Sojourner Truth and the Body That Belonged to God

In 1826, Isabella Baumfree walked away from the Dumont estate in Ulster County, New York, carrying her infant daughter and nothing else. She had been sold five times before her thirteenth birthday. Every slaveholder who claimed ownership of her body treated it as property to be used, loaned, and discarded. But something shifted when she encountered the living Christ. Years later, standing before a crowd in Akron, Ohio, she rolled up her sleeve and flexed an arm hardened by decades of labor.…