Phillis Wheatley

At a slave auction block near Boston harbor on July 11, 1761, “A small, frail, female child was sold…for a trifle.”  Her only covering was a scrap of carpet, and her owner was in a hurry to sell her, convinced she wouldn’t survive.  Suzanna Wheatley bought her as a domestic and named her “Phillis” to correspond with the slave ship that transported her.  No one standing near the auction block that day could have conceived this feeble child sold for a pittance would one day become the first enslaved person to author a book of poems and secure an audience with an American president.  John and Suzanna Wheatley were devout Congregationalists who wanted Phillis to read the Bible, so they tutored her, contrary to prevailing attitudes for slaves. They soon recognized her prodigious talent.  By age twelve, she was reading the Bible as well as Greek and Latin classics.  She wrote her first poem at thirteen and gained recognition for her funeral eulogy in honor of evangelist George Whitefield, read at his funeral.  She composed twenty-eight poems by age eighteen and sought to publish them.  When the Wheatley’s couldn’t interest an American publisher, the family found an English company to publish Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral in 1773 (the Wheatley’s kept the proceeds from the book sales).  Her poem in honor of George Washington prompted his written response, “This style and manner [of your poetry] exhibited a striking proof of your great poetic talents,” which led to their eventual meeting.  Her poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” concluded with the verse, “Remember Christians, Negros, black as Cain, may be refined and join th’ angelic train.” Many found it difficult to believe a young female slave could write such exalted poetry, so she was interrogated by eighteen leading men of Boston (including John Hancock) and passed with flying colors. Phillis was emancipated after Suzanna died and subsequently married John Peters, a freed black grocer.  She couldn’t find a publisher for her second anthology of poems and spent her remaining years in poverty, working as a maid until her death at thirty-one.  One of her poems leads us to pray: