Thank you so much for the recommendations on Sojourner Truth, about whom I've been wanting to do some research. Your point about the way white people presented her words in Southern dialect (especially the famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech; this was not a woman who used the word "aint") is really well taken. A scholar of African-American literature once told me that because of her New York background, Truth spoke with a Dutch accent. But our myths really do try to push her into a different black space.