"I'm on my way to Canada,
That cold, but happy land;
The dire effects of Slavery
I can no longer stand.
O righteous Father,
Do look down on me,
And help me on to Canada,
Where colored folks are free!"
The lyric ran on to state, that, when the fugitive crosses the Canada
line,
"The Queen comes down unto the shore,
With arms extended wide,
To welcome the poor fugitive
Safe onto Freedom's side."
In the truth thus set forth she seemed to have the most simple faith.
But her chief delight was to talk of "glory," and to sing hymns whose
burden was,--
"O glory, glory, glory,
Won't you come along with me?"
and when left to herself, she would often hum these with great delight,
nodding her head.
On one occasion, I remember her sitting at a window singing and
fervently keeping time with her head, the little black Puck of a
grandson meanwhile amusing himself with ornamenting her red-and-yellow
turban with green dandelion-curls, which shook and trembled with her
emotions, causing him perfect convulsions of delight.
"Sojourner," said the Professor to her, one day, when he heard her
singing, "you seem to be very sure about heaven."
"Well, I be," she answered, triumphantly.
"What makes you so sure there is any heaven?"
"Well, 'cause I got such a hankerin' arter it in here," she
said,--giving a thump on her breast with her usual energy.
There was at the time an invalid in the house, and Sojourner, on
learning it, felt a mission to go and comfort her. It was curious to see
the tall, gaunt, dusky figure stalk up to the bed with such an air of
conscious authority, and take on herself the office of consoler
with such a mixture of authority and tenderness. She talked as from
above,--and at the same time, if a pillow needed changing or any office
to be rendered, she did it with a strength and handiness that inspired
trust. One felt as if the dark, strange woman were quite able to take
up the invalid in her bosom, and bear her as a lamb, both physically and
spiritually. There was both power and sweetness in that great warm soul
and that vigorous frame.
At length, Sojourner, true to her name, departed. She had her mission
elsewhere. Where now she is I know not; but she left deep memories
behind her.
To these recollections of my own I will add one more anecdote, related
by Wendell Phillips.
Speaking of the power of Rachel to move and bear down a whole audience
by a few simple words, he said he never knew but one other human being
that had that power, and that other was Sojourner Truth. He related a
scene of which he was witness. It was at a crowded public meeting in
Faneuil Hall, where Frederick Douglas was one of the chief speakers.
Douglas had been describing the wrongs of the black race, and as he
proceeded, he grew more and more excited, and finally ended by saying
that they had no hope of justice from the whites, no possible hope
except in their own right arms. It must come to blood; they must fight
for themselves, and redeem themselves, or it would never be done.
Sojourner was sitting, tall and dark, on the very front seat, facing the
platform; and in the hush of deep feeling, after Douglas sat down, she
spoke out in her deep, peculiar voice, heard all over the house,--
"Frederick, IS GOD DEAD?"
The effect was perfectly electrical, and thrilled through the whole
house, changing as by a flash the whole feeling of the audience. Not
another word she said or needed to say; it was enough.
It is with a sad feeling that one contemplates noble minds and bodies,
nobly and grandly formed human beings, that have come to us cramped,
scarred, maimed, out of the prison-house of bondage. One longs to know
what such beings might have become, if suffered to unfold and expand
under the kindly developing influences of education.
It is the theory of some writers, that to the African is reserved,
in the later and palmier days of the earth, the full and harmonious
development of the religious element in man. The African seems to seize
on the tropical fervor and luxuriance of Scripture imagery as something
native; he appears to feel himself to be of the same blood with those
old burning, simple souls, the patriarchs, prophets, and seers, whose
impassioned words seem only grafted as foreign plants on the cooler
stock of the Occidental mind.
I cannot but think that Sojourner with the same culture might have
spoken words as eloquent and undying as those of the African Saint
Augustine or Tertullian. How grand and queenly a woman she might have
been, with her wonderful physical vigor, her great heaving sea of
emotion, her power of spiritual conception, her quick penetration, and
her boundless energy! We might conceive an African type of woman so
largely made and moulded, so much fuller in all the elements of life,
physical and spiritual, that the dark hue of the skin should seem only
to add an appropriate charm,--as Milton says of his Penseroso, whom he
imagines
"Black, but such as in esteem
Prince Memnon's sister might beseem,
Or that starred Ethiop queen that strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea-nymph's."
But though Sojourner Truth has passed away from among us as a wave of
the sea, her memory still lives in one of the loftiest and most original
works of modern art, the Libyan Sibyl, by Mr. Story, which attracted
so much attention in the late World's Exhibition. Some years ago, when
visiting Rome, I related Sojourner's history to Mr. Story at a breakfast
at his house. Already had his mind begun to turn to Egypt in search of
a type of art which should represent a larger and more vigorous
development of nature than the cold elegance of Greek lines. His
glorious Cleopatra was then in process of evolution, and his mind was
working out the problem of her broadly developed nature, of all that
slumbering weight and fulness of passion with which this statue seems
charged, as a heavy thunder-cloud is charged with electricity.
The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the
deeper recesses of the African nature,--those unexplored depths of being
and feeling, mighty and dark as the gigantic depths of tropical forests,
mysterious as the hidden rivers and mines of that burning continent
whose life-history is yet to be. A few days after, he told me that
he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan
Sibyl. Two years subsequently, I revisited Rome, and found the gorgeous
Cleopatra finished, a thing to marvel at, as the creation of a new
style of beauty, a new manner of art. Mr. Story requested me to come and
repeat to him the history of Sojourner Truth, saying that the conception
had never left him. I did so; and a day or two after, he showed me the
clay model of the Libyan Sibyl. I have never seen the marble statue; but
am told by those who have, that it was by far the most impressive work
of art at the Exhibition.
A notice of the two statues from the London "Athenaeum" must supply a
description which I cannot give.
"The Cleopatra and the Sibyl are seated, partly draped, with the
characteristic Egyptian gown, that gathers about the torso and falls
freely around the limbs; the first is covered to the bosom, the second
bare to the hips. Queenly Cleopatra rests back against her chair in
meditative ease, leaning her cheek against one hand, whose elbow the
rail of the seat sustains; the other is outstretched upon her knee,
nipping its forefinger upon the thumb thoughtfully, as though some firm,
wilful purpose filled her brain, as it seems to set those luxurious
features to a smile as if the whole woman 'would.' Upon her head is
the coif, bearing in front the mystic uraeus, or twining basilisk of
sovereignty, while from its sides depend the wide Egyptian lappels, or
wings, that fall upon her shoulders. The Sibilla Libica has crossed her
knees,--an action universally held amongst the ancients as indicative
of reticence or secrecy, and of power to bind. A secret-keeping looking
dame she is, in the full-bloom proportions of ripe womanhood, wherein
choosing to place his figure the sculptor has deftly gone between the
disputed point whether these women were blooming and wise in youth, or
deeply furrowed with age and burdened with the knowledge of centuries,
as Virgil, Livy, and Gellius say. Good artistic example might be quoted
on both sides. Her forward elbow is propped upon one knee; and to keep
her secrets close, for this Libyan woman is the closest of all the
Sibyls, she rests her shut mouth upon one closed palm, as if holding
the African mystery deep in the brooding brain that looks out through
mournful, warning eyes, seen under the wide shade of the strange horned
(ammonite) crest, that bears the mystery of the Tetragrammaton upon its
upturned front. Over her full bosom, mother of myriads as she was, hangs
the same symbol. Her face has a Nubian cast, her hair wavy and plaited,
as is meet."
We hope to see the day when copies both of the Cleopatra and the Libyan
Sibyl shall adorn the Capitol at Washington.