Free Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall Page A

and miserable? I reply, look at many of the most worthy and most interesting of us doomed to spend our lives in gentlemen’s kitchens. Look at our young men, smart, active and energetic, with souls filled with ambitious fire; if they look forward, alas! What are their prospects? They can be nothing but the humblest laborers, on account of their dark complexions; hence many of them lose their ambition, and become worthless. Look at our middle-aged men, clad in their rusty plaids and coats; in winter, every cent they earn goes to buy their wood and pay their rents; the poor wives also toil beyond their strength, to help support their families. Look at our aged sires, whose heads are whitened with the frosts of seventy winters, with their old wood-saws on their backs. Alas, what keeps us so? Prejudice, ignorance, and poverty. But ah! methinks our oppression is soon to come to an end; yea, before the Majesty of heaven, our groans and cries have reached the ears of the lord of Sabaoth. As the prayers and tears of Christians will avail the finally impenitent nothing; neither will the prayers and tears of the friends of humanity avail us anything, unless we possess a spirit of virtuous emulation within our breasts. Did the pilgrims, when they first landed on these shores, quietly compose themselves and say, “The Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?” Did they sluggishly sigh and say, “Our lot is hard, the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it?” No; they first made powerful efforts to raise themselves, and then God raised up those illustrious patriots, WASHINGTON and LAFAYETTE, to assist and defend them. And, my brethren, have you made a powerful effort? Have you prayed the legislature for mercy’s sake to grant you all the rights and privileges of free citizens, that your daughters may rise to that degree of respectability which true merit deserves, and your sons above the servile situations which most of them fill?

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
    S ojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree as a slave in Ulster County, New York, was the person most responsible during the nineteenth century for linking abolition and women’s rights, and demonstrating the reality of black women’s gender and race identities. She attended her first women’s rights convention in 1850 in Worcester, Massachusetts (Frederick Douglass was also present), and in 1851 delivered her legendary but now controversial “Ar’n’t I A Woman” speech at the Akron, Ohio, women’s rights gathering which was supposedly recorded by presiding officer Frances D. Gage and was subsequently published in Truth’s Narrative (1875) and History of Woman Suffrage (vol. 1, 115—117), many years after the speech was supposedly delivered. Historian Nell Painter has written and lectured about the unreliability of Gage’s account of Truth’s famous speech and is presently completing a biography which will hopefully provide more clarity about the issue (See her “Soujourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic,” in Gender and History 2 (Spring 1990): 3—16.). Carleton Mabee has also written extensively about the “famous Akron speech” (67—82). Since the speech is an important, though unsubstantiated, document in women’s history, it belongs in this collection because of what it reveals about the involvement of black women in women’s rights during the nineteenth century.
    In the debates over black and woman suffrage surrounding the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Truth sided with white feminists and opposed Douglass and other black abolitionists, including Frances Harper, who were against removing “male” from the amendment. Her 1867 speech delivered at the annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York articulates her fears about black men getting