"Sojourner, did you always go by this name?"
"No, 'deed! My name was Isabella. No, 'deed! but when I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I want goin' to keep nothin' of Egypt about me, and so I went to the Lord and asked him to give me a new name. And the Lord gave me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an' down the land, showing the people their sins, an' being a sign unto them. Afterwards I told the Lord I wanted another name, 'cause everybody else had two names; and the Lord gave me Truth, cause I was to declare the truth to the people."
Wendell Phillips relates a scene of which he was witness before the abolition of slavery in the United States. It was in a crowded public meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston, where Frederick Douglas was one of the chief speakers. Douglas had been describing the wrongs of the colored 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, 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 feeling after Frederick 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.
The following is from a letter from a lady who visited Freedman's Village, near Washington, where Sojourner Truth was residing in a little frame building with the American flag over the door.
"We found Sojourner Truth, tall, dark, very homely, but with an expression of determination and good sense by no means common. She apologized for her hoarseness, as she had a meeting last evening. We asked what she had been doing there. 'Fighting the devil,' she said. What particular devil? 'An unfaithful man who has undertaken work for which he is not competent. My people,' she added, 'have fallen very low, and no one need take hold to help raise them up as a matter of business, it must be done from love.' She greatly complained of some one who had an office in relation to the Freedmen, and said he ought to be removed. She was asked why she did not go to the President with her story of the wrongdoing. She said, 'Don't you see the President has a big job on hand? Any little matter Sojourner can do for herself she aint going to bother him with.'"