By Charles Hart
Soujourner Truth and Me: Two Hundred Years Apart/A Part
“Sojourner Truth, born Isabella, is one of the two most famous American women of the nineteenth century.” Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life. A Symbol (W.W. Norton: 1996). (This book was a gift to us, 10/8/1996, from Ellen Tarry, a delightful person and author of The Third Door and other books.)
Sojourner Truth was born in New York in the late 1790’s
on Rondout Creek.
Though Alabama born, I have bathed for forty years
in Rondout Creek waters,
Two hundred years and thirty miles downstream from her place of birth,
In waters cold as the truth she bathed her listeners in.
When she left her slaveowners, she was befriended
by a family named Van Wagenen,
called Van Wagner outside of Ulster County.
I have been befriended in the Catskills by a nice couple
named Van Wagner.
Sojourner Truth’s son, Peter, was sold at 5 or 6 years old
as a slave into families named Gedney, Waring, Fowler.
He ended up in Alabama, “whipped, kicked and beaten” at age 7,
Until his mother got him back in a New York court of law in 1828.
My New York Hart ancestors were kin to families
named Gedney, Waring, Fowler.
I am Cain. I am Abel.