She resolved to escape her enslaver to win her freedom. She had been bought and sold so many times by and to cruel men that she was ready to do whatever it took to leave it all behind. Isabella Baumfree (ca. 1797-1883) told God she was afraid to flee at night yet during the day everyone would see her. A thought flashed into her mind: go at dawn. “Thank you, God, for the thought,” she prayed, and with the morning light, she left with her infant daughter Sophia and all her belongings in a sack.
She asked God for asylum. She had been told that Quakers might assist in her rescue–they were people who lived strictly by Jesus’ teachings. She knocked reluctantly at the home of a Quaker family. Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen opened their heart and home to her. When her enslaver demanded her return. Isaac said they didn’t believe in slavery yet purchased her services for the balance of the year for twenty-five dollars. When Isabella tried to address Isaac as her new master, he corrected her, the first time a white man had ever refused the title. He told her, “There is one master and he who is your master is mine also.” Isabella learned the way of Jesus in their home. They helped her win back freedom for her young son Peter.
Isabella became an itinerant preacher and plain-speaking abolitionist, changing her name to Sojourner Truth. She is best known for her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Her take on women’s rights makes me smile, “Where did Christ come from? From God and woman. Men had nothing to do with him.” Her travels took her to the White House to visit Abraham Lincoln. Proceeds from her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, which she dictated (she never learned to read or write), made it possible for her to purchase a home and retire comfortably. There is a sculpture in her honor, the first for a Black woman, in the US Capitol.
Her conversational manner is evident in the following prayer for the successful release of her son Peter from slavery: