SOURCE: “Reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth as a Collaborative Text,” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1996, pp. 29-52.

In the following essay, Humez examines the interaction between Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert, characterizing their relationship and the resulting work as a highly collaborative one.

Important and complex issues of unequal power over representation of women's experience arise in studying and teaching those nineteenth-century African American women's life-history texts that were produced in collaboration with white political allies. Even Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), the text in this category that is currently recognized as the most highly self-authored, underwent some changes under the influence of abolitionist editor Lydia Maria Child—though not nearly as much as was assumed before Jean Fagan Yellin's careful scholarship on the Child-Jacobs literary relationship.¹ The most complex of these problems of establishing authenticity of voice...