Sojourner Truth knew the importance and the power of the visual. One day, as an orator and crusader against slavery, she faced a hostile group of northern students who jeered her. Truth chose a very powerful visual proof of slavery’s horror to confront them. She opened her dress collar and bared her skin to show the scars from the beatings she endured as a child from one of her slave owners. It wasn’t the only time she had shown these scars to an audience.

Truth first had pictures of herself taken in her 60s, and she sold the photographs as one means to earn income. She thought carefully about how she dressed, often choosing traditional Quaker dress as opposed to adhering to the women’s fashion of the day, as biographer Carleton Mabee explains.. Hence, our visual sense of Sojourner Truth is dominated by images of her as an older woman: wearing a Quaker bonnet; a long, flowing, and full dress to her ankles; a scarf lain over her shoulders; and perhaps spectacles. No public monument shows an image of her as a child who was enslaved.

That is about to change. Soon, a small Hudson Valley memorial park devoted to her will have a bronze statue of Sojourner Truth depicting her as a child growing up in slavery here. Born in Ulster County, Truth spent the first 32 years of her life in the county, 29 of them as a slave until she escaped by walking quietly away one early morning from her slaveholder’s home (see “Tracing Sojourner Truth’s Escape Route” on Mindfulwalker.com).

The sculpture will culminate several years of local effort to restore and honor this history. A sculptor is currently completing the statue, in a project with the Town of Esopus and its Sojourner Truth Memorial committee. For the past several years, the committee has been raising funds, which included working with the town government and through Assemblyman Kevin Cahill to obtain a $75,000 state grant to pay for the park, the sculpture, and related initiatives to honor Truth and bring to the public the history of her early life locally and a sense of her spirit. Those involved expect the statue to be unveiled in the first-half of next year as part of a completed renovation of the Sojourner Truth Memorial, on Route 9W in this town along the Hudson River.

Creating a representation of Truth as a child has involved a meticulous, challenging process. While no real-life images of Truth from her early days exist, the sculptor, the Ulster County historian, and the Esopus committee have been relying on many other sources to capture the qualities and appearance of young Isabella – the birth name she had before changing her name later to Sojourner Truth. They have made use of the abolitionist’s own writings, descriptions of her appearance in later years, and publications focusing on the early 1800s.

Slavery In New York

This new sculpture is sure to build a greater knowledge and appreciation of Truth’s early years and experiences in the Hudson Valley, before she overcame many obstacles to become an orator, preacher, and activist advocating for an end to slavery and for women’s equality and suffrage. Moreover, this local monument is likely to make the public more aware that not only did slavery still exist in New York State until well into the 19th century, some of the community’s prominent citizens owned slaves. Her first slaveholder, for example, was Col. Johannes Hardenbergh, a wealthy landowner and grist mill operator who had been a member of the New York colonial assembly.

“As far as we know, this will be the only statue of a slave child at work,” says Anne Gordon, who is the Ulster County historian and who has had a leading role on the committee memorializing Truth with the park and the statue. Knowing the sculpture’s potential significance and power, Gordon says the aim is a monument that is realistic, highly artistic, and not sentimental.

Artist Trina Greene, whose works have been exhibited in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and nationally, is the sculptor. Her work will render the young Isabella at about age 13. This is about the time that she was a slave in the home of Martinus Schryver, in the Esopus hamlet of Port Ewen. Schryver, a fisherman and farmer, had a tavern in a still-standing stone house at the corner of Route 9W and River Road (see “In Sojourner Truth’s Footsteps” on Mindfulwalker.com).

This sign is part of a memorial honoring Sojourner Truth in the Hudson Valley town of Esopus. Work is underway to feature a bronze sculpture showing her as a child, which will be unveiled as part of a complete renovation of the small corner park. It’s located at the corner of Route 9W and Salem Street in the hamlet of Port Ewen.

How does one produce a sculpture of someone for whom no exact physical images from this stage of her life exist? For guidance, the group and the sculptor have relied on Truth’s own narrative; researched the clothing and other items of that era; examined what children who were slaves wore; took some clues from photos of Truth’s present-day descendants; and consulted other sources to obtain a sense of what she may have looked like, according to Gordon. The panel members working with the sculptor (primarily Gordon and committee member Tim Allred) had a “very distinct vision” of what the sculpture should show, Greene explains. Yet they have given the artist a lot of room to fashion the sculpture based on her interpretation and research as well.

“A Wild, Out-of-Door Kind Of Life”

Truth’s colorful, often-moving narrative provides a picture of her childhood as a slave. In it, she told in vivid terms about her days in the household of Schryver and his family, who she says were kind, though rude and uneducated. “It was a wild, out-of-door kind of life,” Truth stated, her recollection in the third-person. “She was expected to carry fish, to hoe corn, to bring roots and herbs from the woods for beers, go to the Strand for a gallon of molasses or liquor as the case might require.”

The sculpture will capture the “out-of-door kind of life” Truth later conveyed. With this narrative as a basis, it will portray Isabella at work, carrying jugs to transport them for her slaveholder. It will show her walking barefoot along an unpaved road and facing the sun.

The descriptions of the statue-in-progress evoke an image of a girl who had to perform hard physical work daily at such an early age – as Gordon says, “a strong, long-legged girl…maybe not the best-cared-for girl.” The statue will show her standing about 5-feet-2-inches, tall for her age of 11. (In her adulthood, Truth stood at nearly 6 feet.) The young Isabella will hold two jugs, one on her hip and the other in her hand, with the latter one weighing her down somewhat while she balances the other, Greene says.

The artist intends for the sculpture to personify both the difficult day-to-day reality of Truth’s life as a slave – what Greene terms as a patient, stolid quality of a girl who had to work throughout her childhood – and an inner, luminous spirit she possessed that helped her to survive. Like other slave children, Isabella knew pain and suffering at a very early age, both physical and intensely emotional. Slavery shattered whatever family life may have been desired. When Isabella was around age 9, Charles Hardenbergh, her slaveholder after his father Johannes died, also passed away. The remaining Hardenbergh family members chose to free Isabella’s aging father James, who couldn’t work any longer, and mother Betsey. They decided, however, to auction off Isabella and her younger brother, “along with (Hardenbergh’s) farm animals,” selling the children away from their parents, according to Mabee’s biography of Truth, entitled Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. Thus, she endured horrible separation, both from her parents and her many siblings.

Her “trials,” as Truth later called the experiences of this time period, did not let up and the statue will reveal some visible proof – scars. John Neely, the slave owner who purchased Isabella at the auction, whipped her many times. In her narrative, Truth told of one particularly horrendous whipping, when Neely struck her repeatedly with rods that he had heated in the embers of a fire and bound together. Neely beat her so severely that it left deep cuts in her flesh. The sculpture will show some of her scars, through an opening in her clothing at the back of her neck.

While the historical research and Truth’s narrative form a basis, ultimately the sculptor is crafting the appearance. Truth’s parents had African roots. As a key source for what Isabella may have looked like, Greene used The People of Kau, German film director Leni Riefenstahl’s photographic monograph on the life of a group of people living in the Nuba Mountains in southern Sudan. Greene drew on the physical features and strong spirit of the Nuba peoples. She also consulted Truth’s pictures from later life.

This is obviously a labor of love and inspiration for Greene, the sculptor, and for historian Gordon. Every detail has been thought out with an eye toward conveying the young Isabella’s character and inner qualities as much as her physical characteristics. “There is innocence and yet knowingness on her face,” says Greene, when asked to describe the sculpture. “This is a child whose mother talked to her about life and about faith, that all of them would reunite in heaven some day, telling her to always tell the truth, do her best, and God would answer your prayers. So she is open and sweet but with the cloud of having been whipped, having to work, and knowing the suffering of life.”

First Sight of the Model

To represent as accurately as possible the type of clothing Isabella would have worn, the initial research included examining advertisements that slave owners placed in newspapers when a slave had run away, Gordon says. The ads contained much detail about slaves’ clothing. Greene found an 1808 book particularly helpful in deciding on Isabella’s clothing, which is a dress of coarse burlap with long sleeves, bunched at about the elbows.

As Gordon relates the work the local committee has done; Greene’s creation of the sculpture; and the careful steps of this process, her pride and excitement are evident. When Gordon and three committee members first saw the full-size clay model Greene had sculpted, in the artist’s studio, “(we) all got tears in our eyes,” Gordon says. Both Gordon and the artist believe that children will especially relate to the statue. They have planned a four-inch base – making the statue stand above ground level but at a height where children can interact with it.

I understand the emotions and the anticipation. During the past summer, I first saw a photograph of the clay model and found it quite moving. The final statue could look appreciably different, as the piece goes during these months through the intricate sculptural process that includes the making of a rubber mold, pouring molten wax into the mold to produce a wax replica, changes and corrections the artist is making to the wax model, and finally, the casting of the bronze statue at a New Jersey foundry.

Asked what she feels about sculpting the statue of Truth as a child, Greene says, “I’ve felt it was an honor to do it and that it has been important because (to our knowledge) it’s the only statue of a slave child….It stresses her strength and the acceptance of her fate but a very strong inner determination and a faith in life. This young girl expresses that.”

The child gave birth to the woman who heroically stood up strong to fight against slavery and for women’s equal rights throughout her life. The statue is sure to be a powerful revelation and a reminder of just what Sojourner Truth overcame.

The Series

Part 1: In Sojourner Truth’s Footsteps – The Jug Tavern, where Truth lived and worked as a slave

Part 3: The creation of a statue of Truth as a child and the plans to make it the centerpiece of the Sojourner Truth Memorial in Esopus