On "Representing Truth"

Letter to Nell Painter on Representing Truth

“Sell them their dreams. Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having… Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods."

Reading “Representing Truth” immediately brought this quote into my mind. When she sold her shadow to support her substance, she essentially allowed the needs and values of many different people to be interpreted through her person. She became a symbol. Was she the Libyan Sibyl, the embodiment of the abolition movement, a representative for Christian values, an icon of women’s rights? She was all of these things and none of them; she was someone who allowed herself to be adapted in order to survive.

It also exposed to me just how much about history we take for granted, how easy it is to accept a specific narrative without ever inspecting it for truth. I had seen the “Ar’n’t I a Woman” speech printed so many times that I could never have fathomed that she didn’t say it. But armed with that knowledge now, I begin to see the stereotype within that story: of the folksy uneducated black woman baring her breast to a white audience. It’s a story that fit in so perfectly with views of what black women were.

Above all, I see Sojourner Truth as a prime representative of the culture of dissemblance, someone who kept her inner self hidden but sold her external self to stay alive. But when I see the photograph of Sojourner Truth, the one image that she curated for the world, I can only imagine how revolutionary this photograph must have been, and how revolutionary it was for a black woman to finally profit off of herself.