Phillis Wheatley On Trial

A CRITIC AT LARGE about American poet & slave Phillis Wheatley... 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. 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. Wheatley’s poems appeared in periodicals and newspapers in New England and Britain from age 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... Tells about her meeting, October 8, 1772, with a panel of influential thinkers and politicians regarding the authorship of her poems... 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... "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... 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’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.) Wheatley’s freedom had enslaved her to a life of hardship. The emergence, in the mid-eighteen-forties, of fugitive-slave authors, such as Frederick Douglass, rendered Wheatley’s stylized rhymes passé. Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century, Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics in the twentieth... 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...

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