Martin Luther King Jr. Day Anthology | Page 9

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