Her parents were slaves of the Hardenberghs, a Dutch-speaking family, which may account for Truth's distinct pattern of speech. She did not begin learning English until she was about nine and lived under hostile circumstances with a succession of severe slave masters in a region where she probably heard Dutch on a regular basis. Nell Irvin Painter surmises in her biography of Truth, that "she lost neither the accent nor the earthy imagery of the Dutch language that made her English so remarkable."
Isabella was married to a slave named Thomas, and they had several children. In the fall of 1826 Truth left the Dumont family to whom she had been sold in 1810, though she would have been legally free on 4 July 1827 by the terms of a New York state law abolishing slavery. Dumont had reneged on his promise to manumit her, and she walked away in protest, leaving her husband and children with Dumont. In a typical passage from Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850), Olive Gilbert quotes Truth's recollection of this time: "'Ah!' she says, with emphasis that cannot be written, 'the slaveholders are TERRIBLE for promising to give you this or that, or such and such a privilege, if you will do thus and so; and when the time of fulfillment comes, and one claims the promise, they, I forsooth, recollect nothing of the kind.
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