Dr. Michelle Chresfield
speaker
151 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Michelle Chresfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Not at all. She is so convinced that she wept for joy and kissed his feet. Okay. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. And in 1833, she follows him to a commune in Westchester called Kingdom of Matthias.
Yes! She does. She does. Yes! And members of this organization, cult, if you will, it's what it is. They sign over thousands of dollars in property to Matthias, and he styles himself as a prophet chosen by God.
Yes. And so she, you know, begins to or attempts at least to defy him. But he uses physical abuse and punishment against, you know, his followers. And so it's a real tough situation that she finds herself in and is marginalized in this community.
And Matthias eventually kind of abandons Isabella, goes back to his wife. And so that's really how the whole thing kind of comes to an end, that particular chapter. So she's once again having to kind of start over.
Yes, so on June 1st, 1843, the day of Pentecost, she claims to have experienced the Holy Spirit calling her to travel and preach. Sojourner Truth is one who travels to preach God's truth, and she spends several months on the road trying to convince audiences to seek salvation before Judgment Day, which she predicts would occur in March 1844, so it is imminent.
And so there's a huge expediency to her work at this moment.
This is a utopian community that's a stop on the Underground Railroad. And it's really where she begins to cultivate her kind of feelings around anti-slavery and and women's issues particularly. So it's a huge moment for her in her development as a speaker.
Yeah, I mean, the headline act is, well, you know, Frederick Douglass is just starting out. And so there's tension. And they disagreed on these kind of philosophical things that also, I think, bled into their personality differences. She would publicly point out his mistakes and also call him to the carpet for things that he would do in terms of prioritizing black men over women.
Douglass really believed that truth was trying to really make him look bad in the public eye.
Yeah, so Sojourner needs the money, right? She's giving it all the way to Matthias and these other types of institutions that she's involved in. Yeah, so she narrates her life story to Olive Gilbert, who's a friend of William Lloyd Garrison, so the noted abolitionist. So it's the narrative of Sojourner Truth drawn from her book of life, and it's published in 1850.
And even though the narrative is about Sojourner Truth, right, she is a person who can't read and write. So she's narrating her life story to Olive Gilbert. And Gilbert's voice is actually very present. And at one point, you know, kind of implores the reader, you need to buy this book. This woman has spent her money poorly. Her daughters are not taking care of her.
Like the only way that you're going to support this woman is if you buy this book.
Like, seriously, you guys, buy this book. She's able, from the money sold on the book, to buy her own home, actually.
So she has a lot of audiences, but actually the media is very uneven about its coverage of her. So oftentimes she's not mentioned by name in the papers. And so if we're looking at it from the historical record, it's very hard to tell. Yet we also have narratives of people speaking about what a great orator she is. She sings to them. She has this powerful speaking quality.
And she's also really funny. and apparently very sarcastic. And so, and she's able to really infuse this wit and this humor into her speaking engagements where she's talking about these issues, right, like very serious things.
So Truth gave this speech, or is purported to have given this speech, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention that was held in Akron in May 1851. And in this speech, we do know that Truth spoke about how she could do as much physical labor as a man. She says she's plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could heed me. And aren't I a woman?
So that's the part of the text that's often attributed to her. The article was written by an organizer of this convention called Frances Dana Gage. And so Gage here is making a specific point about the intersection of a kind of women's ideology or political orientation and that of a kind of black pride or kind of black ideology. Right.
She's trying to bring these things together that you can be both black and and woman. She does so in adopting a dialect that was not truth. Much of the kind of practice of the time for particularly writers who are trying to elevate the abolitionist cause is that they're translating the kind of oratory of enslaved or formerly enslaved people into broken dialect.
And it's, you know, offensive, right? Particularly to our kind of modern ear. It's also inaccurate. That's not how truth spoke.
Yeah, so she becomes a huge figure in terms of trying to galvanize support amongst Black Americans, particularly to the union cause. She's collecting food for troops. She's using her photographs to bring awareness to the war cause and really trying to popularize the notion that this is an important endeavor for Black Americans to be engaged in.
Showing 21–40 of 151 · page 2 of 8
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