The Thirteen Children Symbol Analysis

Sojourner Truth’s “thirteen children” symbolize the arduous pain and grief Black women of Truth’s era faced. At one of the emotional climaxes of the speech, Truth states that she has given birth to thirteen children, and has seen “most all sold off to slavery,” causing her to “cr[y] out with [a] mother’s grief.” As Truth invokes the image of thirteen children being taken away from her, she highlights the immense grief that enslaved mothers were forced to bear in silence and solitude. The act of crying out in her grief was, in and of itself, revolutionary, since enslaved women could be beaten, raped, or even killed for expressing emotions. Slaveholders often claimed that the Black men and women whom they enslaved couldn’t feel emotions, since they were considered less than human. This cruel rhetoric allowed slaveholders to get away with torturing the men and women whom they considered to be their property. By claiming that she watched nearly thirteen of her own children ripped away from her, Truth externalizes the unbearable pain that enslaved women were forced to endure. This rhetorically and emotionally strengthens her argument not just for the abolition of slavery but for the immediate and irrevocable conferring of equal rights upon women of all races.

Importantly, thirteen is a symbolic number across many religions and cultures. It is sometimes considered especially lucky (or unlucky). There were thirteen people in total at the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his twelve apostles before his Crucifixion. Sojourner Truth invokes Christ several times throughout her speech, strengthening her feminist argument by claiming that man had no role in the creation or birth of Christ. The “thirteen children” she speaks of and the grief she felt as they were torn away from her may have a symbolic connection to Christ and his apostles, though no direct connection is made within the speech.

It is significant to note that Truth’s “thirteen children” aren’t historically accurate—according to most historical records, Truth only gave birth to five children. She did watch as one of her children was sold off to a slaveholding family in the South, but she was reunited with her son after an abolitionist family in Ulster County helped Truth buy him back and set him free. Frances Gage—an abolitionist and white feminist who transcribed the version of “Ain’t I a Woman” that’s most commonly in circulation today—likely came up with the number thirteen on her own. It’s possible to see Gage as cheapening the very real traumas that Truth endured as an enslaved Black woman by purposefully expanding those traumas’ proportions to manipulate readers. There is a lot of controversy surrounding Gage’s transcript of the speech, and while the symbolism of the “thirteen children” is nevertheless weighty and poignant, many scholars consider Gage’s erasure of Truth’s actual experiences problematic.