of the century mention the speech but do not cite phrases verbatim. Some use the speech as a kind of object lesson about historical accuracy. In fact, one of the most recent books sets itself up as “a primary source investigation,” part of a series titled Great Historic Debates and Speeches (Brezina 2005).

Although the present study focuses on individual biographies of Truth, it is notable that she appears in several contemporary collective biographies as well. Collective biographies of historical women, such as Cheryl Harness's anthology of women “rabble rousers,” always mention the speech. Harness places Truth among the abolitionists, whereas the author of a feminist consciousness-raising book for adolescent girls makes no distinctions based on race or class and interprets the speech as part of the feminist project (Harness 14–15; Bolden 152–53). In Outrageous Women of Civil War Times, Mary Rodd Furbee explains the significance of Truth's speech to both movements: “Her ideas shook things up, too, for she forced the mostly white reformers (and the entire country) to consider that status, condition, and rights of black women, as well as white ones.” Furbee's text also uses a sidebar to offer brief explanation and contextualization of the debate of the speech's authenticity (41–42).

For other texts that focus on this speech as the singular result of Truth's positionality, see Brezina (5); Roop and Roop (90–94). For texts that treat the 1851 Akron speech as evidence of Truth's involvement in either abolition, women's rights, or nineteenth-century social movements in general, see Adler (17); Claflin (84); Gillis (19); Krohn (4–5); Lutz (57); Mattern (14); Ortiz (88). A few texts give the speech almost no political significance: Collins (22); McLoone (19); Swain (38).

Sojourner Truth's “Book of Life” includes a report of three incidents wherein Truth confronted the racist practices of the Washington public transit system (Truth, Narrative and “Book of Life” (135–38); other mentions appear on 176 and 230). For scholarly accounts of these incidents, see Mabee with Newhouse (129–38) and Painter, Sojourner Truth (209–11).

Further discussion of the streetcar incidents appears in Taylor-Boyd (43).

For examples of texts that draw a direct causal link between Truth's action and social change, see Claflin (111); Lutz (66–67); Ortiz (138–39); Roop and Roop (110–11).

Although Helen Stone Peterson's biography does not refer to Truth as a freedom rider, the section wherein the stories of the streetcar incidents are told is titled Freedom Rides (80–85).