E316K -- Bremen
LOUIS GATES, JR,
A CRITIC AT LARGE: PHILLIS WHEATLEY
In 1772, a slave girl had to prove she was a poet.
She's had to do so ever since.
It was the primal scene of African-American letters.
Sometime before October 8, 1772, Phillis Wheatley, a slim African
slave in her late teens who was a published poet, met with eighteen
of the most influential thinkers and politicians of the Massachusetts
Colony. The panel had been assembled to verify the authorship of her
poems and to answer a much larger question: Was a Negro capable of
producing literature? The details of the meeting have been lost to
history, but I've often imagined how it all might have happened. Phillis
walks into a room perhaps in Boston's Town Hall, the Old Colony House-and
stands before these New England illuminati with a manuscript consisting
of twenty-odd poems that she claims to have written. She is on trial,
and so is her race.
Wheatley's poems had been appearing in periodicals
and newspapers in New England and Britain since she was fourteen.
One of her adolescent works, &On Being Brought from Africa to
America,& displays her typical subject matter and the hallmarks
of her early style-religious piety wrapped in heroic couplets. The
eight-line poem has been widely anthologized in collections of African-American
literature in this century, most recently in James G. Basker's &Amazing
Grace: An Anthology of Poems About Slavery, & (Y
$45). It is a modest and not particularly sophisticated paean to her
Christian education, and expresses a forgiving, even grateful attitude
toward human trafficking:
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
&Their colour is a diabolic die.&
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refln'd, and join th' angelic train.
She had arrived in Boston on July 11, 1761, on board the Phillis,
a slaver that was returning from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles
de Los, off the coast of Guinea. Most likely a native Wolof speaker
from the Senegambian coast, she was &a slender, frail, female
child,& naked except for a kilt made from &a quantity
of dirty carpet,& as a descendant of her owners wrote in 1834.
She had lost her front teeth, and so was thought to be about seven
or eight years old. Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a prosperous tailor
and merchant, John Wheatley, acquired her as a house servant, and
named her after the slave ship.
John and Susanna Wheatley had teenaged twins, Nathaniel
and Mary, who were living at home when Phillis arrived. Phillis spoke
no English, and Mary, apparently with her mother's encouragement,
began to teach her to read, tutoring her in English, Latin, and the
Bible. By 1765, Wheatley had wr in 1767, when
she was thirteen or fourteen, the Newport Mercury published a poem
that Susanna Wheatley submitted on her behalf. In 1770, when she was
about seventeen, an elegy she wrote on the death of the Reverend George
Whitefield, a popular English preacher who was a leader of the evangelical
movement in England and America, was published in newspapers in Boston,
Newport New York, and Philadelphia. Whitefield had been the personal
chaplain of an English philanthropist, Selina Hastings, the Countess
of Huntingdon. Wheatley shrewdly apostrophized the Countess in the
Whitefield elegy and sent her a letter of condolence with the poem
enclosed. With the poem's publication in London, in 1771, Wheatley
suddenly had a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic.
As her literary reputation grew, however so did doubts
about her authenticity, and the Wheatleys, attempting to publish her
manuscript, were unable to elicit the number of book orders that printers
in those days required. Eighteenth-century philosophers like David
Hume believed that blacks were a different species, and there was
widespread incredulity at the idea of a black litterateur. It was
John Wheatley who assembled the illustrious group of interrogators,
hoping that they would support Phillis's claim of authorship, and
that the opinion of the general public would follow.
Picture the eighteen men gathered in a semicircle. At the center was,
no doubt, His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts.
Hutchinson, a Colonial historian and a royal official, was born into
a wealthy merchant family in Boston. He entered Harvard College at
the age of twelve, where, because of his family's social position,
he was ranked third in his class, (Even back then, grade inflation
loomed on the Charles.) Following the Boston Tea Party, he want to
London, &for consultations,& and never returned.
Andrew Oliver, the colony's lieutenant governor, would
have been seated on one side of Hutchinson. Oliver imprudently allowed
himself to be publicly identified as a supporter of the Stamp Act
of 1765, prompting angry crowds to ransack his house and uproot his
garden. When, in 1774, Oliver had a stroke and died, commentators
assumed that it was related to the political turmoil.
Quite a few men of the cloth were present. The Reverend
Mather Byles was the minister of the Hollis Street Congregational
Church, in B he was the grandson of Increase Mather and the
nephew of Cotton Mather. As a young man, he had corresponded with
Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, and in 1744 he had published a book
of verse, &Poems on Several Occasions.& Like Hutchinson
and Oliver, Byles was a Tory loyalist, and he lost his pulpit when
Massachusetts finally rebelled. He was sentenced to banishment, later
commuted to house arrest, for his loyalist views. (Byles called the
sentry stationed just outside the house his &Observe-a-Tory&)
Others of the Wheatley witnesses, though, were to become prominent
figures in the newly founded republic. Among them was John Hancock,
the head of the House of Hancock, which had grown rich by trading
in whale oil and real estate. Hancock was later the president of the
Second Continental Congress and the first governor of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts.
Nearly all the men present were Harvard graduates and a majority were
slaveholders. One, Thomas Hubbard, had bee another,
the Reverend Charles Chauncy, had attacked the Great Awakening, an
evangelical movement that threatened the established religious order,
because it allowed & yea Negroes ... to do the
business of preachers.& The group that Wheatley faced was not
exactly an association for the advancement of colored people.
There is no transcript of what took place in that room. Was Wheatley
given scansion tests? Quizzed on the Latin subjunctive? Asked to recite
the Psalms? We'll never know. Whatever the nature of the exam, she
passed it, and earned the letter of support that she and her master
had hoped for:
We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems
specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written
by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought
an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and
now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in
this Town. She has been examined by some of the best judges, and is
thought qualified to write them.
Even after the validation of the esteemed Bostonians,
no American publisher was willing to take on Wheatley's manuscript,
and so Susanna Wheatley turned to English friends for help. The publishing
climate in England was more receptive to black authors. The Countess
of Huntingdon, though a slaveholder herself (she had inherited slaves
in Georgia), had already, in 1772, shepherded into print one of the
earliest slave narratives, by James Gronniosaw. Vincent Carretta,
a leading scholar of eighteenth-century black transatlantic literature
and an expert on Wheatley, has observed that the British market for
black literature may have been indirectly created by a court ruling,
in 1772, that made it illegal for slaves who had come to England to
be forcibly returned to the colonies. Although the ruling stopped
short of outlawing slavery in England, it encouraged an atmosphere
of sympathy toward blacks.
Through the captain of the commercial ship that John Wheatley used
for trade with England, Susanna engaged a London publisher, Archibald
Bell, to bring out the manuscript. The Countess agreed to let Wheatley
dedicate the book to her. An engraving of Wheatley appeared as the
books frontispiece, at the Countess's request.
&Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley,
Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston& was published in
September, 1773. Five advertisements that ran in the London Morning
Post & Daily Advertiser the month before pointed to the statement
of the Boston panel as proof that Wheatley was the &real Author.&
The book's publication represented a significant moment in black literary
achievement. Various black authors had published individual poems,
but even these instances were rare. Jupiter Hamnon, a slave from Long
Island, had published the first of several poems in 1760. Francis
Williams, a Jamaican who is said to have studied at Cambridge University,
had caused a minor sensation when it was posthumously revealed that
he had written an ode in Latin in 1759. Wheatley's book was widely
reviewed and discussed in England and in America, where it became
available in 1774. Voltaire wrote to a correspondent that Phillis
Wheatley had proved blacks could write poetry
While Phillis was in London, where she had been sent
with Nathaniel Wheatley in the spring of 1773 to oversee the book's
publication, she met the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave her five guineas
to buy the works of Alexander P Granville Sharp, the scholar and
antislavery activist, who took her to the Tower of L and Brook
Watson, a future Lord Mayor of London, who gave her a folio edition
of &Paradise Lost.& Benjamin Franklin paid her a visit,
which he mentions in a letter to his nephew Jonathan Williams, Sr.
&Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and
offer'd her any Services I could do her,& he wrote. &And
I have heard nothing since of her.& On the strength of this seemingly
perfunctory visit, Wheatley decided to dedicate her second volume
of poetry to Franklin. Even an audience with King George was arranged,
although she had to cancel it when Susanna Wheatley suddenly fell
ill and needed her care.
Within a month of the book's publication and Phillis's
return to America, the Wheatleys freed her. (English reviewers, using
Wheatley's book as a point of departure, had condemned the hypocrisy
of a colony that insisted on liberty and equality when it came to
its relationship to England but did not extend those principles to
its own population.) Freedom meant that she became filly responsible
for her literary career, and for her finances. In mid-October, she
wrote a letter to David Wooster, the customs collector in New Haven,
alerting him that a shipment of her books would soon arrive from England,
and urging him to canvass among his friends for orders. &Use
your interest with Gentlemen & Ladies of your acquaintance to
subscribe also, for the more subscribers there are, the more it will
be for my advantage as I am to have half the Sale of the Books.&
She continued, &This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now
upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, &
it is the Chief I have to depend upon. I must also request you would
desire the Printers in New Haven, not to reprint that Book, as it
will be a great hurt to me, preventing any farther Benefit that I
might receive from the Sale of my Copies from England.&
In the spring of 1774, the British occupied Boston. Susanna Wheatley
died the same year, and when John Wheatley fled the city Phillis moved
to Providence, where John Wheatley's daughter, Mary, and her husband
lived. With the outbreak of war, in April of 1775, Phillis's prospects
dimmed considerably. A number of the people who had signed the attestation
were dead, and the others who had earlier supported her, both Tories
and Patriots, were more concerned with whining the war than with the
African prodigy. But Wheatley lost no opportunity to cultivate powerful
friends, and on October 26, 1775, she wrote to General George Washington
at his headquarters in Cambridge, aligning herself with the Revolutionary
I Have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed
poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its
inaccuracies. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress
to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with
the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress.
Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing
your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so
generously engaged in, l am.
Your Excellency's most obedient humble
PHILLIS WHEATLEY
The accompanying poem was nothing if not flattering:
One century scarce perform'd its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia'
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!...
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev'ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.
On February 28, 1776, Washington responded:
Miss Phillis,
Your favor of the 26th of October did not reach my hands, till the
middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer
ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually
interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope
will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming
but not real neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice
of me, in the elegan and however undeserving
I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit
a striking proof of y in honor of which, and
as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the poem, had
I not been apprehensive, that, while I only meant to give the world
this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation
of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it place
in the public prints.
If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall
be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature
has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. lam, with
great respect, your obedient humble servant.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
In the event,
Washington overcame his fear of the imputation of vanity and, by means
of an intermediary, secured publication of Wheatley's pentametric
praise in the Virginia Gazette, in March of 1776.
1776, Wheatley had moved back to Boston. In 1778, she married a black
man named John Peters. Peters was a small-time grocer and a sometime
lawyer about whom very little is known-only that he successfully applied
for the right to sell spirits in his store, and that a Wheatley relative
remembered him as someone who affected the airs of a gentleman. Meanwhile,
the poet continued her efforts to publish a second volume. In 1779,
she advertised six times in the Boston Evening Post & General
Advertiser, mentioning that she intended to dedicate the book to Benjamin
Franklin. The advertisements failed to generate the necessary number
of subscribers, and the book was never published.
Wheatley's freedom had enslaved her to a life of hardship. Peters
abandoned her soon after she gave birth to their third child (the
first two died in infancy). She placed her last advertisement in the
September, 1784, issue of The Boston Magazine and died in December,
at the age of thirty, poor and alone. Her baby died with her. Peters
is thought to have sold the only copy of the second manuscript. A
few years ago, one of the poems surfaced at Christie's, and sold for
nearly seventy thousand dollars, but the fall manuscript has never
been recovered.
To her black
contemporaries, Wheatley was a heroine. Jupiter Hammon published a
laudatory poem entitled &An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley
Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston,& in 1778. Hammon's poem echoed
and approved of the sentiments expressed in &On Being Brought
from Africa to America&: &Thou hast left the heathen shore,
/ Thro' mercy of the Lord, /Among the heathen live no more, / Come
magnify thy God.& Wheatley encouraged the work of other black
artists, such as Hammon and Scipio Moorhead, a well known painter
to whom she dedicated a poem. In letters to her best friend, Obour
Tanner, a black woman she had met in Providence, Wheatley argued for
the inherent right of blacks to be free. She corresponded with the
English philanthropist John Thornton, a wealthy merchant and a friend
of the Countess of Huntingdon. She used her fame and her acquaintance
with political figures to complain bitterly about the human costs
of the slave trade, as in a famous poem called &To the Right
Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth&:
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows Labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can 1 then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
And there is a letter Wheatley wrote about the evils of slavery to
the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian minister in the Countess's
circle. The letter was published several months after her manumission.
It appeared in The Connecticut Gazette on March 11, 1774, and reads,
human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of
F it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for D
and by the Leave of our Modem Egyptians I will assert, that the same
Principle lives in us.
In the half
century following her death, Wheatley remained something of an icon
in the abolitionist movement, and was frequently cited as proof of
Africans' innate intellectual equality with whites.
At the same
time, her popularity among the abolitionists brought her some formidable
detractors. In &Notes on the State of Virginia,& which was
published in America in 1787, Thomas Jefferson dismissed Wheatley's
poetry as undeserving of the name:
often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the
blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar
oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses
only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis
W but it could not produce a poet. The compositions composed
under her name are below the dignity of criticism.
had plenty of experience &misery enough&-and, thanks to
the Wheatleys, training in spelling and composition. What she lacked,
Jefferson wrote, was an animating intellect. &Epictetus, Terence,
and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It
is not [the blacks'] condition then, but nature, which has produced
the distinction.& The authentication of Wheatley's authorship
in 1772 missed the point, in Jefferson's view. The issue wasn't whether
she was the genuine author but whether what she produced was genuine
The emergence, in the mid-eighteen-forties, of fugitive-slave authors,
such as Frederick Douglass, rendered Wheatley's stylized rhymes pass&E.
Under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist movement
was assuming an urgency and a stridency consonant with the angry realism
of Douglass's voice. Wheatley disappeared from view and when she reappeared,
in the late nineteenth century, it was as a version of what Jefferson
had made of her---a symbol of artificiality, of spiritless and wrote
convention. Unlike Douglass, who was embraced by the black literary
she was a pariah, reviled for &On Being Brought from
Africa to America,& even though the poem belongs among her juvenilia.
In 1887, Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the fathers of black nationalism,
wrote about her contemptuously, and the tone was set for the century
looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage
of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land, &James
Weldon Johnson wrote about &On Being Brought from Africa to America,&
in 1922. Instead, one finds a &smug contentment at her own escape
there from.& Wallace Thurman, in 1928, called her &a third-rate
imitation& of Alexander Pope: &Phillis in her day was a
museum figure who would have caused more of a sensation if some contemporary
Barnum had exploited her.& Another black critic described her
as &a clever imitator, nothing more.&
By the nineteen-sixties,
criticism of Wheatley had risen to a high pitch of disdain. Amiri
Baraka, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, wrote in 1962 that Wheatley's
&pleasant imitations of eighteenth-century English poetry are
far and, finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices
that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies,
and ballits. & In &Images of the Negro in American Literature&
(1966), Seymour Gross wrote, &This Negro poetess so well fits
the Uncle Tom syndrome .... She is pious, grateful, retiring, and
civil.& A few years later, the critic Addison Gayle, Jr., issued
his own bill of indictment: Wheatley, he wrote, was the first among
black writers &to accept the images and symbols of degradation
passed down from the South's most intellectual lights and the first
to speak with a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to
[her] oppressors.& She had, in sum, &surrendered the right
to self-definition to others.& Phillis Wheatley, who had once
been cast as the great paragon of Negro achievement, was now given
a new role: race traitor.
The examples
could be multiplied, as versions of the Jeffersonian critique have
been taken up by successive generations of black-writers and critics.
Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth
Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics
in the twentieth. She was an impostor, a fraud, an avatar of inauthenticity.
It's striking that Jefferson and Amiri Baraka, two figures in American
letters who agreed on little else, could concur in the terms of their
condemnation of Phillis Wheatley.
For Wheatley's
critics, her sacrifices, her courage, her humiliations, her trials
could never be enough. And so things came flail circle: the sorts
of racist suspicions and anxieties that first greeted Wheatley's writing
were now directed at forms of black expression that failed the new
test of cultural affirmation. The critics of the Black Arts Movement
and after were convening their own interrogators, and they were a
rather more hostile group than met that day in 1772. We
can almost imagine Wheatley being frog-marched through another hail
in the nineteen-sixties or seventies, surrounded by dashiki-clad figures
of &the Revolution&: &What is Ogun's relation to Esu?&
&What are the seven principles of Kwanzaa?& &Santeria
is derived from which African culture?& And, finally, &Where
you gonna be when the revolution comes, sista?&
If Wheatley
stood for anything, of course, it was the creed that culture did,
or could, belong equally to everyone. That's an ideal that has been
arraigned, interrogated, and prosecuted with unremitting zeal, but
it remains worth defending. The republic of letters that Wheatley
so yearned to join-one that might embrace the writing of both Jefferson
and his African-American descendants-was based on common expression,
not common experience. What would happen, then, if we ceased to stereotype
Wheatley, to cast her in this role or that, but, instead, read her,
with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft?
That's the only way to let Phillis Wheatley take the stand.