Although the critical reception to Wheatley and her poetry by contemporary African-American critics has been largely negative, there has, of course, always been a counter-narrative, but in a distinctly minor key. As Kenneth W. Warren notes, in 1892, Anna Julia Cooper praised Wheatley in her collection of essays A Voice from the South; in the 1920s her works appeared in anthologies of African-American poetry; W. E. B. Du Bois complimented her in an essay published in 1941; and in 1973, Margaret Walker’s famous bicentennial celebration of Wheatley’s poems at Jackson State College was attended by leading African-American writers and scholars. Nonetheless, the overwhelming tendency in Wheatley criticism has been to upbraid her for “not being black enough.”
And unfortunately, the examples of recent criticism that Reising supplies could be multiplied. It’s clear enough what we’re witnessing. The Jeffersonian critique has been recuperated and recycled by successive generations of black writers and critics. 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. Precisely the sort of mastery of the literary craft and themes that led to her vindication before the Boston town-hall tribunal was now summoned as proof that she was, culturally, an impostor. Phillis Wheatley, having been pain-stakingly authenticated in her own time, now stands as a symbol of falsity, artificiality, of spiritless and rote convention. As new cultural vanguards sought to police and patrol the boundaries of black art, Wheatley’s glorious carriage would become a tumbril.
Phillis Wheatley, who had once been cast as the great paragon of Negro achievement, was now given a new role: race traitor.
I am not the only scholar who has wished the teenage poet had found a more veiled way to express her gratitude to Susanna Wheatley for saving her from a worse form of slavery and for expressing her genuine joy at her full embrace of Christianity. But it’s striking that Jefferson and Amiri Baraka, two figures in American letters who would agree on little else, could agree on the terms of their indictment of Phillis Wheatley.
For Wheatley’s critics, her sacrifices, her courage, her humiliations, her trials would never be enough. And so we have come full circle: the sort of racist suspicions and anxieties that attended Wheatley’s writing are now directed at forms of black expression that seem to fail of a new sort of authenticity, as determined by a yardstick of cultural affirmation. Today the question has become “Who is black enough?” The critics of the Black Arts Movement and after were convening their own interrogation squad, and they were a rather more hostile group than met that day in 1772. We can almost imagine Wheatley being frog-marched through another hall in the nineteen-sixties or seventies, surrounded by dashiki-clad, flowering figures of “the Revolution”: “What is Ogun’s relation to Esu?” “Who are the sixteen principal deities in the Yoruba pantheon of Gods?” “Santeria derived from which African culture?” And finally: “Where you gonna be when the revolution comes, sista?”
And this has not merely turned out to be a sixties phenomenon. Those haunting questions of identity linger with us still, much to the devastation of inner-city youth. I read with dismay the results of a poll published a few years ago. The charge of “acting white” was applied to speaking standard English, getting straight A’s, or even visiting the Smithsonian! Think about it: we have moved from a situation where Phillis Wheatley’s acts of literacy could be used to demonstrate our people’s inherent humanity and their inalienable right to freedom, to a situation where acts of literacy are stigmatized somehow as acts of racial betrayal. Phillis Wheatley, so proud to the end of her hard-won attainments, would weep. So would Douglass; so would Du Bois. In reviving the ideology of “authenticity”—especially in a Hip Hop world where too many of our children think it’s easier to become Michael Jordan than Vernon Jordan—we have ourselves reforged the manacles of an earlier, admittedly racist era.
And, even now, so the imperative remains: to cast aside the mine-and-thine rhetoric of cultural ownership. For cultures can no more be owned than people can. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it so poignantly:I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.
This is the vision that we must embrace, as full and equal citizens of the republic of letters, a republic whose citizenry must always embrace both Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson.
Frederick Douglass recognized this clearly; in a speech delivered in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Douglass argued that his contemporaries in the Confederacy selectively cited Jefferson’s pro-slavery writings when convenient, ignoring the rest. For Douglass, black Americans were the true patriots, because they fully embraced Jeffersonian democracy; they were the most Jeffersonian Americans of all, allowing us to witness a new way to appreciate the miracle that is America. Here was Jefferson, whom Douglass called “the sage of the Old Dominion,” cast as the patron saint of the black freedom struggle.
If Frederick Douglass could recuperate and champion Thomas Jefferson, during the Civil War of all times, is it possible for us to do the same for a modest young poet named Phillis Wheatley? What’s required is only that we recognize that there are no “white minds” or “black minds”: there are only minds, and yes, they are, as that slogan has it, a terrible thing to waste. What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft? I can already hear the skeptics: that’s all well and good, they’ll say, but how is it possible to read Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America?” But, of course, there are few things that cannot be redeemed by those of charitable inclination. And just a few days after a recent Fourth of July, I received a fax from a man named Walter Grigo, sent from a public fax machine in Madison, Connecticut.
Mr. Grigo—a freelance writer—had evidently become fascinated with anagrams, and wished to alert me to quite a stunning anagram indeed. “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” this eight-line poem, was, in its entirety, an anagram, he pointed out. If you simply rearranged the letters, you got the following plea:Hail, Brethren in Christ! Have ye
Forgotten God’s word? Scriptures teach
Us that bondage is wrong. His own greedy
Kin sold Joseph into slavery. “Is there
No balm in Gilead?” God made us all.
Aren’t African men born to be free? So
Am I. Ye commit so brute a crime
On us. But we can change thy attitude.
America, manumit our race. I thank the
Lord.
It is indeed the case that every letter in Wheatley’s poem can be rearranged to produce an entirely new work, one with the reverse meaning of the apologetic and infamous original. Grigo adds that the title of the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” can be rearranged to read “Bitter, Go I, Ebon Human Cargo, From Africa.” Moreover, he continues, the five italicized words—Pagan, Savior, Christians, Negroes, Cain—are an anagram of “grasp a great vision: no races in chains.” “Could it be that Phillis Wheatley was this devious?” Mr. Grigo asked me. And it is fun to think that the most scorned poem in the tradition, all this time, was a secret, coded love letter to freedom, hiding before our very eyes. I don’t claim that this stratagem was the result of design, but we’re free to find significance, intended or not, where we uncover it.
And so we’re reminded of our task, as readers: to learn to read Wheatley anew, unblinkered by the anxieties of her time and ours. That’s the only way to let Phillis Wheatley take the stand. The challenge isn’t to read white, or read black; it is to read. If Wheatley stood for anything, it was the creed that culture was, could be, the equal possession of all human
ity. It was a lesson she was swift to teach, and that we have been slow to learn. But the learning has begun. Almost two and a half centuries after a schooner brought this African child to our shores, we can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.
Bibliography
Editions of the Writings of Phillis Wheatley
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Mason, Julian D., Jr., ed. The Poems of Phillis Wheatley: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Robinson, William H. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. New York: Garland, 1984.
Shields, John C., ed. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Nine biographies of Boston’s eighteen “most respectable characters” can be found in the American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), including the following:
Calhoon, Robert M. “Andrew Oliver.” Vol. 16, 684-86;
———. “Thomas Hutchinson.” Vol. 11, 597-600; Fowler, William M., Jr. “John Hancock.” Vol. 9, 968-70;
Kershaw, Gordon E. “James Bowdoin.” Vol. 3, 272-74;
Lippy, Charles A. “Charles Chauncy.” Vol. 4, 753-55;
Lowance, Mason I. “Samuel Mather.” Vol. 14, 693;
McCarl, Mary Rhinelander. “Mather Byles.” Vol. 4, 130-31;
Mills, Frederick V., Sr. “Samuel Cooper.” Vol. 5, 456-57;
Robinson, David M. “Joseph Green.” Vol. 9, 499-500.
In addition, biographical data on John Erving and
James Pitts can be found in the ANB entry for James Bowdoin; Erving is Bowdoin’s father-in-law and Pitts is his brother-in-law. Information about Thomas Hubbard, Ebenezer Pemberton, and John Moorhead is found in William H. Robinson’s Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York: Garland, 1984).
Secondary Sources on Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson
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Applegate, Ann. “Phillis Wheatley: Her Critics and Her Contribution.” Negro American Literature Forum 9 (1975): 123-26.
Armistead, Wilson. A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Coloured Portion of Mankind, with Particular Reference to the African Race. Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970.
Bacon, Martha. Puritan Promenade. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
———. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Baym, Max I. A History of Literary Aesthetics in America. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973.
Beard, Eva. “A Friend in High Places: Thomas Jefferson.” The Crisis 54.4 (April 1947): 111-24.
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______. “Wheatley’s ‘On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age.’” Explicator 58.1 (1999): 10-13.
______. “Wheatley’s ‘To the University of Cambridge in New-England.’” Explicator 55.4 (1997): 205-8.
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Brawley, Benjamin Griffith. Negro Builders and Heroes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937.
Brawley, Benjamin Griffith, ed. Early Negro American Writers: Selections with Biographical and Critical Introductions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935. 31-55.
Bridenbaugh, Carl. “The First Published Poems of Phillis Wheatley.” New England Quarterly 42 (December 1969): 583-84.
Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. London: n.p., 1853.
Burke, Helen. “Problematizing American Dissent: The Subject of Phillis Wheatley.” Cohesion and Dissent in America. Eds. Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. 193-209.
______. “The Rhetoric and Politics of Marginality: The Subject of Phillis Wheatley.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10.1 (Spring 1991): 31-45.
Carretta, Vincent. “Phillis Wheatley, the Mansfield Decision of 1772, and the Choice of Identity.” Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture. Eds. and introd. Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 201-23.
Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic . Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001.
Chase, Eugene P. trans. and ed. Our Revolutionary Forefathers; the Letters of Francois, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois during His Residence in the United States as Secretary of the French Legation, 1779-1785. New York: Duffield, 1929.
Chinard, Gilbert. The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928.
Choucair, Mona M. “Phillis Wheatley (1754-1784).” African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. and pref. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Wesport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. 463-68.
Cima, Gay Gibson. “Black and Unmarked: Phillis Wheatley, Mercy Otis Warren, and the Limits of Strategic Anonymity.” Theatre Journal 52.4 (December 2000): 465-95.
Collins, Terence. “Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of the Poetry.” Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 36 (1975): 78-88.
Connor, Kimberly Rae. Conversions and Vision in the Writings of African-American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.
Cook, Mercer, and Stephen E. Henderson. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
Daly, Robert. “Powers of Humility and the Presence of Readers in Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley.” Puritanism in America: The Seventeenth through the Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Michael Schuldiner. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993. 1-24.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
______. The Problem of Slavery in Western Thought. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966.
Davis, Gwenn, and Beverly A. Joyce, eds. Poetry by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Deane, Charles, ed. Letters of Phillis Wheatly [sic] , the Negro-Slave Poet of Boston. Boston: J. Wilson and Son, 1864.
Delany, Martin R. The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. Rpt. ed. Introd. Benjamin Quarles. Salem, NH: Ayer Company, 1988.
Douglass, Frederick. “The Proclamation and a Negro Army.” Ed. Philip S. Foner. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. 3. New York: International Publishers, 1952. 321-37.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Introd. Donald B. Gibson. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Ellison, Julie. “The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility.” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837. Eds. Carol Shiner Wilson and Jean Haefner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 228-55.
Erkkila, Betsy. “Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution.” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America. Ed. Frank Shuffleton. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 225-40.
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