I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.
And ar’n’t I a woman?
Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter.
Then I will speak upon the ashes.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.
If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.
We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again; but we have been long enough trodden now; we will come up again, and now I am here.
Now, if you want me to get out of the world, you had better get the women votin’ soon. I shan’t go till I can do that.
You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway.
And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the ‘Peculiar Institution’? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system – which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches – we wish to be shown where it can be found.
Many slaveholders boast of the love of their slaves. How would it freeze the blood of some of them to know what kind of love rankles in the bosoms of slaves for them! Witness the attempt to poison Mrs. Calhoun, and hundreds of similar cases. Most ‘surprising ’ to every body, because committed by slaves supposed to be so grateful for their chains.
Yes,′ she said, ’the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.
I tell you I can’t read a book, but I can read de people.
Look there above the center, where the flag is waving bright; We are going out of slavery, we are bound for freedom’s light; We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight...
Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wan’t a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?” Rolling thunder couldn’t have stilled that crowd, as did those deep, wonderful tones, as she stood there with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!
Oh Lord,′ inquired Isabella, ‘what is this slavery, that it can do such dreadful things? what evil can it not do?’ Well may she ask, for surely the evils it can and does do, daily and hourly, can never be summed up, till we can see them as they are recorded by him who writes no errors, and reckons without mistake.
Think you, dear reader, when that day comes, the most ‘rapid abolitionist’ will say-‘Behold, I saw all this while on the earth?’ Will he not rather say, ‘Oh, who has conceived the breadth and depth of this moral malaria, this putrescent plague-spot?’ Perhaps the pioneers in the slave’s cause will be as much surprised as any to find that with all their looking, there remained so much unseen.
In heartening contrast to our own “culture of complaint,” in which the idea of human solidarity seems lost in the clamor of victim groups competing for attention and entitlement, Sojourner Truth grew to understand that her personal quest for freedom was meaningful only as a moment in a larger struggle against the burden of injustice.
As we were walking the other day, she said she had often thought what a beautiful world this would be, when we should see every thing right side up. Now, we see every thing topsy-turvy, and all is confusion.
All who eat swine’s flesh are of the devil; and just as certain as he eats it, he will tell a lie in less than half an hour. If you eat a piece of pork, it will go crooked through you, and the Holy Ghost will not stay in you, but one or the other must leave the house pretty soon. The pork will be as crooked in you as ram’s horns, and as great a nuisance as the hogs in the street.