There are a lot of stories white people tell themselves to feel better about race.

Stories like, my ancestors were Quakers and abolitionists, the unspoken conclusion being, so we weren’t/aren’t part of the problem. Or, I live in New York State, and our part of the country wasn’t complicit in the slavery of the South. Sometimes something happens that pulls the pants down on your story and exposes it as fiction.

Enter The Comet’s Tale. Most people have at least a surface familiarity with Sojourner Truth’s story. I’ve read several picture books to my kids about her. Sheehan’s book seeks to tell a fictionalized version of her life in the first person based on historical facts.

I knew Sojourner Truth traveled throughout the country speaking out against slavery and in support of human rights and women’s rights. I knew there were historical locations near where I live that honored her contributions.

But I was in denial about the fact that she grew up just south of me in the Hudson River Valley. Slavery used to be legal in New York, too. Long after it was abolished, Blacks struggled for equal opportunities for education and employment due to systematic racial discrimination. Too often, we are in denial about the long-term implications of this type of discrimination, especially when it occurs over the course of generations.

In the Northeast, we can tend to paint ourselves as progressives who believe that besides fetuses, everyone in our neck of the woods gets the consideration they deserve. I once heard someone say that the difference between the North and the South is that in the South, they admit racism is a thing.

Sojourner Truth’s story puts a startlingly bright light on the failures of New York State in the treatment of Blacks. How when New York ended slavery, children born of slaves were required to continue to work for the slaveholders until their mid-20’s, even after their parents were free. In Sojourner’s case – and how many others? – this forced her to choose between freedom and remaining with her children, not to mention those children’s formative years  spent in slavery.

Black birds kidnapped escaped slaves and freemen off the streets in the North and brought them back to slavery in the South, and New York allowed it. This happened for a time outside of the law, and then it was legalized.

The Comet’s Tale focuses less on the well-known portion of Sojourner’s life, and instead tells of the first half of her life, skimming over the well-known bits later on, but including the full arc of her story. Some of the details, I knew, but so much more of the story was news to me.

The back of the book has an interesting question and answer session with the author, as well as a list of resources for further reading.

The paperback copy I found on Amazon was riddled with editorial mistakes – grammatical errors, and missing and misspelled words. In the back, the book is actually referred to by a different title! I’m not sure what went wrong there, but the story was so powerfully told that when I was stopped short by an error, I quickly got swept back in.

The Comet’s Tale forced me to think hard about my own state’s role in slavery. It combats the self-righteous narrative of the Progressive Northerner. It reminds us that not all abolitionists were for equality. It’s a compelling story about a resilient and dynamic woman with deep faith who chose to do what was asked of her.

I assigned my big girls the task of photographing this book for me while I slept off a night shift. The above photo is what they came up with. The background is a beautiful tie dye scarf I got as a head wrap for Three at this year’s local Juneteenth celebration.