It is highly likely, then, that Sojourner Truth never said ain’t I, ar’n’t I, or am I not a woman. Not literally, writes the African American studies professor Imani Perry. But “she said it symbolically through her work, through her ‘shadows’”—Truth’s term for the photographic portraits she sold of herself, as cartes de visite. Via these cards, if nowhere else, white women were forced to look at and consider Sojourner’s gender.
