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18 May 2008

my neighbor Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?

Click on image for larger, clearer.

NOTICE

In conformity with the federal Truth In Digital Images Act of 2001, Agence-Vleeptron Presse discloses that the new version of this photograph has been digitally edited to remove a gardener, who was leaning over and showing her butt to the photographer.


I filled up the roll of 35mm film in my disposable camera with images in my neighborhood.


This is a 5-year-old statue of the freed slave, anti-slavery activist, and early champion of women's rights, Sojourner Truth, who came to my neighborhood -- Florence, Massachusetts -- to join a pacifist, abolitionist school community in which both genders and all races were equal. She lived in a small house in the village of Florence for the rest of her life, which was the headquarters of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a quite famous and radical community in its day.

Northampton just spontaneously has always had a history of lefty and somewhat Utopian activity. I am constantly surprised at how closely it resembles my vacation planet of Vleeptron (which abolished slavery of human beings and cats and dogs 975,000 years ago).

I just learned an odd bit of trivia about my neighbor S.J. She wasn't a stereotypical slave in the American South. She was born into slavery in New York state, owned by a Dutch-American household, and until she was a young adult, the only language she spoke was Dutch. After a series of sales from owner to owner as New York state was on the verge of abolishing slavery, a Quaker family bought her, freed her, and paid her last owner money to compensate for a year's worth of her slave labor.

The sculptor is Thomas Jay Warren, and I was shocked at how fine a statue it is compared to most modern representational statues I've seen.

The text below is from her famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?", made at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.

3 comments:

James J. Olson said...

cool. we will have to go see it when I come for a visit.

Welcome home.

Mike Stone said...

Nice. Post more. On that note, you so need to go digital.

Vleeptron Dude said...

Thanks! SOOOOOOOO happy to be home!

The trip to DC was a family emergency (now smoothed and calmed), but I didn't take my itty bitty digital camera because I wasn't thinking at all of the Tourist Delights of Washington DC.

But Something Came Up (post & images being prepared now) and I wanted to photograph it, so I bought one of those cheapo disposable film cameras, and the pharmacy chain that processed it was delighted to give it back to me on a digital disk.

Sorta sad that these cheap but effective drug store disposables -- mine was a Kodak -- represent the Last Dying Days of silver-film technology. But quite handy in a pinch.

Our digital is a tiny Konica Minolta that lives on the belt of my trousers, hidden under my t-shirt, doesn't scream

--> TOURIST <--

and is all the camera I ever need.