Lucille Clifton's The Narrative Of Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was a woman who born Swartekill in 1797. Her real name was Isabella Baumfree. She was an women's rights activist and African-American abolitionist. She had a very tragic childhood, she was been sold with a sheep for just 100 dollars when she is just nine. Then she has been sold to a tavern keeper for 105 dollars. After she was sold again and again,she fall in love with Robert from a neighboring farm which is also a slave. But his owner do not like the relationship between them. And finally she married to a slave called Thomas. She named herself in 1843, and start to traveling and preaching about the abolition of slavery. She wrote a book named ‘The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave’.After those she had a speech

When she born she has two extra fingers, so she has been called ‘two ghost fingers’, and because of superstition and social stigma, she they has been cutted off. Her poetry is simple and straightforward, even it is a dark theme, there will always reveal some optimistic mood. Her poems and stories usually wrote about blacks and women’s lives, their humiliation history, their rights and their tribulations in the 20th century through her personal experience. Because one of her ancestors the first black woman has been ‘legally hanged’, she also cares about n slaves. When she was a child because of her father she heard a lot of stories full of family, slavery, strong women, heritage and the dignity of ordinary people, those are part of her poems

The most obvious rhetorical is plain folk. Pain folk is a way using informal word and slang word. The using of plain folk shows they have no chance to have education , they have no rights to get education. At that time, a lot of people think that slaves don’t need to learn, the only thing they have to learn is how to work .In the speech ‘Ain't I a Woman’ because she was a slave and she did not have any education, she used a lot of informal words, slang words and illiterate sentences such as ‘But what’s all this here talking about?’, ‘And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.’ and ‘Ain't I a Woman’, all of them used wrong, and this is the use of plain folk. It helped readers and all audience right there feels sad and compassion, they will have a feeling that because of been a slave they have no right to have educate, but they want to against their life, so they still there to give us a poem/ speech. But because they were slaves, they can see a lot of things that normal people can not: discrimination, both as a woman and a black people. In the poem ‘at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989’, ‘nobody mentioned slaves and yet the curious tools shine with your fingerprints.’. She means that the slaves did the works, but no one talked about the slaves,