14
Phillis Wheatley
’Twas Mercy
The slender teenager stood before eighteen of the most prominent, powerful, and respected men in colonial Boston—among them Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver, statesman John Hancock, and Reverend Charles Chauncy. Altogether the esteemed group was comprised of seven ordained ministers, three poets, six government officials, and several key figures in the battle for independence. They were gathered for one reason: to determine whether the shy, young girl was, as she claimed, the legitimate author of the twenty-eight poems she clutched in her hands. The men in the room, along with most of Boston’s literate public, doubted the girl’s literary authenticity. After all, as an African slave, she was considered intellectually inferior and incapable of writing such high-caliber poetry.
As she stood poised before the tribunal, the girl prepared herself to endure an oral examination that would not only determine the course of her own life and work but also impact an entire race. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, “The stakes . . . were as high as they could get for an oral exam. She [was] on trial and so [was] her race.”1 Furthermore, as Gates noted, the “jury” wasn’t exactly an association for the advancement of colored people. Not only were the eighteen men assembled arguably the most highly educated and powerful men in Boston at the time, but the majority owned slaves. One even worked as a slave dealer.
No transcript of the exchange between the tribunal and the poet exists, so we can’t know for sure the nature of the examination or the questions that were asked that day. But we do know this: at the examination’s conclusion, Phillis Wheatley walked out with a certificate of authentication signed by all eighteen examiners, an attestation that was included in the prologue of her first published book:
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.2
The book, published in England in 1773 (despite the attestation, Boston publishers still refused to consider it) and entitled Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, is considered the first book of poetry written in English by a person of African descent.
A Poet Is Born
Phillis Wheatley was one of six million enslaved Africans to arrive in the Americas between 1700 and 1808. She landed in Boston on July 11, 1761, aboard the Phillis, the vessel after which she was renamed by her owners, Boston merchant and tailor John Wheatley and his wife, Susanna. Because she wrote so little about her native Africa, almost nothing is known about her life prior to her arrival in Boston, including her birth name or her exact birthplace. Historians surmise that she was born in either Senegal or Gambia.
Likewise we know little about her Middle Passage aboard the Phillis. As biographer Vincent Carretta points out, “Perhaps her experience was understandably so traumatic that she was never able or willing to reimagine it.”3 All we know is that of the ninety-six enslaved Africans who crossed the Atlantic on the Phillis, only seventy-five survived to be sold in Boston, a mortality rate of nearly 25 percent during the journey. A child of seven years old, Phillis disembarked from the ship thin, sickly, and naked, missing her middle two top teeth. It’s said Susanna Wheatley chose her from the more robust, healthy females exhibited because of “the humble and modest demeanor and the interesting features of the little stranger.”4
Phillis was treated by her master and mistress like a member of the Wheatley family rather than a typical slave in eighteenth-century colonial Boston. She was spared the hours of washing, ironing, cooking, baking, sewing, and knitting that the majority of female house slaves endured. Instead, she was educated not only in rudimentary reading and writing and the basic tenets of Christianity but also in the classics. Just four years after her arrival in Boston, Phillis was adequately literate in English to compose a letter to a Presbyterian minister and write a short elegy on the death of a neighbor. She was allowed access to a dictionary and was given a place to write, where she studied her favorite authors, including Alexander Pope and Homer and Ovid in translation. As Carretta observes, “The education Phillis Wheatley received . . . would have been very impressive for a white man of high social standing at the time.”5
“The Most Reviled Poem in African-American Literature”
As an ardent Congregationalist, Susanna Wheatley felt obligated to introduce Phillis to Christianity, and she dealt with her slave’s spiritual education as conscientiously as she did that of her own two children. Phillis was baptized in 1771 and subsequently came to believe that God’s providence included the enslavement of Africans, a view that infuriated African Americans in the twentieth century, particularly during the 1960s and ’70s.
“Let us rejoice in and adore the wonders of God’s infinite Love in bringing us from a land Semblant of darkness itself, and there the divine light of revelation (being obscur’d) is as darkness,” Phillis wrote to her friend and fellow native African Obour Tanner in 1772. “Here the knowledge of the true God and eternal life are made manifest; But there, profound ignorance overshadows the Land. . . . Many of our fellow creatures are pass’d by, when the bowels of divine love expanded toward us. May this goodness & long Suffering of God lead us to unfeign’d repentance.”6
Phillis’s best-known poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” was written when she was fourteen years old and has been called “the most reviled poem in African-American literature.”7 The eight-line poem follows the argument she made in the letter to Tanner—namely, that it was God’s mercy that brought her as a slave from Africa to America, subsequently allowing her the opportunity to know Jesus:
’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 refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.8
Modern critics have vilified Phillis for rejecting her African heritage and condoning slavery. She has been criticized for being nothing but a clever imitator of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, as well as for being “too white,” having “a white mind,” and playing the role of an “early Boston Aunt Jemima.”9 While we can understand how this particular poem’s verses are problematic, given what seems to be her justification of the slave trade, as Carretta notes, the poem is theologically consistent with Phillis’s religious convictions. “Like anyone with faith in an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God,” Carretta observes, “Wheatley believes that the evil of enslavement that caused her exodus from Africa has to serve an ultimately positive purpose that may as yet be unknowable to humankind.”10 Phillis perceived her personal enslavement to be the ironic catalyst for her introduction to and union with God.
This connection between her enslavement and her embrace of Christianity is not, however, proof that Phillis condoned slavery or diminished it as less than the horrific evil it was. Many of Phillis’s other poems and letters express a bitter opposition to the slave trade, a fact that’s been overlooked by many contemporary scholars. In a 1774 letter to her friend Samson Occom—a letter that was subsequently reprinted in eleven New England newspapers—Phillis stated her boldest antislavery protest, condemning those who regularly boasted of Christian charity yet held slaves at the same time:
In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for Deliverance . . . and I will assert that the same principle lives in us . . . This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite.11
Clearly she was not afraid to criticize the blatant double standard that existed among Christian slaveholders, including her own master and mistress.
From Extraordinary to Obscure
When it became obvious that Susanna Wheatley would not be able to convince a Boston printer to publish Phillis’s first book despite the signed attestation, Susanna secured the support of London’s Countess of Huntingdon and began to pursue a British publisher. In 1773 Phillis sailed with the Wheatleys’ son, Nathaniel, to London to meet her patron. By then, having published dozens of poems in American and London newspapers, she was an international celebrity. As her ship set sail from Boston, newspapers reported her every move. The Boston News-Letter declared on May 3 that the “extraordinary Negro Poet” was about to depart.12
Phillis left London after just six short weeks, without having met Countess Huntingdon. She and Nathaniel were called home to attend to a terminally ill Susanna, who languished for nearly a year before dying in March of 1774. Her mistress lived to see Phillis’s landmark book in print. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773 by Archibald Bell, an obscure printer of religious books. The volume was widely reviewed by English and Scottish newspapers and magazines, at least two of which noted the hypocrisy of the Wheatleys, who went to enormous lengths to tout the talents of their slave poet but did nothing to free her from enslavement. “We are very much concerned,” wrote a reviewer, “to find that this ingenious young woman is yet a slave.”13 Shortly after her return, after being enslaved for twelve years, Phillis was emancipated by the Wheatleys.
Susanna and John Wheatley may have treated Phillis as a virtual member of the family when she was young, but it’s clear that her legal status as a slave made her far from such. When John died in 1778, his last will and testament bequeathed the bulk of his estate to his son, Nathaniel, and the remainder of it to his daughter, Mary. Phillis’s name was not mentioned. Despite the fact that she was invited into the company of such notable figures as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, circumstances grew increasingly difficult for Phillis after her emancipation, and she struggled to earn a living off her published writing. The prominent leaders who had supported her writing years earlier either had died or, by the start of the Revolutionary War in 1776, had fled Boston or been forced to fend for themselves.
A few days after the death of her former master, Phillis accepted the marriage proposal of John Peters, a black grocer in Boston—a decision, Carretta notes, “no doubt prompted at least in part by her desire for some degree of social and economic security.”14 Not a lot is known about this period of Phillis’s life, except that it was the beginning of the end. The couple struggled financially. John was imprisoned for debt, and their two children died in infancy. Still writing and still in search of a publisher for her second volume of poetry, Phillis placed her last advertisement for a book publisher in the September 1784 issue of Boston Magazine. Two months later, her husband still imprisoned, Phillis died alone at the age of thirty-one, poverty-stricken, destitute, and in relative obscurity. Some historians suggest that a third infant child died a few hours later.
Unshaken
Phillis Wheatley’s life as a Christian seems overshadowed by her historic contributions as an African American poet. But think for a moment about her thirty-one years. Wrenched from her home and family at seven years old, she endured inconceivable atrocities on the long voyage from Africa to America, arriving naked, half alive, alone, and terrified, to be sold like an animal to strangers in a land where she couldn’t speak a word of the language and knew not a soul. She served as a slave, was considered nothing more than a piece of property, and was forced to defend her intelligence before a group of white men who defined her as an “uncultivated barbarian.” Yet in spite of the profound suffering and humiliation she endured, Phillis Wheatley praised God as good—a God of kindness, mercy, and love. Given similar circumstances, how many Christians would stand as firmly as she did, with their trust in God’s benevolence unshaken?15