“Ain’t I a woman?” Well, nope, not me. But that line, oh that line! I remember the first time those words hit me like a freight train, in Sojourner Truth’s epic speech from way back in 1851 at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. It’s etched in my brain as a peak moment in American speakin’ history, hanging out right next to Abe Lincoln’s “With malice toward none” and MLK’s “I have a dream.”
I went and tossed it into my column on April 8, like one would throw in a spicy dash of Americana zest — talking about that elusive thing, the “shared conviction” gluing the strong and weak together in this chaotic democratic experiment we call the U.S. of A. But guess what? Big oops. Post-publish, I found out Sojourner might’ve never actually dropped that iconic line.
Here’s the snag — the original speech transcript, found in the Anti-Slavery Bugle in June 1851, doesn’t have those words. Nope. Nada. But poof, 12 years later, it appears, suddenly strung together as “And ar’n’t I a woman?” in this alternate universe version whipped up by Frances Dana Barker Gage, some feminist abolitionist who was running the show back then.
Why the skepticism? Well, Gage’s account is dripping with a Southern dialect. But fun fact — Sojourner? She was born up in New York, around a lot of Dutch-speaking folks, and she spoke English with a heavy Dutch accent. Confusing, much?
Anyway, whatever the truth about Truth (pun intended, sort of), both speech versions hit hard, with moral power punching through, and Sojourner’s status as an American legend pretty much stands solid.
But, oh boy, this week I stumbled, accident-style, across some folks you probably haven’t heard about, unsung heroes of the American tale. So, my momma, she hopped on the M.V. Italia at ten years old, fleeing to America like a lot of folks back in 1950. And on that passenger list, I saw this name: Gerda Nesselroth, labeled as “stateless.” There she was with her 15-year-old kid, Peter, right under her name.
Next day, boom, got an email from Peter’s daughter, Eva Nesselroth Woyzbun from Toronto. She sent me on a digital treasure hunt through her dad’s journey—courtesy of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. Born in Berlin, 1935, then ducking Nazis by skedaddling to Belgium post-Kristallnacht. Fast forward to 1944, Peter evaded capture by hiding out and eventually made it to Switzerland. But his mom, Gerda, and dad, Laslo, weren’t so lucky — Auschwitz came calling. Gerda, though, fought through hell and back. Eva says she’s “the toughest human” she’d ever met.
Peter, in the land of stars and stripes, nabbed himself a Ph.D. from Columbia and went on to mold minds as a French and Comp Lit professor at the University of Toronto. Get this, he never got Canadian citizenship. Nope, he saw himself as an American to the core, sustained by whatever particular brand of America he found swimming through its mythology.
And then Eva tossed in this tough truth: “If he were alive now” — passed away in 2020 — “he’d be horrified by those the Trump administration’s chucking out, having lived his own youth ducking and dodging.” She even shared a photo of her dad, fresh in the U.S., posing with Lady Liberty herself in the backdrop. Here’s hoping that both his legacy and what America used to mean never fade away.
