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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You're Dead to Me · Sojourner Truth: American abolitionist, suffragist, preacher · 28 Feb 2025 podcast
Yes, she does. And in 1833, she follows him to a commune in Westchester called Kingdom of Matthias.
She does. 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. And he believes that he is the only prophet.
So Elijah Pearson, who has a lot of money, also a prophet, he becomes kind of edged out, even though he still remains a member of the community. But it's Matthias who is the one who is speaking the word. He takes what he calls a spirit match. He's legally married to another woman, but takes on this other woman as his spirit match. He styles himself the father.
So he very much wants to be the head of everything.
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.
Matthias. He gets in trouble, actually. He's alleged to have poisoned Elijah Pearson, who dies after a prolonged illness. And so it makes the newspapers. And this actually even brings side eyes, for lack of a better word, to Isabella. A family, the Folgers, accuse her of trying to poison them. So they both need lawyers. And she gets a lawyer for herself. She gets a lawyer for Matthias.
She tries to get all these statements. She even goes back to DeMont to get a character statement. This is a really tough moment. It's all over the newspapers. 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. At that point in time, she had been known more frequently as Sojourner, but that's when she really adopts the surname Truth because she believes that she is as true as God's word. God is with her.
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.
She does. And she travels around New England. She's preaching. She doesn't speak to her children or family about this decision. And she gave her employer at the time only one hour's notice before she sets out on this new path.
Yeah, so it's a kind of education, civic organization focused on women's rights, liberal education, abolition. She doesn't immediately love it. It's kind of a stark kind of place that people bathe in a river, right? So it's about this kind of like essential kind of living. But she believes it gives her equality of feeling, liberty of thought, and the largeness of soul.
And so this is a utopian community that's a stop on the Underground Railroad. And it's really where she begins to cultivate relationships her kind of feelings around anti-slavery and women's issues particularly. So it's a huge moment for her and 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. So Douglass really stressed the importance of education.
He taught himself to read and write and really wanted to be this sophisticated public orator, right, who styled himself on the figures that surrounded him. Sojourner Truth, right? She's Sojourner Truth now, right? She was illiterate. She never learned to read and write. And I think by this time in her 30s, she was okay with that. She wasn't trying to change.
And she had this more kind of homespun, accessible type of demeanor. And, you know, Douglass would say something not so nice about her. Douglass would write about how 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.
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.
Yes. So in 1853, Sojourner Truth approaches Harriet Beecher Stowe for this endorsement. She gives it. And then 10 years later, Stowe will publish this article titled Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sybil. And the piece actually suggests that Truth had died. So she has to come out later and like, you know, tell the people I didn't die. I'm still around. Okay.
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