We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth (Book Review)
This book review first appeared in the most recent issue of the Baptist History & Heritage Journal (Volume LVIII, No. 2).The Baptist History & Heritage Society publishes the Baptist History & Heritage Journal three times yearly. Contributors include Baptist and religious historians, as well as clergy and laity.
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We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. By Nancy Koester. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023. 270 pp.
Nancy Koester’s We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth successfully achieves the mission of Eerdmans’ religious biography series: to provide academically grounded scholarship “free from academic jargon.” Koester offers a robust biography that requires little background knowledge from the reader and integrates theological analysis throughout. Her Sojourner Truth is a bold and determined woman whose insistent appeals for the abolition of slavery and equal civic rights for women and Black people were driven by a spiritual calling to evangelize and actualize the coming kingdom of heaven on earth. Koester asserts that Sojourner Truth’s work for equal rights was always “an expression of her faith in a God of justice and mercy.” (xx)
Koester employs a traditional chronological structure that traces Truth’s life from birth to death. Despite little archival evidence, she pieces together a lengthy and compelling account of Truth’s life under slavery as Isabella Baumfree. To compensate for the lack of sources, Koester corroborates Truth’s Narrative with historical evidence from the figures around her. Koester is careful to leave space for the unknowns in this part of Truth’s life, including questions around sexual abuse.
The result is a captivating narrative of Truth’s early life, punctuated with conditional verbs, that reads more like a heroic tale than a conventional historical monograph. The reader comes to understand Truth’s complex ostraciza- tion as a “favorite” of her enslaver as well as her unflinching boldness as a mother who successfully navigated the legal system to secure her son’s return despite the enslaved status of them both.
The second half of book reads more like a traditional biography and is based on ample historical evidence of her movement and public appearances, extensively documented in newspaper articles and extent letters and preserved as her fame rose on the public speaking circuit. This half is at times bogged down in detail but demonstrates Truth’s incredible mobility and persistence in mission despite her challenging economic reality.
Readers follow Truth as she preached in Dutch areas of Long Island, joined a utopian community in Massachusetts, called for abolition on the Midwest speaker circuit, and eventually settled with her children and grandchildren in Battle Creek, Michigan. The biography’s structure effectively underscores Truth’s development from an isolated woman under the oppressive weight of slavery to a fearless, impassioned, and famous orator whose urgent invocations for justice resounded in the political and social turmoil of her time and for decades thereafter.
Over the past thirty years, several historians have written compelling scholarly biographies of Sojourner Truth. Koester’s biography depends heavily on these predecessors’ work, but also effectively inter- venes in the historiography by consistently seeing Truth through a religious lens. The author states this aim plainly in the book’s final pages, asserting that a narrow focus of Truth’s social reform work can obscure the fact that she was internally propelled by a “quest for holiness.” (207) Koester artfully crafts the biography around key religious moments in Truth’s life.
In her telling, the most important turning points in Truth’s life were not her emancipation from slavery or even the recovery of her stolen son, but rather a religious conversion prompted by a divine vision and a later call to evangelism, resulting in her choice to take the name Sojourner Truth. In this way, Koester underscores the relationship between Truth’s experience of spiritual freedom and her efforts to actualize that freedom socially and politically, for herself and others.
At times, Koester’s analysis includes insider Christian language and she occasionally evaluates Truth’s actions in theological terms. However, Koester also highlights Truth’s engagement with religious sects that she and contem- porary Christian readers would characterize as non-orthodox. Koester’s determination to explore and explain Truth’s religious world results in a history that invites the reader into the spiritually pluralistic world of nineteenth century America, which often understood cultural turmoil in apocalyptic terms.
We Will Be Free is clearly intended for a general reader audience. However, Koester is able to familiarize her readers to some of the complexities of nineteenth century American scholarship, even including source criticism, in laymen’s terms. This biography is particularly apt for a Baptist reader interested in how a Christian conception of freedom informed and empowered the nineteenth century Black freedom movement in the United States.—Reviewed by Leslie Garrote, doctoral student, Department of Religion, Baylor University, Waco, Texas
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