14 - The King James Bible and African American literature

Summary

Prophetic as she was known to be, one wonders if former slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth would have foreseen such a moment: Barack Obama taking the oath of office with his hand on the Lincoln Bible as he became the first African American president of the United States. In 1864, her own visit with President Abraham Lincoln at the “Executive Mansion” (or White House) was captured in a portrait as iconic in the nineteenth century as is the image of Obama’s inauguration in the twenty-first (see Illustration 6). Truth’s presence with Lincoln at the White House in 1864 represents a transgression of racial and gendered norms of mid-nineteenth-century America. In the portrait, she is gazing out at the viewer while Lincoln’s gaze is focused on the open Bible, his left hand appearing to have just turned the page. Truth, who could not read or write, does not look at the text, but gestures to it with her right hand. The triangle formed by the three subjects of the portrait – Lincoln, Truth, the King James Bible – suggests the desire for the Bible to serve as a text of national unity. This is the reason President Obama chose this Bible specifically for his historic inauguration.

Of course the small, red-leather-bound volume upon which Obama’s left hand rested on January 20, 2009 is not the same as the imposing volume in the portrait of Lincoln and Truth. In a letter dated November 17, 1864 from Freedman’s Village, Virginia where she was working with a refugee camp of freedpeople, Truth wrote (with the aid of an amanuensis):

He then showed me the Bible presented to him by the colored people of Baltimore, of which you have no doubt seen a description. I have seen it for myself, and it is beautiful beyond description. After I had looked it over, I said to him, This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.

(178–9)