PROTEST IN THE POETRY OF PHILLIS WHEATLEYBy Wided Sassi Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Kairouan-Tunisiaw.sassi@laposte.net

On July 11, 1761, the Phillis, a schooner returning from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea reached the docks of Boston harbor. Among its cargo was "a slender frail, female child…supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.”The girl was almost "naked," except for "a quantity of dirty carpet about her like a filibeg” (“Phillis Wheatley” 763). From her looks and the few words the child mumbled, it was surmised that she was a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast. John Wheatley, an affluent tailor and merchant, responded to advertisements in the Boston Evening Post and the Boston Gazette in search for a house servant for his wife Susanna. Mr. Wheatley acquired the child "for a trifle," as “ the captain had fears of her dropping off his hands, without emolument, by death." The slave purchase price was estimated to be less than ten pounds according to dedicated Wheatley biographer William Robinson. Ironically enough, Mrs. Susannah Wheatley named the child "Phillis," after the name of the schooner that had brought her from Africa.

Given her poor health condition, the young girl was unsuited for rigorous labor, so Mrs. Wheatley relieved her of physically demanding domestic chores. For unexplained reasons, Susannah never treated Phillis like a slave. She rather considered her almost like one of her eighteen-year-old twins, Mary and Nathanial. Phillis herself wrote after Susanna’s death that “I was treated by her more like her child than her Servant; no opportunity was left unimprov’d, of giving me the best of advice”.

Mary, apparently with her mother's enthusiastic encouragement, began to teach Phillis to read. To the great Astonishment of the family, young Phillis had an impressive capacity to learn. In just sixteen months time from her arrival, Phillis, the utter stranger of English, attained the language without any assistance from school education, and by only what she was taught in the Family. In so short a time, she was immersed in British literature, particularly John Milton and Alexander Pope, and the Greek and Latin classics of Vergil, Ovid, Terence, and Homer (Showalter 20). Not only was she tutored in literature, philosophy, and Phillis was equally introduced to the Christian faith.

By 1765, Phillis had written her first poem critic Carl Bridenbaugh contends. Thirteen-year-old Wheatley, he claims, after hearing a miraculous saga of survival at sea, wrote "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin." The poem was later published on 21 December 1767 in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. In 1770, she wrote, "On the Affray in King -

Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770", a poem to commemorate the Boston massacre. It reads in part:

Long as in Freedom's Cause the wise contend,Dear to your unity shall Fame extend;While to the World, the letter's Stone shall tell,How Caldwell, Attucks, Gray, and Mav'rick fell.

That same year Phillis wrote an elegy on the sudden death of Reverend George Whitfield during a speaking tour in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The poem was a great sensation and propelled young Phillis into the national spotlight. This exceptionally popular poem was published as a broadside in Boston in 1770, and then again in Newport, four more times in Boston, and a dozen times in New York, Philadelphia, and Newport.

By 1772 Phillis had apparently amassed a considerable number of poems in a manuscript, which had been widely circulated among the Wheatleys’ circle. Delighted with her slave's dazzling abilities and her growing fame, Susannah Wheatley set out to have Phillis's work collected and published as a book. On February 29, March 14, and April 18, 1772 She advertised the Boston Censor magazine for subscribers for “A Collection of Poems, wrote at several times, and upon various occasions, by PHILLIS, a Negro Girl, from the strength of her own Genius.” The volume was to be an octavo of approximately 200 pages “handsomely bound and lettered.” The publisher, Ezekiel Russell, would begin printing copies as soon as enough subscribers--perhaps 300--could be reached to underwrite the cost of publication. But the necessary number of subscribers could not be found, because not enough Bostonians could believe that an African slave possessed the requisite degree of reason and wit to write a poem.

Such incredulity at the sheer resonance that a black could ever create formal literature was understandable given the broader discourse of race and reason permeating eighteenth century America. Following a tradition inaugurated by major Enlightenment thinkers, many believed that blacks belonged to a distinct race, most likely a subhuman category. Doubts regarding blacks’ intellect were frequently voiced. In 1753 philosopher David Hume forwarded:

I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences.… Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.

Writing, being the most elevated sign of reason, could not therefore emanate from such an inferior breed. Even the rare occasions, where blacks could produce literature, they were believed to be imitating but never close to white’s intellect and creativity. Commenting on the case of slave Francis Williams, Humes scorned “In Jamaica indeed they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but 'tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishment, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”

Ten years later, Emanuel Kant voiced a similar indictment of blacks’ mental capabilities. In Kant’s view, blacks were inherently inferior to whites and are inhibited by their physical limitations. He explained:

The Negroes of Africa have, by nature, no feeling that rises above the trifling…So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color…. [if a] man [is] black from head to foot, [it is] a clear proof that what he said was stupid.

To publish her work, black Phillis Wheatley had to provide undisputable evidence that she had indeed written her own poems. Sometime before October 8, 1772, upon her master’s request, eighteen of the most influential thinkers and politicians of the Massachusetts Colony were summoned to scrutinize Phillis's claim of authorship. Critic and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. tries to recreate imaginatively the scene:

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…No doubt the young woman would have been demure, soft-spoken, and frightened, for she was about to undergo one of the oddest oral examinations on record, one that would determine the course of her life and the fate and direction of her work, and one that, ultimately, would determine whether she remained a slave or would be set free. The stakes, in other words, were as high as they could get for an oral exam.

The historical record is sparse on the proceedings and deliberations of Miss Wheatley’s examination. But, whatever the nature of the exam, Wheatley passed it and prompted the eighteen august gentlemen to compose, sign, and publish a two-paragraph "Attestation" an open letter "To the Publick" validating her allegations. That letter reads in part:

We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the 4 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.

This statement of authenticity, however important, could not quell the doubts of American publishers who refused to take on phillis’ manuscript. Susanna Wheatley, as a

result, turned to her English friends for help, as the publishing climate in England seemed more forthcoming to black authors. Scholar Vincent Carretta has observed that after the 1772 court ruling that made it illegal for slaves who had come to England to be forcibly returned to the colonies, the British market for black literature started to thrive. Although the ruling did not completely outlaw slavery in England, it encouraged an atmosphere of sympathy toward blacks. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, had already shepherded into print one of the earliest slave narratives by James Gronniosaw. Mrs.Wheatley as a result forwarded the elegy that Phillis wrote for George Whitefield to the countess. The latter agreed to finance the book’s publication and instructed printer Archibald Bell to start the necessary preparations.

Wheatley, suffering from a chronic asthma condition, left for London on 8 May 1771 accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley to oversee the publication of her collection. The now-celebrated poetess was welcome by several dignitaries: the Earl of Dartmouth, Granville Sharp, the scholar and antislavery activist, and Brook Watson, a future Lord Mayor of London, philanthropist John Thorton, and Benjamin Franklin among many others. Wheatley was impressed by the “unexpected and unmerited civility and complaisance” with which she was treated by all. An audience with King George was arranged, although she had to cancel it when Susanna Wheatley suddenly fell ill and needed her care.

While Wheatley was crossing the Atlantic to reach her terminally ill mistress, Bell was circulating the first edition of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the first volume of poetry by an American Negro published in modern times against the greatest odds.  The book's publication represented a significant moment in black literary achievement. Although a few black authors had published individual poems before Wheatley, their work fell short of receiving comparable interest. Jupiter Hamnon, a slave from Long Island, had published the first of several poems in 1760. Francis Williams 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.

Within a month of the book's publication and Phillis’ trip back to America, the Wheatleys manumitted her. But, her freedom had enslaved her to a life of hardship. While under the patronage of the Wheatleys , Phillis suffered very limited restrictions on her life. Once free, Phillis became fully responsible for her needs, and for her literary career. At the beginning, she struggled to manage her finances, but her prospects dimmed considerably after the death of her benefactress Susanna Wheatley in 1774 and the British occupation of Boston that same year.

With the outbreak of war in April 1775, Phillis decided to align herself with the revolutionary cause. On October 26, 1775, she wrote to General George Washington at

his headquarters in Cambridge. Accompanying the letter, Wheatley enclosed a rather flattering ode to George Washington. Its last lines read:

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.

Favorably responding to her request, "Washington invited her to visit him at Cambridge, which she did a few days before the British evacuated Boston…. She passed half an hour with the commander-in-chief, from whom and his officers she received marked attention"(Lossing). Both the letter and the poem were later published by Thomas Paine in his Pennsylvania Magazine in April 1776.

The next year Wheatley wrote "On the Capture of General Lee," a poem that laments the rather inglorious seizure of Washington's respected second in command. Having neglected to post a proper guard around his temporary headquarters in a tavern, Lee was captured in his dressing gown. Wheatley did not miss the opportunity, however sad it was, to pledge allegiance to the great General Washington:

Columbia too, beholds with streaming eyesHer heroes fall-tis freedom's sacrifice!So wills the Power who with convulsive stormsShakes impious realms, and nature's face deforms;Yet those brave troops innumerous as the sandsOne soul inspires, one General Chief commandsFind in your train of boasted heroes, oneTo match the praise of Godlike Washington.

On 1 April 1778, despite the skepticism and disapproval of some of her closest friends, Wheatley married John Peters, a free black whom she barely knew. Merle A. Richmond described him as "a man of very handsome person and manners," who "wore a wig, carried a cane, and quite acted out 'the gentleman.'" Peters is purported in various historical records to have called himself Dr. Peters, to have practiced law, kept a grocery in Court Street, exchanged trade as a baker and a barber, and applied for a liquor license for a bar. Like many others who fled towards the Northeast to avoid the fighting during the Revolutionary War, the Peters moved temporarily from Boston to Wilmington, Massachusetts. In the following years the couple allegedly had three children who died in infancy. As their economic situation worsened, Wheatley had to fend for herself by working as a charwoman while her husband dodged creditors and looked for employment. 

Interestingly though, throughout these lean years, Wheatley continued to write and aspired to publish a second volume of poetry (O'Neale). Between 30 October and 18 December 1779, she ran six advertisements in the Boston Evening Post & General Advertiser soliciting subscribers for "300 pages in Octavo," a volume "Dedicated to the Right Hon. Benjamin Franklin, Esq.: One of the Ambassadors of the United States at the Court of France. "The collection would include thirty-three poems and thirteen letters. But her hopes shattered as the advertisements failed to generate the necessary number of subscribers, and the book was never published. Under the name Phillis Peters, Wheatley managed to publish “Liberty and Peace”in 1784. In this sixty-four-line poem supports the nation in its intense struggle for freedom while shrewdly advocating for racial “equality”. Wheatley ended the poem with a triumphant ring:

Britannia owns her Independent Reign,Hibernia, Scotia, and the Realms of Spain;And Great Germania's ample Coast admiresThe generous Spirit that Columbia fires.Auspicious Heaven shall fill with fav'ring Gales,Where e'er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,And Heavenly Freedom spread her gold Ray.

Phillis Wheatley passed away on 5 December 1784, at the age of thirty, alone and in in abject poverty. Her husband John Peters was incarcerated, "forced to relieve himself of debt by an imprisonment in the county jail"( Richmond). Margaretta Matilda Odell reveals that in her last days Phillis was “ suffering for want of attention, for many comforts, and that greatest of all comforts in sickness--cleanliness. She was reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe. ... In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis ... . The woman who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and good ... was numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of a squalid poverty!" 

Wheatley’s literary legacy:After her untimely death, Writer and poetess Phillis Wheatley left behind a very

rich literary legacy. Recent scholarship suggests that Wheatley wrote around 145 poems in total. Unfortunately, though, the overwhelming majority of her writings disappeared and was never recovered. Of the numerous letters she wrote to national and international political and religious leaders, only some two dozen notes and letters stood the test of time. According to scholar Vernon Loggins, 18 out of Phillis’ 42 poems are elegies, consolatory poems written at the request of friends. Five of them are on Ministers of the Christian religion; two on the wives of a Lt.-Governor and a celebrated physician; and the rest are on unknown persons. Wheatley also wrote poems that were inspired by public

events of importance, such as the repeal of the Stamp Act, appointment of George Washington as Commander-in-Chief of the Revolutionary forces, betrayal of General Lee into the hands of the British, and the return of peace at the close of the Revolution. A number of her poems are also on minor happenings like a voyage of a friend to England, and the providential escape of an acquaintance from a hurricane at sea. Furthermore, Phillis wrote poems on abstractions (“On Imagination,” “On Virtue,” “On Recollection,” and “Thoughts on the Works of providence,” among others.) She also wrote companion hymns (“An Hymn to the Morning” and “An Hymn to the Evening,”). Besides writing poems, Phillis also versified selections from the Bible, a custom in the New England which begun in the early days when the Bay Psalm Book was compiled. In all, she versified eight selections, including the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, and the passage in First Samuel which describes David’s fight with Goliath. She also adapts a portion of the sixth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which tells of Niobe’s distress for her children. Wheatley also excelled in writing letters.Critical reception

Phillis Wheatley is one of the few African American writers whose art has stirred conflicting reactions on the part of white and black readers alike. Critical reception of Wheatley’s writings, like a pendulum, never ceased to swing back and forth.

Eighteenth century blacks were overwhelmed by her accomplishments. Poet Juppiter Hammon wrote in her honor “An Address To Phillis Wheatley”. It read in part:

Come you, Phillis, now aspire,    And seek the living God, So step by step thous mayst go higher,    Till perfect in the word.

Phillis genuine artistry propelled some prominent white figures to acknowledge the fact that blacks could indeed write. Antislavery advocates, especially in Britain, frequently cited Wheatley's poetry as evidence of the humanity and inherent equality of blacks. In his Essays Historical and Moral (London, 1785), George Gregory considered Wheatley’s poems "striking instances of genius contending against every disadvantage, resulting from want of encouragement, and of early cultivation." In An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African (London, 1786), Thomas Clarkson, a leading British abolitionist, said of Wheatley, "if the authoress was designed for slavery, . . . the greater part of the inhabitants of Britain must lose their claim to freedom."

Not everybody jubilantly celebrated the black poetess achievements, however. Phillis came under fire from the most notable white critics of her times. Perhaps the harshest comments came from Thomas Jefferson. In "Notes on the State of Virginia"(1787), Thomas Jefferson dismissed Wheatley's poetry as undeserving of the name.” Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions

composed under her name are below the dignity of criticism” Jefferson wrote. He further noted that “all the training in spelling and composition that Phillis received, thanks to the Wheatleys, was not enough to procure her an animating intellect.

Interestingly, the same racist suspicions and anxieties that attended Wheatley's writing in the eighteenth century were reverberated in the twentieth century. Only this time assaults came from her own “people”. Phillis Wheatley, once the most revered figure in black letters, would turn into the most reviled figure. In this respect, critic Henry Louis Gates,Jr. notes : having survived the tribunal of eighteen in 1772, Wheatley now finds her genuineness impugned by a larger authority, subjected to a higher test of originality and invention. While white critics found her “too black to be taken seriously”; she was now “too white” to interest black critics. In 1922, poet James Weldon Johnson condemned phillis’ humility and ambivalence towards the scourge of her race. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," he disparaged "One looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land, Instead, one finds a "smug contentment at her own escape there from." A few years later, Wallace Thurman reduced Wheatley authorship to "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." A very similar plea was pronounced by anthropologist Vernon Loggins, who labeled her an “occasional poet” in his masterful history of Negro literature (1930). Wheatley's poetry, in his view, reflected "her instinct for hearing the music of words" rather than understanding their meaning”. He concludes Wheatley is "a clever imitator, nothing more."

Criticism of Wheatley rose to its highest pitch of disdain by the mid-sixties (Gayle.Jr.). In "Images of the Negro in American Literature" (1966), Seymour Gross concluded "This Negro poetess so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome .... She is pious, grateful, retiring, and civil." That same opinion was later pronounced by Amiri Baraka. In his seminal collection of essays  Home(1966), Baraka argued that Wheatley's "pleasant imitations of 18th 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." Addison Gayle, Jr., issued his own bill of indictment in The Way of the World (1975). 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."(Gayle Jr.)

Worth noting is the fact that recent scholarship has revisited Wheatley’ legacy. Critics looking at the whole body of her work have favorably established the literary quality of her poems and her unique historical achievement.

Identity in Phillis Wheatley’s poetry:

On Being Brought from Africa to AmericaPHILLIS WHEATLEY 1773

'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye.     

"Their color is a diabolic dye."

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refined, and join the angelic train.Read literally Phillis’ words seem to reveal a meek acceptance of her slave fate.

Phillis praises the mercy of God for singling her out for redemption. Despite the horrifying experience of being abducted and forcibly driven into on a dangerous journey that nearly took her life, Wheatley hails God's mercy for freeing from a heathen land. In the new, she was introduced to Christianity

This rather submissive tone failed to gain Wheatley the support of her audience but certainly succeeded in making her the traitor of her own race. Phillis’ detractors condemned her for ignoring the plight of her race and missing a prime opportunity to share her experiences with the white public( Redding). Eleanor Smith maintained that Wheatley was "taught by whites to think," thus she had "a white mind" and "white orientations."

Such a shallow reading, however, fails to unravel the poet’s prowess and reduces her artistry to a dull, unimaginative routine. What is needed is a deeper reading of her work with a clear understanding of the context and circumstances that ushered in its production. Wheatley’s poems were written in a context where “to establish a literary identity, to earn the title "poet," one had to insert oneself into this tradition (Burke). The black poetess had therefore to tune her rhetoric not to shock a slaveholding community. She entreats with them in a discourse that they understand and value.

Phillis, it seems, was acutely aware of her limitations as a slave, yet very conscious of the power forfeited to her through writing. It is this particular entrenched sentiment which WE.B. Du Bois dubs double consciousness. It is this set of powerful, mutually incompatible ideals. In his own words, it "One ever feels his twoness," wrote Du Bois, "-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconcilable strivings . . ." (Du Bois : 45) .

Underneath its apparent humble and retiring tone, Wheatley couches a call to question the institution of slavery. Through using a rhetoric that is heavily laden with irony, ambiguity, and mythological allusions Phillis exposes the contradictions between what Christianity professes (universal brotherhood of all men) and what Christians practice(enslavement). Didactic as her purpose is, She accentuates this message through the use of the imperative – “ Remember!” – leaving no doubt in the careful reader’s mind that she is in full control of her elements and is nobody’s derivative.

But could a slave find the courage to command a white readership that she knew were the enslavers? By opting for an inclusionary rhetoric – not to assign blame openly –resting on a manipulation of tone, imagery, and sermonic techniques, Wheatley takes the upper hand on her readers and dares preach Christians their true faith. Wheatley is a slave but she is mentally and spiritually free. Her enslavers, however, are physically and materially free but morally enslaved. Wheatley’s literary “maneuvers” are very reminiscent of Pope’s in his “An Essay on Man” where the civilized man thinks himself superior to the naïve savage whose conception of the after-life is unimaginative (Black Literature Criticism, 1892). It is obvious that by placing her imagined self in ironic juxtaposition of the “Christians” who would view her as “diabolic,” Phillis is making the same satiric point.

Wheatley’s denunciation of slaveholding did not approach in manner or tone those of later twentieth century Balck Arts poets, but she did her contribute her share in the fight against racial bigotry. Given the circumstances, Wheatley had to couch her plea for freedom and equality under a submissive rhetoric.