"Julia Foote"(1823-19000)

Evangelist and writer was born the fourth child of freed parents in Schenectady New York.Little is known of her early life except what can be gleamed from her autobiography,A Brand Plucked from the Fire(1879).It is known that she had a brother and an elder sister.She never reveals her family surname, nor does she provide her full name in the text.Julia's mother-named in Brand, though deeply influential in her life-was born a slave in New York and suffered under a cruel master and mistress. This is a traditional claim in texts grounded in the slave narrative tradition, as popularized by such accounts as those of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.Julia provides graphic detail to support her mother's claim of suffering. When her mother refused her master's sexual advances and reported his behavior to her mistress, the master tied and whipped her.Then,he washed her back with salt water and would not not permit her to change her clothing for a week. At the end of the week, realizing that she could not remove the clothing because it had stuck fast to her scabs, the mistress tore the fabric from the wounds, thus reopening them.