This remarkable narrative, first published in 1850, offers a rare glimpse into the little-documented world of Northern slavery. Trnth recounts her life as a slave in rural New York, her separation from her family, her religious conversion, and her life as a traveling preacher during the 1840s. She also describes her work as a social reformer, counselor of former slaves, and sponsor of a black migration to the West.A spellbinding orator and implacable prophet, Truth mesmerized audiences with her tales of life in bondage and with her moving renditions of Methodist hymns and her own songs. Frederick Douglass described her message as a "strange compound of wit and wisdom,of wild enthusiasm, and flint-like common sense." This inspiring account of a black woman's struggles for racial and sexual equality is essential reading for students of American history, as well as those interested in the continuing quest for equality of opportunity.

  Narrative of Sojourner Truth is the record of one such small miracle of indomitability, one that eventually gathered enough force to touch a broad public in the antislavery, temperance, and women"s rights movements. Originally named Isabella Baumfree, Sojourner Truth was born into slavery in 1797 in Ulster Gounty, New York, on the estate of a Dutch family, the Hardenberghs (she grew up speaking no English,only the Dutch she acquired from her masters). At the regular evening religious sen,ices conducted by her mother, Isabella imbibed the heady mixture of African animism and mystical Ghristianity that inspired her lifelong religious quest. In 1808 she was sold to John Neely, an Englishspeaking master who frequently beat her because of her imperfect understanding of his English commands. Isabella"s prayers for deliverancewere answered when she was sold to Martin Scriver, who owned a Dutch tavern, where the saturnalian ambience seems to have led her temporarily astray from her religious calling. In 1810 she was purchased for seventy pounds by John Dumont, on whose estate she spent the next sixteen years cooking, cleaning, weaving, and working the fields.Strong in body as well as spirit, the tireless, six-foot Isabella discharged her duties with such thoroughness and skill that Dumont commented that his "Bell" was "better to me than a man--for she will do a good family"s washing in the night, and be ready in the morning to go into the field, where she will do as much at raking and binding as my best hands." Withal, she still managed to bear five children to the older slave she was forced to marry.