In the Public Eye: Sojourner Truth and the "O.J. Trial"

Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. By Nell Irvin Painter. New York: Norton, 1996. Pp. 348. 44 illustrations. $28.

Birth of a Nation 'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. Ed. Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Pp. 418. $15.

A person would have to have been living in a small dank cave, with no cable television, for the last four years to be unaware of the court cases involving Orenthal James Simpson, a star athlete turned sportscaster, movie actor, and all-American celebrity. That same recluse would have to have avoided U. S. bookstores almost religiously to be unaware that the most discussed of his trials, a criminal case concerning two brutal murders, spawned an array of accusations and revelations to throng the "true crime" shelves. When Jeffrey Toobin's journalistic The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson (1996) is hailed as the one "must-read" account in this media barrage, that evaluation rests on a plausible but particular conception of what it is that people need when they consider violent deaths linked to wife-battering and drug abuse, the rupture of an extended family and of faith in police procedure at a crime scene, popular doubts surrounding present-day incarnations of the jury trial, and a scandal widely understood as somehow pitting "black" against "white." Alternate conceptions of inquiry suggest the importance of looking past whether Simpson committed two murders to discover the reasons that onlookers found his criminal trial so compelling. Essayists who contributed to Birth of a Nation 'hood do not assume, or even ponder, Simpson's innocence; instead, they collaborate to refute the dictate that: "No book or interview time will be orchestrated for any but those convinced of or flirting with Mr. Simpson's guilt." The hope is that alert cultural analyses of the scandal named for an ex-football star will shed light on tensions central to American culture at the end of the century that W. E. B. Du Bois linked to negotiations of the "color line."

Nell Irvin Painter would surely second this vision, because her recent book on another spot-lighted black American is a sustained attempt to exhibit the process by which one nineteenth-century abolitionist lecturer has been remembered (rightly or wrongly) and even iconized, while more influential and courageous fellow-travelers are forgotten. Painter's study can be read as a biography. But its real aim is to investigate how images of Sojourner Truth have been deployed in ways that crowd out her actual life and work, to dissect the myth that grew out of an amalgam of this activist's self-expressive acts and others' commentary on her words and deeds. As a conclusion to this project, Painter admits a personal agenda: "I myself have functioned as a sort of Sojourner Truth." Scholar-subject identification is not new in feminist scholarship, but Painter's deployment of this strategy is odd because, coming at the end of her study, it appears to be the climax to which her long book builds. Painter's account has aroused dissent.[1]Until more votes are in, it will be difficult to say whether this scholar functioned as a sort of Truth, a sort of "Truth," or something altogether different. But even if a person who picks up this book missed the New Republic's critique, and its charge that Painter tried to hitch her wagon to a star, that reader should still wonder how she decided to pronounce some events in the standard Truth data file to be fact and dismiss others as white writers' fantasy. My problem with Painter's latest book is not that I find her self-aggrandizing, but that she cannot figure out what sort of work she is trying to do. "I've never been properly formed as a historian," she announced in a recent interview.[2] That is surely an overstatement but the implications are confusing, to say the least, and the confusion is not cleared up by the most striking portion of Painter's study, the two concluding sections which have little to do with Truth.

I will return to those codas, but first review the known facts about the life and times of the anti-slavery speaker and women's rights activist born Isabella Baumgartner ca. 1797 in New York State. Trained as a servant, Isabella was noted for her physical strength, hard living and vivid personality. She left her home and found a new line of work after being freed in 1826, due to a religious conversion which persuaded her to change her name. As Sojourner Truth, she joined the circle around a charismatic figure who called himself the Prophet Matthias. When he was discredited, Truth brought her singing and preaching skills to those Americans dedicated to the immediate end of slavery. Here, in the early 1840s, began the period of her life of most interest to her contemporaries and to us, as Truth gained a reputation for moving descriptions of slavery from the freedwoman's point of view. As an abolitionist, she associated with the freethinkers of her day, and investigated the "spirit-rappings" that swept America after 1848. Yet she always poured more energy into impassioned support for an end to slavery and the enhancement of women's rights.

Painter suggests that Truth's use of humor diminished her speeches' impact on white audiences, but with little supporting evidence of reaction or effect this charge must remain in doubt. So must Painter's views on the ways in which black audiences received Truth's words, since the book is silent on the topic except to show that Truth resisted the policies proposed by Frederick Douglass, the most famous former slave and a great orator in his own right. This is a glaring lapse, for historians interested in black Americans' involvement in abolition and for those who wonder whether Truth's long-popular Narrative (1850) appealed to black Americans conscious that slavery was not always, or entirely, what was portrayed in the abolitionist press. Painter discusses Truth's life-story to note its emendations and silences, but focusses on the still-new proposition that Truth may never have uttered the words for which she is now best-known. Responding, that is, to the charge of Carleton Mabee and Susan Mabee Newhouse, Painter agrees that the bold "Ar'n't I a woman?" (sometimes "Ain't I a woman?") was the work of a white essayist who hoped to enlist Sojourner Truth in the cause of women's rights. Painter concludes the biographical portion of her book with an account of Truth's final decades, spent lecturing out of a home-base in western Michigan. Sharp-witted to the last, the dynamic religieuse died in 1883.

This story is worth retelling for many reasons, but one of its outstanding characteristics in Painter's rendering is the warts-and-all Sojourner Truth that is impressed on the reader's mind. Wrongheaded at times, uncertain, and yet confident in her faith and mission, Painter's Truth is a fully human figure worthy of interest and respect. No one will walk away from this Sojourner Truth thinking that nineteenth-century black Americans can be conceptualized or studied en masse, or ignorant of the important role that a Bible-based faith played in many ex-slaves' lives. The second point should inform scholars' understanding of the attacks made on Frederick Douglass when he criticized church-goers who owned slaves. But the first point is the more important, because farther reaching, as scholars particularize and juxtapose the experiences and outlooks of nineteenth-century Americans who could, and did, disagree. Truth is a good place to look for outlooks and acts that jar, because she was raised a Dutch speaker in a Northern state and knew nothing of the South's slavery except by report. Painter shows how this background torqued Truth's post-Emancipation projects into shapes that now look eccentric or ill-advised.

Early reviews showed no interest in this aspect of Painter's work; instead, they made angry charges about this book's "deconstruction" of Truth. Remorseless in their pursuit of puns on what was, after all, a chosen moniker that could almost be called a stage name, reviewers seem to have missed the point of Painter's undertaking. She does not whittle away Truth's ability to direct her own life-course or construct her persona.[3] Instead, Painter very usefully affirms that individuals who achieve celebrity do not do so by their own unaided efforts and explores the media apparatus that created a half-fictive but deeply appealing "Sojourner Truth." I agree with Painter that media sources create and destroy perceptions of notoriety or importance which then influence the historical record, and with scholarship that shows how print reputations are constrained by, but not entirely dependent on, the rules, needs, and tastes of media outlets like newspapers and magazines. This sort of inquiry leads, in turn, to investigations of the ways in which reputations are constrained by, but not entirely dependent on, the individuals with the greatest access to and clout within those sources of infotainment. Some scholars obviously take a different view, but I see nothing about this approach that makes Truth, or anybody else, powerless in her own life or in the creation of her public fame. Besides, Painter insists that the former slave did utter forthright witticisms that forced audiences to stop and think, and did make up her own mind about divisive issues like black suffrage and post-bellum projects to re-situate the former slaves. What early reviewers failed to see, I believe, was the distinction Painter tries to make between person and persona in the freighted case of testimony from a speaker discredited by membership in socially depreciated groups like "woman," "ex-slave," and "black."

Scholarship of this kind is fresh and informative, but it does carry a special burden because its findings stand or fall on knotty valuations of reception and use. Here, I do think that Painter's scholarship merits criticism, because it does not help us to guess at audiences' reactions to Truth. I accept that, in many cases, guesses are all we've got. But I would still inquire if Painter intended her Sojourner Truth to resemble the Henry James character who, as a women's-rights speaker allied to spiritualist circles, lectures fluently but effects no change. More information about audiences' reactions could amend this portraiture, but in the meantime it is not obvious what Painter's adoption of Truth's mostly fictive authority signifies.

I think it's supposed to show that Painter has overcome trauma and adversity, for this scholar's "scoop" is the idea that the young Isabella was sexually abused. A predictable eventuality, one might say, for girls born in slavery, but Painter's twist is to impute the abuse to Isabella's mistress. I feel deep reservations about this consciously provocative claim because it strikes me, though the word sounds odd, as a wish. I don't say that Painter hoped to boost her subject's victimization; instead, I think she tried to find an explanation for Truth's involvement with the Matthias cult, which was bizarre even by the standards of its Heaven-conscious day. Unfortunately, Painter's "discovery" is spun out of a few half-sentences in Truth's Narrative, and the assertion that some women abuse children sexually in our own day. This is fragile support for a disturbing claim which could be helpful or crippling to historians of sexuality, women, slavery, etc. Yet Painter was insouciant about her lack of evidence when interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Of course there's no proof," she admitted, of the abuse charge; "It just seems to fit." My response to that claim is: "yes and no," because even if female-female sexual abuse fills some trendy niche on today's talk shows, we can only wonder how legitimate it is to read contemporary pop psychology back into an utterly different cultural milieu.

Having noted my objections, I want to acknowledge that Painter has made a genuine contribution to Truth scholarship, broadly conceived, and to larger topics having to do with racial identities in our own day, because the importance of this study is less in what she says about the life of Sojourner Truth and more in its discussion of Truth's ongoing prominence as an icon of feminist theory and "black pride" circles which do not routinely overlap. In this portion of her book, Painter's tactics are less likely to offend because she provides solid evidence and weightier analysis. Most helpful is Painter's analysis of Truth's use of the carte-de-visite, a sort of proto-business card bearing a photographic image and a motto. It results in a display of images which affirm the contention that Truth presented herself in a plain style that nonetheless hinted at middle-class respectability. The same display reveals that Truth did not choose to be remembered as the ex-slave who asked "Ar'n't I a woman?", since the motto on her cards alludes to photographic techniques and her chosen name: "I sell the shadow to support the substance." This word-play is significant from a person interested in the possibility of spirit-communications, once you know that seekers of that persuasion liked to use photography to bolster the claims that ectoplasmic substances appeared in séance rooms. But how are readers to know that fact? Painter misses it, and misses the chance to frame her argument in historical context by contrasting Truth's cartes-de-visite to those of other prominent Americans or providing information about those who bought, received, collected, or saved such mementoes. Then, too, while we learn that these cards provided Truth with income, we don't learn how much. I, for one, wondered how she was able to buy a house in Battle Creek upon leaving a communitarian experiment. If she had savings or a formal patron, we do not hear of either, and if her lecturing paid well, we are not told. Yet surely either source of support would have been pertinent to a study of this woman's images and fame. Information on these topics would also increase understanding of a form of nineteenth-century cultural transmission, and of racial relations' interlacings with economic security.

These are not the queries that detain Painter as she unearths the processes by which a real person was made into a face on a t-shirt. That really is an interesting and worthwhile project, and it's because I support the inquiry that I would have liked to see this scholar do a more deliberate job. Nor is it terribly illuminating or challenging for Painter to claim that her academic training was somehow inadequate, since she goes on to charge that the usual historical methods are not as useful as scholars suppose. The upshot of her positioning and re-positioning disturbs me more than the unsupported charge of sexual abuse because it looks to me as though Painter wants to have her cake and eat it, too.

The first part of her two-pronged declaration jabs at what it is that historians do: describing her experience of teaching undergraduates about Sojourner Truth, Painter reports, "I would go over the material methodically and explain, in good historian's fashion. . . ." Confronted with undergraduates' preference for the "Truth" they thought they knew, and finding this mythic creature equally prized by right-minded friends and colleagues, the "good historian" presents herself as converted to the belief that of good will" require the "Truth" she considers bowdlerized more than they require historical fact. "We need," Painter concludes, "an heroic 'Sojourner Truth' in our public life to function as the authentic black woman, as a symbol who compensates for the imperfections of individual black women—especially educated, and thereby inauthentic, black women like me." But who finds educated black women inauthentic? Probably some people do, but Painter does not clarify the object of her critique; instead, she gestures toward "our public life," a shifting location determined, to a large extent, by media representations that she depicts as soothing fictions: "Believe the Lie." In this worldview, it is hard to see what an historian can contribute but there must be something, since Painter's second coda lists her sources and mounts an attack on the tools of her putative trade. Nothing in these last few pages clarifies how Painter feels about the stereotype of the "Strong Black Woman" which she claims to find linked to her own interests, but the clear implication is that it is damaging to real people, particularly those who are female and black. Is adherence to, or yearning for, the image of the "Strong Black Woman" equated to a form of abuse? I would be interested to see more discussion of this point, but Painter's use of sarcasm at a crucial juncture clouds debate. Readers are likely to end up uncertain where she apportions blame or sees error; what her proposals for the reform of wrong ideas or methods might include; and why education is some kind of key. What, finally, is an American of good will to learn from Painter's sense that mythologies exert an irresistible appeal? The good historian, turned playful ironist, does not say.

Instead, she vaunts her own research methods: "a Truth biographer, like the biographer of any poor person, any person of color, or a woman of any stratum, cannot stick to convention, for conventional sources are mostly lacking." I find that "mostly" surprisingly timid, and the following sentence almost placatory. "This history demands more or less uncommon research methods," a claim that Painter supports by listing quite traditional sources (newspapers, friends' letters, pamphlets) and well-known archives. This account of history-writing contains no news, but one kicker: "Trained conventionally as an American historian," Painter writes, she had to "emancipat[e]" herself to write a Truth biography. We have all heard that education is brainwashing but, um, was she trained or wasn't she? It's likeliest that she means to attack her training, or alma mater, as if graduate school lessons should serve, without creative interventions, for the entirety of a career. But she may be saying that ruling conceptions of historical training are inadequate for certain tasks. Is the implication of that charge the proposition that some truly proper training exists, or could be devised, or that it doesn't and couldn't? I can't tell but I do feel puzzled that this experienced scholar thinks there is anything innovative or dangerous about leaving non-print sources behind, or examining photographic images, or writing the history of a not-so-poor black woman who lectured, hobnobbed with VIPs, and left an account of her own life. You want a historical challenge? Try researching the Cincinnati hair-dresser Eliza Potter or the Berkshires servant-poet Maria James; find out about the elusive James Williams, whose narrative was charged with falsehood though it was never proved a lie; or write the biography of an individual Jicarilla Apache on the Maxwell Land Grant. Please.

 
Similar obscurity will never befall O. J. Simpson, if video and print sources are preserved, but the actual athlete and celebrity pitchman plays just a cameo in Birth of a Nation 'hood. A series of "thought-pieces" in which mostly academic writers differ on the issue of who acted, under what constraints, with what media involvement, and to what end, this essay collection avers that "the consuming interest of the trial" was never Simpson's guilt. For co-editor Claudia Brodsky Lacour, it was instead

As this is a large and unprovable claim, I was disappointed that no essayist addressed the ethnographic question of what it is that actual trial-viewers, from the junkies to the browsers, thought they were seeing and/or watching for. The implication of that silence is that "we" all somehow "knew" what Americans were thinking too well to have to ask. Scattered references to conversations overheard in check-out lines and airport bars hint at some uneasiness about the extent to which academic cultural critics manage to locate the popular pulse. There is less uneasiness about this case's certifiable villain, for contributors agree that media representations distort understandings of current events in pernicious ways. For Armond White, a student of popular culture who analyzes hip hop lyrics about the Simpson case, "Media became meddlesome, unholy participants—as much agents of venality, cruelty, dishonesty, conspiracy, hate, soul murder, as anyone whose name was actually stenotyped into the record." There is no doubt that this charge is true. Yet I found myself wondering, with each new essay in the Morrison/Lacour collection, how this writer would handle the reception and use issues that Painter's book evades.

Essays in Birth of a Nation 'hood fall into three categories: legal disquisition, character analysis, and a search for literary analogues. Race and racial identification are central to each essayist, as is a sense of the hoopla that surrounded the "O. J. trial" from its inception. However, the ways in which essayists pursue these topics are diverse and, in their diversity, help to show how little trial-watchers were helped to think despite being inundated by a media extravaganza. Legalistic essays show, for instance, that the defense team was well within its rights and duties when it elected to bring issues involving race to the forefront of the jury's consciousness. An essay on this topic by A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Aderson Bellegarde François, and Linda Y. Yueh is usefully paired with another by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw which explores trial-commentators' references to the ideal of "color blindness." Crenshaw demonstrates that: "In the new 'frank' talk about a host of issues, blackness reemerges as a repository for a range of pathologies," so that: "re-racing is the thrill of today's social discourse." More accessible is Nikol G. Alexander's and Drucilla Cornell's examination of the charge that a mostly black jury refused to acquit Simpson because of racial solidarity. Alexander and Cornell do not address the defendant's culpability, but point out that one juror reminded trial-watchers, "I have not declared him [Simpson] innocent at all." "Dismissed or Banished? A Testament to the Reasonableness of the Simpson Jury" should help Americans renew their confidence in the wisdom of relying on "ordinary" people's ability to sift and weigh evidence in the pursuit of justice according to this nation's laws, and subvert racist ideas of what it is that makes some black women "strong." An intriguing contrast to this study is Andrew Ross's dense essay on the problematic nature of DNA evidence. I preferred "Dismissed or Banished?" because it shows that you don't need a Ph.D. to question the hard sciences' seeming objectivity.

Turning from science and law to a much-discussed "private" life, Patricia J. Williams and Ann duCille discern aberrant racial and cultural markings in the media's treatment of Nicole Simpson, and present the anomalies as central to viewers' opinions about her ex-husband's guilt. Interestingly enough, both essayists gesture toward a mythicized Sojourner Truth, with Williams adding grace-notes on the decisions and vicissitudes of a supposed "race traitor" like Anita Hill, and the treatment meted out to Shannon Faulkner, a young white woman who dared to assert her right to enroll at a formerly all-male military school. More centrally, both Williams and duCille draw attention to the murder victim who proved so photogenic after death. Alert to Nicole Simpson's blonde good looks, Williams asks where a high school graduate, who worked as a waitress before her marriage to a football star, might have "realistically found herself if she'd decided to walk out years ago" from the battering husband who had secured for her father a lucrative job. Williams does not suggest that Nicole Simpson forfeited our compassion if she lacked the courage and determination to make the necessary break. But she asks, "would [she] have been able to retain the sympathetic power of her perfectly coiffed beauty" if she had "fled with her children, the first time he hit her, giving up completely 'his' house, 'his' car, and 'his' support payments"? The point is worth considering, in light of the many cases of spousal abuse, and even murder, that do not win a spot on the evening news. Williams shows how deeply this victim's Nordic genes, and a lot of money, drew the media's adoring gaze, and the extent to which: "Beauty is at the heart of race."

In "The Unbearable Darkness of Being: 'Fresh' Thoughts on Race, Sex, and the Simpsons," duCille also focusses on this murder victim (as opposed to the young man who died at her side), but does so "to argue the relative irrelevance of Nicole Simpson as a white woman." From her vantage, "[t]he narrative that held its audience captive for more than two years is the fall of a black man who would be white—not the death of a white woman who did sleep black." I have mixed feelings about this claim, since I think it depends which sources of information a trial-watcher found most moving and/or reliable, and maybe because I live in a community in which interracial couples are seen every day. Then, too, because duCille makes sexual practices central to her analysis, I heard more about the dead woman's erotic practices, during her marriage and afterwards, than I cared to know. Sure, accounts of a wild party girl were available but so was the contention that Nicole Simpson was a good mother, an affectionate sister and daughter, and the cruelly battered wife of a philandering man. It must have taken a lot of energy to ignore all the "pro Nicole" evidence and read selectively in a large archive.

Ishmael Reed is more helpful with his evocation of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), though the comparison is uninspired; but Toni Morrison provides real insight with her reminder that Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1854) illuminates popular reactions to the news that "O. J." was not the golden-boy many had supposed. The grace and clarity of her "The Official Story: Dead Man Golfing" contrast markedly with Reed's sometimes intemperate tone. Still, intemperance has its place, and grace and clarity are of less significance than Morrison's discovery that Melville had already told the story of a consciously good American who finds himself hoodwinked by race-based assumptions that are shown to be moronic, endangering, and nearly too precious to forego. More combatively, Reed attributes brains and verbal skills to the Heisman trophy winner often dismissed as an amiable dumb jock. "O. J. Simpson's cunning and intellect contributed," Reed asserts,

This list is illuminating because it gauges the defense team's victory, but also because it gives Simpson an important role on the squad. That placement is crucial and refreshing, because other essayists evaded the "did he or didn't he?" query by treating the defendant as a pretty face that the media picked up and destroyed. As Leola Johnson and David Roediger show, in this collection's most thoughtful essay, that portrait is wrong because it effaces the ways in which Simpson ably constructed his rise to, and maintenance of, enormous fame, from within a celebrity-producing apparatus that enabled and constrained his strategies.

In "'Hertz, Don't It?': Becoming Colorless and Staying Black in the Crossover," Johnson and Roediger demonstrate that Simpson exerted himself to foster the perception that his fame transcended race. Other essayists refer to Simpson's belief that he lived above or apart from racial prejudice, but these two American Studies professors research the decisions, statements, and positioning strategies that temporarily "whitened" a talented black man in many Americans' minds. To demonstrate the kind of power that Simpson had to direct his own life, fame, and career, they recall his repudiation of the Olympians who chose to demonstrate against racial oppression in the United States, and his evocation of research conducted by the marketing division of Hertz Rent-a-Car which suggested that Simpson's persona was unraced. They show, too, that when it suited him, Simpson could "chang[e] his image in a frank bid to get a role that would enable him to realize his central acting goal: to become a 'bankable' star," and even "cast his personal contractual situation within a broader civil rights framework." The irony of all this maneuvering is that "militants in and out of sports both established the preconditions for the advertising and media success of a Simpson and ensured that the first athlete to cash in on new possibilities would be anything but a militant." The understanding that guides this essay is the nuanced idea that decisions made by one football player, and by the corporate culture that found him useful, intersected neatly for commercial profit until that athlete found himself the chief suspect in a double murder case.

Early in Birth of a Nation 'hood, George Lipsitz charges that this particular scandal caught the public attention because "[m]edia coverage of the Simpson trial drew upon and reinforced the connection between Simpson and commodities." This shrewd analysis helps to measure the distance between the "O. J. trial" and Sojourner Truth's quite distinct elevation to celebrity. Technology was important to both, as Johnson and Roediger show by recounting the ways in which one television producer "helped to make a spectacle of Simpson" at his athletic peak, with the use of slow-motion techniques, instant replay, and unusual camera angles. Yet Johnson and Roediger produce more solid, persuasive, and sophisticated scholarship noteworthy for its conception of an individual agent, a larger and enabling/constraining media apparatus (which is shaped, in turn, by another individual's ideas and innovative use of technology), and a larger receptive sphere. Though Painter tried for a similar complexity of this approach, she failed to balance a putative agent's words and acts against the cultural apparatus that saves, amends, or destroys that actor's presence in the record of the day. Then, too, Johnson and Roediger do not discredit the training that allows them to probe events, and they attend to reception, foregrounding actors' and watchers' race. "Sport has functioned as a spectacle," they charge, "in which the male body and the white mind are at once exalted, and in which white men feel especially empowered to judge, to bet on, and to vicariously identify with African Americans." This statement is not supported by footnotes but is far more grounded than Painter's guesses about nineteenth-century audiences' response to Truth.

Because public reactions are important, when repute is on the line, I would have loved to see an essay in this book by Ian Ang, the scholar who asked TV viewers to tell her what they liked about the hit show, "Dallas." The sources would be many and, if my experience is a guide, all too willing, but it would be even more absorbing if an alert mind had realized early on that analysis of the Simpson morass should focus on what it was that viewers saw, thought, believed, and feared. If that kind of research is still in the works, or only comes to us in fragments, a way into it could be examination of the "Save O. J." images that portrayed the ex-football star on a crucifix. Who made them, and why? What was the religious echo supposed to recall? Who found these images shocking, silly, or deeply disturbing, and who shared it so that it spread across the United States—was the Internet involved? Less or differently mediated images may or may not be evidence of an actual grass-roots campaign. But discussions of non-commercial and even unprofitable "O. J."s would be true to the stated spirit of Birth of a Nation 'hood. They might also help us think about the ways in which real people make sense of—or scorn? or oppose?—the agendas, angles, and silences that professional critics of culture discern.

NOTES

1. Michael P. Johnson, "Twisted Truth," The New Republic (4 November 1996): 37-41.

2. Karen J. Winkler, "The Life of the Legendary Sojourner Truth: A New Biography Explores the Facts and Fictions," Chronicle of Higher Education (13 September 1996): A18-9.

3. Gerda Lerner makes this charge in "Book Review," The Nation (13 January 1997): 25—9; and Ira Berlin, the historian of slavery, concurs in "Sojourner's World: A historian's view of the making (and self-making) of a symbol," The New York Times Book Review (22 September 1996), 29.