“Ain’t I a woman?” Well, no, I’m not.
Yet ever since I first read that refrain in Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, I’ve thought of it as belonging to the canon of great American rhetoric — right up there with Abraham Lincoln’s “With malice toward none” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream.”
It’s for that reason that I cited the line in my April 8 column as an example of the kind of American spirit I treasure — what I called “the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed.”
The problem — as I learned after the column was published — is that Truth may never have said it.
We may never know for sure. A near-contemporaneous transcript of the speech, published in June 1851 in the Anti-Slavery Bugle newspaper, does not contain the famous phrase. But it did appear (as “And ar’n’t I a woman?”) 12 years later, in a very different version of the speech published by the feminist abolitionist Frances Dana Barker Gage, who had presided over the convention.
Among the reasons not to believe Gage’s account: Her version of Truth’s speech is rendered in a Southern dialect. But Truth was born in upstate New York as a slave to a Dutch-speaking family, and spoke English with a Dutch accent.
Whatever the case, both versions of the speech are powerful and ring true, morally speaking, and Truth’s place in the pantheon of American heroes remains secure.
There are also less-heralded heroes in the American story, including two who came to my attention this week almost by accident.
In my column, I noted some of the names that appeared on the passenger manifest of the ship — the M.V. Italia — that brought my mother to the United States as a 10-year-old refugee in 1950. Among them was Gerda Nesselroth, then 45, who was listed as “stateless.” She arrived along with her 15-year-old son, Peter, whose name appears below hers on the manifest.
The day after my column was published, I received an email from Peter’s daughter, Eva Nesselroth Woyzbun of Toronto. Eva steered me toward a brief biography of her dad from the Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, produced by the Azrieli Foundation. He was born in Berlin in 1935 and fled to Antwerp, Belgium, after Kristallnacht. Following the Nazi invasion in 1940, the family went into hiding but were betrayed in 1944. Peter managed to be smuggled to safety in Switzerland, while Gerda and his father, Laslo, were deported to Auschwitz. Only Gerda made it out alive: Eva called her “the toughest human I will ever know.”
In America, Peter earned a Ph.D. at Columbia and spent most of his career as a distinguished professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. But, as Eva wrote to me, he “never acquired Canadian citizenship — he was committed to the project of becoming and being ‘American’ and saw himself as nothing but. The mythology of America sustained him.”
Eva added this: “Were he alive today” — he died in 2020 — “he’d be terrified for those the Trump administration is rounding up and deporting, having spent his own childhood living in hiding and on the run.”
Eva sent me a picture of her father, newly arrived in the United States, standing before the Statue of Liberty. May his memory be for a blessing — and so may be the memory of what America used to stand for.
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