Sojourner Truththe ArenaENTP

In 1858, at about 61, Sojourner Truth was speaking against slavery at Silver Lake, in northern Indiana, when a doctor in the crowd announced that she was a man.

She should not have been there at all. Indiana's constitution of 1851 barred Black people from coming into the state. She had come anyway. A group of proslavery men had come too, and they had prepared something.

Their spokesman, Dr T. W. Strain, claimed she was a man in women's clothes. He demanded that she show her breast to some of the women present, so that they could settle the question. According to the one report of the meeting, he had already bet forty dollars that she was not a woman.

A bet placed in advance tells you it was a plan. The point was to humiliate her so completely that nobody would remember what she had come to say. Most people, cornered like that, argue the point or walk out.

Arenas tend to look for the hinge in the attack and swing it the other way. Truth found it on the spot.

Some of those white babies had grown into men, she said, and they were more manly than her persecutors seemed to be. Then she bared her breast. She did it in front of the whole meeting, and asked whether they, too, wished to suck.

She had refused every term of their trap. They wanted a private inspection by a few chosen women, so she chose the whole room. They wanted proof of her sex, so she gave them proof of what slavery had taken from her body and from her children. The report said she did it “not to her shame” but “to their shame.”

None of it was rehearsed. The answer came in the room, with a hostile crowd in front of her, which is where Arenas often think fastest. And it was more than clever. She spoke with a preacher's authority, as someone who believed she had been sent to say it.

She had made moves like this before. Born into slavery in New York around 1797, she walked away from the man who held her in 1826, carrying her baby daughter. Two years later, when her young son Peter was sold illegally to Alabama, she took the case to court and won him back. She had a gift for finding the rule her opponents had broken, and making them answer for it.

Her most famous line is probably not hers. She did speak at Akron, Ohio, in 1851, but the refrain “Ain't I a woman?” comes from a version published twelve years later. Silver Lake rests on a letter from a man who was there.

She died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1883, at about 86. The men at Silver Lake had come to make her body the argument. She agreed, and made it the answer.