Abigail Hebert

On Wednesday afternoon, the Harriet Beecher Stowe House hosted “Room for Truth,” an exhibit honoring the legacy of abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. The collection featured student work from “Black Women Lives,” a course taught by Professor of Africana Studies and English Tess Chakkalakal and Associate Professor of Africana Studies Judith Casselberry.

Truth, who deliberately avoided literacy and conveyed her activism through spoken word and visual expression, has been repeatedly misinterpreted in traditional historical narratives; Students examined four such narratives throughout the semester.

Among these distortions stands Harriet Beecher Stowe’s essay “Sojourner Truth, The Libyan Sibyl,” a reflection on her interview of Truth. Written nearly a decade after their encounter, the essay romanticizes the outspoken reformer as a mythological sibyl, evoking exoticism through allusions to nature and descriptions of Truth’s “African authenticity.”

Chakkalakal and Casselberry explained that Stowe had developed a profound literary influence from her recent publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” enhancing both the credibility and readership of her 1863 article in The Atlantic. Stowe also wrote the introduction to a later edition of Truth’s dictated autobiography, “Narrative of Sojourner Truth.”

The professors selected Stowe’s home as the exhibit’s venue to introduce the women’s contrasting stories.

“I don’t think there’s one way of looking at the relationship between these two,” Chakkalakal said. “That’s why we’re using the students’ nine perspectives on who Sojourner Truth was and who Harriet Beecher Stowe thought Sojourner Truth was, in order to better understand the nature of this relationship.”

The “Room for Truth” assignment encouraged students to reimagine Sojourner Truth through visual or oral interpretations, embodying the activist’s illiteracy and reclaiming the narrative of which she had been deprived.

“Conceptually, when we first put the course together, we were thinking about how to engage students in more creative processes and how to have them translate the information that they’re getting about specific Black women in historical context … into something apart from an essay,” Casselberry said.

The exhibit, composed of nine pieces, featured predominantly visual art. “Sojourner’s Battle Hymn,” a song performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, played while viewers examined the students’ pieces.

Tess Mooney ’26 collaged the activist’s narrative with watercolor and glue in her artistic piece entitled “Are’n’t I a Book?” to illustrate Truth’s intentional illiteracy, rendering her words illegible.

“Reading [Truth’s] narrative was the first time I really took the time to get to know about her story,” Mooney said. “I wanted the book to be reconstructed as something that shows her portrait but not as something that’s meant to be read.”

Students and viewers alike remarked that none of the creative works bore distinct similarities to one another. While some approached the project primarily considering literacy, others contemplated Truth’s femininity, divinity or history.

Anthony Holly ’26 drew an abstract map tracing the perils and resilience of Truth’s journey from enslavement to freedom.

“I [created] a timeline where someone can really understand how she went through freeing herself from slavery, how she went through starting movements … as a self-made woman. It’s really inspirational,” Holly said.

Victoria Figueroa ’26 hand-sewed a shawl with layered embroidery to indicate the narratives imposed on Truth, stitching an empowering flexed female arm, the African continent and the Union symbol. Figueroa also included a photo frame, illustrating Truth’s “cartes-de-visite.”

Truth’s small calling cards captioned “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance” funded speaking tours and activism when sold. Her formal, modest portraits on these “cartes-de-visite” were a rare embodiment of the activist’s agency, which Phoebe Kreutz ’28 referenced in her work.

Kreutz photographed her friends and classmates holding Truth’s “cartes-de-visite” without instructing them to pose or smile, capturing her peers without alteration. She offered the printed cards to the event’s attendees.

In his contrasting visual representation, Daniel Isaacs ’27 assembled a contemporary presentation of carousel Instagram posts with comments from historical figures.

“This is inspirational, not just as a project that the professors asked students to create. I think it’s exciting that we have students who are taking away fascinating topical issues and [translating] those concepts and ideals into material objects that hold history, but also intellectual depth,” Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Michael Oshindoro said.

Along with Bowdoin students and faculty members, the event attracted members of the Brunswick community eager to discuss students’ renewed insights on the historical figure.

“I’m taking away the echoes of her shadow from the 1800s, what she stood for and the resonances of that today,” Oshindoro said.