Abstract
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella in the late 1790s on Roundout Creek in Rosendale, Ulster County, in the state of New York. A Colonel Ardinburgh owned her parents, James and Betsy. Isabella’s father, James was given the name “Bomefrey” (low Dutch for “tree”) because of his tall stature. Betsy or Mau-Mau Bett, as she was called, gave birth to 10 or perhaps 12 children. Isabella was the youngest and only knew six of her siblings. The rest were sold to other owners. Ardinburgh died when Isabella was still an infant. The Colonel’s son Charles inherited his father’s property, including those he enslaved. Under Charles Ardinburgh, Isabella’s family as well as all of Ardinburgh’s other enslaved blacks lived in a cellar beneath a house that was converted into a hotel. In the cellar, there was little sunlight and the floor was often covered with mud. The men, women, and children who shared this cellar suffered from diseases and ailments resulting in bodies that were often contorted and tortured by pain. 1
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Notes
Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 11. Here, Morrison is referring specifically to slave narratives but this argument would apply to nineteenth-century spiritual autobiographies as well.
See William L. Andrews, “The Changing Moral Discourse of Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography: Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley,” in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 229.
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 54.
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (Glenview, IL: Basic Books, 1992), 33.
Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2007), 39.
George White, Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White, 1st Palgrave ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 90.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 234.
Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 128.
Clifton H. Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves, 2nd ed. (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1969), 93–94.
Finnian N. Nwaozor, Studies in African and Medieval European Mysticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, May 2002), 53–54.
Charles H. Long, “Indigenous People, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning,” in Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, ed. Jennifer I. M. Reid (Oxford, UK: Lexington Books, 2003), 168.
Anthony B. Pinn, The End of God-Talk: An African American Humanist Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 130–131.
Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 280.
Beverly Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 14.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 18.
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© 2013 Joy R. Bostic
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Bostic, J.R. (2013). God I Didn’t Know You Were So Big: Apophatic Mysticism and Expanding Worldviews. In: African American Female Mysticism. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375056_4
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