As a little girl in the seventies, I memorized the names of prominent African Americans for Black History Month. These were the images that my teachers would trace from construction paper, then tack to the bulletin boards in my school. How I loved those dark silhouettes.
My school was 99 percent segregated; the laws had changed in the South but custom had not. My teachers celebrated black “firsts” to shore up our self-esteem, to fortify us against our smaller and shabbier schools and a pervasive white unfriendliness from those outside our enclave.
To my teachers, the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley was the first of the firsts, a beacon for black children. My parents were teachers, too, and at home they filled in the details. Wheatley was a child stolen from across the Atlantic and enslaved. A young genius whose playthings were the poems of Homer and Terence, she was the first African woman on this side of the Atlantic to publish a book of poetry. Neither of my parents liked her poetry much, but that wasn’t the point. The point was loyalty to the race, to African American men and women. This probably wasn’t my first lesson about the responsibilities of being a black person, but it’s the first one I remember and the most lasting.
I don’t recall my elementary school teachers or my parents ever mentioning Wheatley’s husband. I believed she never had married before dying at the young age of thirty-four, and I found it heartbreaking that she did not have someone to love from her native land, someone who looked like her and shared the same cultural memories. All she had was the white people who used to own her. When I first encountered information about Wheatley’s husband, John Peters, in my junior year of college, I was confronted with the dominant negative stereotypes of black men. Those thirty-five words describe him as an arrogant good-for-nothing who deserted his family.
Talladega College, where I was studying at the time, was founded by former slaves. The campus is situated in a rural Alabama town, but smack in the middle of the ’hood. As I read the words portraying Peters, how he had abandoned Wheatley and their children, leaving them to poverty and then eventual death in the midst of squalor, images of black men came to me: the shiftless brothers who hung at the edge of campus, townies waiting for college girls. They sometimes shouted to us and promised pleasures of all kinds. These were the young men my doggedly middle-class mother had warned me about, in her alto, cigarette-tuned voice. My mother had fought her way up from backwoods poverty in rural Georgia and she cautioned me: One wrong step with a man could land me in perdition; living in a shack or a one-room apartment surrounded by my screaming, misbehaved progeny. As a formerly poor person, my mother looked down her nose at poor, black folk who had not escaped to tell the advisory tale, as she had.
I thought of Wheatley, the “Ethiop” genius, taken in by Peters’s charms, falling from her magnificent perch. I pictured her, beguiled by a man who whispered in her ear, told her lies to get into her starched, Good Negro bloomers.
• • •
Much of the information on Wheatley’s personal life comes from Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave, a book published in 1834, fifty years after the poet’s death. The author, Margaretta Matilda Odell, identifies herself as a “collateral descendant” of Phillis’s former mistress. In her biography of Wheatley, she pushes a well-meaning abolitionist message: Black folks do not deserve to be slaves, and someone like Wheatley is the example of what her brethren could be, if they only had a chance.
According to Odell, the child-who-would-be-renamed-Phillis was “supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstance of shedding her front teeth” when she arrived in Boston. Susannah Wheatley, the wife of a merchant, was looking for a “faithful domestic in her old age.” Instead, she found “the poor, naked child” with a piece of cloth tied around her like a skirt. Once the child was taken home,
A daughter of Mrs. Wheatley, not long after the child’s first introduction to the family, undertook to learn her to read and write; and, while she astonished her instructress by her rapid progress, she won the good will of her kind mistress, by her amiable disposition and the propriety of her behavior.
And with the help of Susannah, the smart and well-behaved Phillis began writing poetry. Odell doesn’t give specific dates about Phillis’s journey to freedom, but later biographers of the poet do. On May 8, 1773, she sailed to London (accompanied by the Wheatleys’ grown son, Nathaniel) to promote her work, staying there six weeks. According to Wheatley scholar Vincent Carretta, on September 9, 1773, advertisements appeared for Phillis’s only book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. We know that upon her return from London, her owners freed her, because Phillis mentions this fact in a letter dated October 18, 1773.
We can’t know if Phillis hoped to return to her African homeland after receiving her freedom, but we do know that she retained a connection to the continent and its people. She developed a years-long friendship with Obour Tanner, a fellow kidnapped African who lived in Newport, Rhode Island. For several years, these two women exchanged fervent, spiritual thoughts in their letters. Phillis dedicated a poem to “S.M., A Young African Painter,” and she references Africa in several of her poems, too. “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth” contains lines about her involuntary—and possibly violent—migration from her native land:
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
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?
Odell paints the Wheatleys as kind masters, and draws an especially sympathetic portrait of Susannah, who acted as an eighteenth-century stage mother to push forward Phillis’s career. Susannah wrote to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, a philanthropist and a leader in the Methodist movement, in an attempt to secure her patronage for the young poet. (The countess replied to this letter on May 13, 1773.) Phillis herself speaks lovingly of Susannah, and she continued to live with the Wheatleys after receiving her freedom. In a letter to Obour (dated March 21, 1774), Phillis writes of the death of her former mistress, and how a white woman treated Phillis as less a “servant” and more a “child.” But as we look back on this era, kindness must be viewed through a complex prism, for slavery was a scatological, morally bankrupt enterprise. Besides Phillis, the Wheatleys owned at least one other slave and they did not raise their voices publicly or act overtly against the institution of slavery. Odell seems to think that Phillis was living the kidnapped African’s dream, however, and that, after the death of Susannah, that dream collapsed:
At this period of destitution, Phillis received an offer of marriage from a respectable colored man of Boston. The name of this individual was Peters. He kept a grocery in Court-Street, and was a man of very handsome person and manners; wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out “the gentleman.” In an evil hour he was accepted; and he proved utterly unworthy of the distinguished woman who honored him by her alliance. He was unsuccessful in business, and failed soon after their marriage; and he is said to have been both too proud and too indolent to apply himself to any occupation below his fancied dignity. Hence his unfortunate wife suffered much from this ill-omened union.
Having written in great, flattering detail about the poet’s years with the white Wheatleys, Odell uses her talents to draw a contemptuous likeness of John Peters. She informs us that Phillis never used the last name of her husband—and, it’s implied, we should assume that this decision had something to do with Peters’s qualities as a mate. Odell accuses him of possible abuse, writing in delicate terms that while Phillis was in very bad health, she wouldn’t have been “unmindful . . . of her conjugal or matronly duties.” In other words, Peters pressed his frail wife into sexual service when he shouldn’t have, which resulted in (according to Odell) three pregnancies. From there, Odell opines, Wheatley’s destruction was a foregone conclusion: There was terrible poverty. Each of the three children born to Wheatley fell sick in infancy and died. And at the age of thirty-three or -four, Wheatley herself died from an illness exacerbated by her “extreme misery” in living in “a filthy apartment” with a “negligent” husband.
This is the story branded into literary history.
• • •
In 2003, while working on my third book of poetry, I read an essay on Wheatley written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The New Yorker. It was an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book, a treatment of Wheatley juxtaposed against the racism of Enlightenment scholars such as Immanuel Kant, and more specifically, Thomas Jefferson. As someone who explored American history in my poetry, I found Gates’s thesis fascinating: He believed Wheatley was important in dispelling derisive eighteenth-century notions about black humanity; her poetry had rebutted Kant’s ordering of the nations with Africans down at the very bottom. Because of Wheatley’s important symbolism for black humanity, Thomas Jefferson’s negative response to Wheatley’s poetry—“[t]he compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism”—was a symbol as well. It meant that the struggle for black equality on all fronts was not yet won. And thus, Gates argues, an intellectual movement was born, one that triggered a wave of eighteenth-century black literary and scholarly production, which persisted into the 1960s and continues into contemporary times.
My encounter with Gates’s article started me on a Wheatley reading jag. For the next six years, I read everything I could find on her. I checked books out from the library, I downloaded scholarly articles, and I began to think deeply about her most (in)famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” This eight-line poem begins with discordancy, with seeming racial self-hatred combined with religious fervor. The tone of these verses earned Wheatley sharp, ugly criticism from other black poets, most notably the Black Arts Movement poet Amiri Baraka (né LeRoi Jones):
’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.
As a woman in my (then) thirties, I had a different take from Baraka. I thought about a little girl’s pain at being torn from her parents in Africa, her trauma on board a slave ship. I thought of her mother’s grief, her wondering what had become of her child. I thought about my own and other black folks’ beliefs in a benevolent God, in spite of our history in this country, the brutality enacted against us. And in a burst of empathy, I wrote these lines:
Mercy: what Phillis claimed
after that sea journey.
Let’s call it that.
Let’s lie to each other.
Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.
What got Phillis over the sea?
What kept a stolen daughter?
Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.
Mercy,
Dear Brethren.
However, until I traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, to the American Antiquarian Society, I had no idea that the devastating picture of the naked, gap-toothed child wrapped in a carpet may have been Odell’s imaginary reflection. It was 2009, and I was the recipient of the society’s artist fellowship. Its archives house one of the largest collections of printed material from early colonial days through 1876, about the United States, the West Indies, and Canada. I was on a mission to write a series of poems based upon Wheatley’s life, and I was in search of primary resources.
At the beginning of my fellowship, I was ready to get to work. Though I’d been conducting archival research for nearly twenty years, I wasn’t formally trained as a historian, but as the research librarians remarked, I was quick and a self-starter. In only a matter of days, I found references to Odell’s Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave. Looking through the bibliographies in texts on Wheatley, I noticed that they either cited Memoir directly or they summarized Odell and listed a relative of the Wheatley family as a reference. There was no overt tracing of Odell’s lineage, no proof of how she was related to the Wheatleys, no way to establish Odell’s authority.
In July, around the middle of my fellowship term, I drove from Worcester to the Northeast National Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was at the urging of my mentor at the society that I made the drive, even after she told me that records would be on microfiche; the very mention of microfiche made me sick to my stomach. I spent a couple hours looking through the census records, and as I feared, it was not the exhilarating process I’d hoped for. My eyeballs ached and the lobster roll from the day before threatened to repeat on me.
I was ready to return to Worcester, when I saw John Peters on the 1790 census of Suffolk County, Massachusetts—the city of Boston. He was listed as a free man of color.
No, it wasn’t a mistake. There was Peters’s name.
Swallowing my nausea, I rechecked the entire census, just to be sure. There was no other black John Peters, the narcissistic man who had abandoned his wife off and on, and then—as Odell had written—supposedly had moved farther south after his wife’s death. I looked the census over completely two more times and took pictures of the relevant pages.
I sat there, confused. Rather than verifying facts about America’s first black poet, which had been my intention, I realized literary history had entrusted the story of Wheatley and Peters to a white woman who may have made assumptions about Wheatley’s husband that might not just be wrong, but also the product of racial stereotypes.
Why would Peters have moved farther south after the Revolution? This piece of it didn’t make sense to me. Why would a free, black man in his natural, right mind move south, taking his body to slaveholding territory, where white men would be waiting to place him in chains?
Wheatley had died in 1784, but the census had been taken in 1790. It’s possible, then, that Peters had been in Boston through that decade, which meant that Peters may have been in Boston when Wheatley died. What could this mean? Had the young couple been separated? Had he left her for another woman? Had she left him? Maybe they had remained together. Maybe he hadn’t abandoned her. Maybe Odell misrepresented their relationship. And if Odell had misrepresented the relationship of Wheatley and Peters, maybe she had done the same about her relationship to the white Wheatleys.
I drove back to the AAS and huddled with my mentor and the research librarian. I asked them what Odell meant in her book when she claimed to be a “collateral descendant” of the white Wheatleys? A cousin? A niece? An in-law married to a direct descendant? Both of them advised me to look up Odell in the New England Historic Genealogical Society. I did, and I found Margaretta Matilda Odell of “Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts”—and that’s all I found. Nothing else.
I returned to the texts on Wheatley. In each, I double-checked the notes and indexes several times, sure that I had overlooked something. Every night, back in my fellow’s room, I took hours to draft possible genealogies of the blood relatives and in-laws of Susannah and John Wheatley, and those of their twins, Mary Wheatley Lathrop and Nathaniel Wheatley. I uncovered no documentation connecting Odell to the white Wheatleys. There was no establishment of family bona fides. Rather, it appeared that the only proof that Odell had been related to Susannah Wheatley, the former mistress of Phillis Wheatley, was that she had said so.
• • •
Vincent Carretta, the author of Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011)—to date, the most comprehensive biography of the poet—has unearthed a treasure trove of previously unpublished material on Phillis Wheatley and her husband: legal documents, newspaper notices, records in Boston’s Taking Book, along with other important minutiae. Still, even Carretta doesn’t know how or when Wheatley met Peters. There is a reference to a “young man” in a letter she wrote her friend Obour, on October 30, 1773, but we don’t know his identity. We do know that in 1778, Phillis Wheatley and John Peters, “free Negroes,” married during the tumultuous period of the American Revolution. In a letter to Obour (dated May 10, 1779), the poet signs herself as “Phillis Peters”; thereafter, whenever she refers to herself in print, she always uses her married name.
In the years leading up to the Revolution and directly afterward, Massachusetts was the site of black political agitation. Just as I had heard the name of Phillis Wheatley in elementary school, so had I learned about Crispus Attucks, a biracial African American and the first to fall during what became known as the Boston Massacre. Over the years, I would learn the names of others, like Lemuel Haynes, a minister who had fought in the Revolution, and Prince Hall, who founded the African Masons. There was Belinda, who petitioned the Massachusetts Assembly for a pension in her old age. And I would read the words of Felix, an unidentified black man—and presumably a slave—who petitioned the same body, demanding his freedom and that of other African American men:
We have no Property. We have no Wives. No Children. We have no City. No Country. But we have a Father in Heaven, and we are determined, as far as his Grace shall enable us, and as far as our degraded contemptuous Life will admit, to keep all his Commandments. . . .
When I view Peters through the lens of the eighteenth century, he fits in quite easily with his brethren. Carretta depicts him as a smart, hard worker, trying his hand in different business enterprises: law, commerce, real estate, even medicine. (The latter was not the profession that we know today, and required no specific schooling.)
As a white woman of the nineteenth century Odell fits in perfectly with her era, too. It doesn’t take much speculation to deduce that she believed Peters to be an uppity Negro. He was a black man who had the nerve to possess high self-esteem, who cajoled Wheatley away from her white friends. Even though Odell dedicates her book to “friends of the Africans,” her tone ridicules his ambitions: “[Peters] is said to have been both too proud and too indolent to apply himself to any occupation below his fancied dignity.” In other words, how dare a black man want to be anything other than a day laborer with calluses on his hands? Who did he think he was, to desire property and not be property, to style himself as a business owner, to marry a high-status, accomplished woman of his own race?
There are other second- or third-hand, derisive accounts of Wheatley’s husband, all by whites. Carretta quotes from Josiah Quincy, who claims to have met John Peters in court, and who didn’t think much of the encounter. While doing my own research, I found a footnote in the November 1863 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which claims that an acquaintance of Obour Tanner told someone else that Tanner had told her—keep up, now; this is getting complicated—that Tanner did not like Peters, that Wheatley had “let herself down” by marrying him. But this same footnote giving this ostensible inside information also gets Wheatley’s death date wrong, by ten years.
Even if Wheatley did, as Odell claims, give birth to children who died in infancy—and at present, there is no documentation for that—infant mortality rates were disturbingly high during this period. It was not uncommon for parents to lose several offspring in infancy or childhood, even those parents who fed, clothed, and loved their children. There would have been nothing for Peters to forestall a child’s death from a disease such as measles. As for Wheatley’s passing and whether Peters had a direct or indirect hand in it, there is no proof that he pushed her into an early grave, either. In the eighteenth century, life spans were short for whites, and even shorter for African Americans. Wheatley died around the age of thirty-three, which, unfortunately, is in keeping with life expectancies for black women in America at that time.
Carretta supplies evidence that, at the time of Wheatley’s death, Peters was living in Massachusetts indeed, but he was in prison because he couldn’t pay his bills. (In twenty-first-century terms, he had bad credit.) This is not a crime by our contemporary standards, but it was during Peters’s time. There was an economic depression in New England, in the aftermath of the American Revolution; many people in Massachusetts, black and white, couldn’t pay their bills or even afford food. Starvation was not unheard of.
Peters was released from jail, and, according to Carretta, for the next sixteen years, he continued to aspire to the role of gentleman. And now we have definitive proof that Peters also kept trying to publish the second book of poetry that his late wife had written. In October 2015, I corresponded (by e-mail) with the assistant curator of manuscripts at the American Antiquarian Society. Knowing my interest in the Wheatley-Peters marriage, she shared with me an excerpt of a never-published letter (dated June 2, 1791) between the printers Ebenezer T. Andrews and Isaiah Thomas. In this letter, Andrews refers to a “proposal” for “Wheatley’s Poems,” and that he had promised Peters that they would “print them” and split the “neat profits with him.” But bewilderingly, that second book never appeared.
Carretta notes that Peters died in 1801; he was fifty-five at the time of his death. He never was able to pay off his debts, but he left some nice belongings behind. A horse, a desk, some leather-bottomed chairs. Books, which meant he not only was literate, but may also have enjoyed reading.
When you look at Peters’s life, okay, the brother “did a couple bids,” but at least he didn’t leave behind any people that had to be sold to erase his debts, as Jefferson did. Families were broken up, auctioned off, and sifted like chaff. That would be the fate of the slaves of Monticello after Jefferson died. I can’t help but wonder what Odell would have thought of his actions.
• • •
I have continued my research on Wheatley. I regularly search for new information; I read new articles about her, and always, I check the notes and the bibliography. Periodically, I look for primary materials to see if any new information on her has emerged. When finances permit, I travel and do my primary research in person.
In the meantime, I publish poems based upon Wheatley research. In 2010, I published an essay on her as well, mentioning my sighting of Peters on that 1790 census, discussing the unproven connection between Odell and the Wheatley family:
[It] is distressing that, in 176 years, scholars have not questioned Odell’s right to speak for Phillis Wheatley. This blind trust continues the disturbing historical trend of African Americans, and black women in particular, needing white benefactors to justify their lives and history.
The thing is, I have fallen in love with Wheatley and I want to do right by her legacy. I want to get everything correct, but if I’m not the one to uncover new information, if someone else finds it, that isn’t a problem for me. I just want it to be found. I have hoped that by pointing to the absence of documentation on Odell, researchers will take notice and renew the search for her genealogy. If no family records can be identified, then the responsible, professional cause of action would be to cease using Odell as a primary source for Wheatley’s life. The other option would be to categorize Memoir as historical fiction, but whatever the categorization, someone must directly challenge Odell’s authority to provide the most enduring depiction of Wheatley, and of her husband as a sycophant and a hustler.
I’ve tried to be pragmatic when it comes to the work of Wheatley biographers and scholars. Research is hard. It’s time-consuming and frustrating; I know that from personal experience. Furthermore, there often isn’t much information to go on. For example, if Odell’s Memoir were to be eliminated as a primary source for Wheatley’s life, what else would be left to rely upon? Precious little. Yes, a chronicle that may not be fully accurate is more than exists for most eighteenth-century, formerly enslaved black folks, but really, these traces provide a pitiful tribute to the woman who is the mother of African American literature.
Never mind that controversial, beginning line of her poem “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land . . .” Wheatley is much more than that. She proved something to white people about us: that we could read and think and write—and damn it, we could feel, no matter what the racists believed. We already knew those things about ourselves. I’m pretty positive about that, but during her time, philosophers were arranging the “nations” with Africans at the bottom, while other Europeans measured black people’s skulls alongside those of orangutans to determine if the two species were kissing cousins. In the midst of these soul assaults, Wheatley’s poems carried the weight for African people on this side of the Atlantic. As a result, Wheatley—along with black soldiers and sailors who fought on the winning side of the American Revolution, black intellectuals and writers, and various individuals of African descent asserting their God-given rights of liberty—helped to sway many white Americans and Europeans that slavery was wrong.
Yet I’m waiting for someone to write a more emotionally charged book about Wheatley, one that would take into account her pre-American existence. Although she was a little girl when she arrived in Boston, and although the Wheatleys were “kind” to her, she did have African birth parents. Her life did not begin in America or with slavery. She had a free lineage that did not include the Wheatleys. If nothing else, a treatment of precolonial West African history, along with the eighteenth-century culture of that region, would be an appropriate and respectful introduction to Wheatley’s life in America.
In addition, I’m waiting for someone to include a compassionate, well-fleshed depiction of John Peters, which considers how he fit into African American intellectual, commercial, and activist life of the Revolutionary era. Perhaps I seem naïve or silly, but I’d like scholars to view him as a natural occurrence in Wheatley’s trajectory, instead of a low-down disruption that led to her demise. Oddly, no account that I’ve read of Peters gives the most obvious, commonsense reason for why Wheatley might have married him.
Maybe he didn’t trick her. She wasn’t desperate or temporarily out of her mind. They married because they were deeply, passionately in love.
Is that explanation so ridiculous? Why wouldn’t they love each other? American people of African descent did fall in love back then, and, if allowed by local power structures, they legally married. They did this in the midst of war, slavery, economic chaos, and/or posttraumatic stress over being torn from their homelands and sent over the horrific Middle Passage. I think it’s logical to assume that many, many black folk fell in love with many, many other black folk. This assumption is a rational consequence of acknowledging black humanity.
At times, when I’m impatiently waiting for scholars to reexamine the complicated realities of these two people, I imagine Phillis and John, what their moments together might have been.
Maybe Peters thought Wheatley was beautiful. He was drawn to her delicate face, to her very dark skin, her full lips, her tight, kinky hair, to the ring in her nose that might have been an ornament she carried from across the water. (Look very closely at that engraving in her book. Use a magnifying glass and you will see that nose ring.)
And maybe Wheatley thought Peters handsome. He might have looked like her relatives, back in the Gambia that she wrote about. She and Peters might have shared a hankering for a place that lived only in their memories. He might have been born in America—we probably will never know—but in any case, he would have been of African heritage. Maybe at night, when they settled down together in their rickety bed, they talked in whispers, telling each other stories of that faraway place across the water. Folktales or proverbs that had been passed down.
He possessed ambitions, the same as she, and instead of stories, maybe they talked about the future, their hopes for his fledgling businesses and her new book of poetry, the glories that would be accomplished by their children. Anything was possible in that time, when messages of liberty abounded.
Maybe he was a tender lover and they laughed and cried and clutched. The words they spoke after their passion were to be believed, even though they came from the mouths of black folk.
I. The title of this essay uses a line from Phillis Wheatley’s “To a Clergyman on the Death of His Lady,” published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773).