Two Poems: Cortney Lamar Charleston
It’s Important I Remember That Sojourner Truth Hadn’t Suffered Enough— apparently being born the lowest class of noun wasn’t adequately tragic. Steering one’s life story over the hills of low Dutch and English was too elevated an exercise for an illiterate. Her Northern narrative of enslavement could weaken the moral authority of the abolitionist cause, so it needed to be revised southward with diction and cadence. Birthing five babies, one of whom was of her legal captor rather than her beloved, was eight labors too few to evoke sufficient sympathy. The hard labor: perfect. The beatings: even better for being even worse. Four bills of sale on her back were forced moves that could help propel two movements forward. She could escape the institution of inherited servitude; she could best a white man in court to reclaim her stolen son;