You Can’t Handle the Truth
With all due respect to Jack Nicolson and Paul Pierce; it is a rare gift when we are presented with a person who is both an extraordinary intellect and powerful orator all wrapped up in one. Sojourner Truth was just such a person. She never did learn how to read and write; others who listened to her words wrote for her; but the lessons Sojourner Truth provided through her plain words and extraordinary speeches still echo today. Sadly, that self-same resistance to hear, to truly hear, also still remains.
The text afforded us with only a brief mention of Sojourner Truth. The authors simply stated that she was a “former slave and itinerant preacher . . . . [who] became a powerful and popular antislavery speaker throughout New England”
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She shared her slave master’s last name of Hardenberg. She was later sold, and took the last name of her new “owner,” Dumont. “Voices” instructed her to change her name—and Truth is who she became. The undeniable rang out from Sojourner’s soul. She spoke of race; she spoke of men’s disgrace. She spoke of survival, and she spoke with inescapable meaning.
While Sojourner Truth addressed the need to eliminate the evils of slavery and the need to eliminate the evils of disrespect toward women, she did so while adding the message to simply use common sense in finding the truth. She spoke with “homespun” words that elegantly shouted the clear and unvarnished truth. She spoke direct—and her meaning was understood. Truth itself was the lesson this great woman provided. A truth we would do well to hear once again.
Truth is inescapable. If there is one lesson the world today can still take from Sojourner Truth—it is to recognize the truth, to hear the truth, to speak the truth, and to exercise the power of the truth. Her message was one of the oldest lessons on Earth, and unfortunately, it is the one still wholly ignored ~ The Truth will set you