Phillis Wheatley’s True Voice
“Somewhere Phillis Wheatley is smiling on Amanda Gorman,” someone tweeted after Gorman’s recitation of her poem at Joe Biden’s inaugural speech. “The poet Phillis Wheatley would be proud,” tweeted another. Can we say this with certainty?
Wheatley’s Short Life
Many people who had never heard of Wheatley before looked her up after Gorman listed her as one of her inspirations. They read about the small, gap-toothed seven-year-old girl who came off a slave ship in the Boston harbor and was sold to a successful merchant, John Wheatley. She might have reminded John of a daughter who had died at about the same age. The Wheatleys called her Phillis, after the ship that had taken her to America.
Noticing Phillis’s talents and eagerness to learn, the Wheatleys taught her to read and write. And read and write she did. In fact, she read a greater number and a higher quality of books than most white girls of her age. At age twelve, she was already writing poems.
In 1770, seventeen-year-old Phillis wrote an elegy for the famous English preacher, George Whitefield. Susanna Wheatley sent it to Countess Selina Hastings, one of Whitefield’s most prominent English sponsors. The poem, published in both English and American papers, marked the start of the young girl’s fame. With the countess’s help, a book of Phillis’s poems was published in London, where Phillis traveled to help with the promotion. She was an immediate sensation.
She could have stayed in England, where she had some influential friends who were fighting against slavery. By English law, she would have been considered a free woman. But this freedom wouldn’t have lasted if she had ever returned to America. Possibly, for this reason, she chose to go back and be legally manumitted by the Wheatleys.
By that time, Susanna was seriously ill and died a few months after Phillis’s return, depriving the young girl of a dear friend and faithful advisor. Phillis learned that life as a free woman came with a price, as she had to find ways to support herself in a world where former slaves had limited opportunities and where writing rarely yields financial security.
Her financial situation continued to be unstable even after she married. As a merchant, her husband, John Peters, experienced some of the economic problems of his time, compounded by the upheaval of the Revolutionary War. When a client couldn’t pay her large debt to his store, he was forced to dispense the same treatment to others, joining the growing company of insolvent debtors. He was eventually sent to prison, where he was when Phillis died in 1784 – most likely of the respiratory illness that had troubled her most of her life. She was about thirty years old.
Reinventing Phillis Wheatley
The first written account of Phillis Wheatley’s life was published in 1834 by Margaretta Matilda Odell, presumably a descendant of Susanna Wheatley. The story, written in the sentimental style of the Victorian age, seems to be intent in proving that Phillis would have faired better as a slave of the Wheatleys. This was the account that scholars have accepted for years.
In the 1960s, when Americans began to recover unknown Black voices of the past, Phillis Wheatley was quickly dismissed as a product of the White culture of her time. Oddly enough, there was a similarity between their judgment and that of many intellectual men of Phillis’s time: they both refused to believe that her writings reflected her own voice.
Their premises were, of course, different. For many men of the Enlightenment, such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites because, in their view, they had not shown the same artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishments. Before she could publish her poems, Phillis had to produce a list of signatures by esteemed men who could vouch that she was indeed the author.
In the sixties, the suspicion that the poems were a product of the Wheatley family resurrected, this time because they sounded too “white.” In the minds of this later generation, a slave could never willingly write:
‘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.
Our age has made some peace with Wheatley, so much that Amanda Gorman could claim her as her inspiration. To do so, most people relegate her writings, such as the above poem, to the time when she was still enslaved and her comments against slavery to the time after her manumission.
While it’s true that Phillis spoke more freely against slavery after she left the Wheatleys (accusing Americans of hypocrisy in their alleged fight for freedom), her writings (including personal letters) show that she had deeply understood the meaning of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7:20-21: “Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise, also he that is called, being free, is Christ’s servant” (1 Cor. 7:20-21).
These words might seem inconsistent in an age that dislikes nuances. That’s why, in this latest reinvention of Phillis Wheatley, her vigorous stand against slavery is emphasized over her Christian convictions, without realizing how her biblical understanding – matured through serious studies and church attendance – informed every aspect of her life, her views, and her decisions.
Was Phillis Wheatley smiling on Amanda Gorman? Would she have been proud? We can’t answer these questions without falling into speculation or anachronism. We can just say what historian Eric Ives once wrote about another brave woman of our past (Lady Jane Grey): “In the West, growing secularization ensures that relatively few people even understand the issues which meant so much to her.”[1]
And yet, enough has been published by and about Wheatley to make these skewed opinions unjustifiable.[2] It might be time to let her speak for herself and to meditate on what she has to tell us.
Know the real Phillis Wheatley.
Simonetta Carr’s book is available from Reformation Heritage Books.
