||| FROM DAVID KOBRIN |||
And Ain’t I A Woman
by David Kobrin
(Former slave Sojourner Truth speaks at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio 1851)
Standing there
her arm, worked muscle
a bonnet that speaks the field
an apparition
to white ladies
rising
to speak to that hall
where mockery echoes
louder and wider
than the fields she’s slaved in
each row sown, hers
the children born, and lost
no man helped her
cross puddles
dust to her tongue
And didn’t she do it
And didn’t she say!
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I just read Sojourner Truth’s speech at the Convention, (the Marcus Robinson version in the Anti-Slavery Bugle). David’s poem makes an intensely emotionial addition to the speech. About 10 years ago I attended a celebration of a new baby in a women’s group at our church in Santa Monica, CA. We were encouraged to talk about our grandmothers. I spoke of my grandmother, born 1880 in Utica, Ohio, and of Harriet Tubman, who I called my spiritual grandmother. Sojourner Truth is another of those spiritual grandmothers who mean so much to men and women today.