The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates Read Free Book Online

art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.
    In their efforts to prove Jefferson wrong, in other words, black writers created a body of literature, one with a prime political motive: to demonstrate black equality. Surely this is one of the oddest origins of a bellestric tradition in the history of world literature. Indeed, when Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, a press release on behalf of the Nigerian government declared that—because of this prize—no longer could the world see Africans as distinctly inferior. The specter of Thomas Jefferson haunts even there, in Africa in 1986, as does the shadow of Phillis Wheatley.
    Now, given all of the praise and attention that Wheatley received, given her unprecedented popularity and fame, one might be forgiven for thinking that Wheatley’s career
took off with the publication of her poems in 1773, and that she lived happily ever after. She did not. In the spring of 1774, the British occupied Boston. Susanna Wheatley died the same year, and when John Wheatley fled the city Phillis moved to Providence, where John Wheatley’s daughter, Mary, and her husband lived. With the outbreak of war, in April of 1775, Phillis’s prospects dimmed considerably. A number of the people who had signed the attestation were dead, and the others who had earlier supported her, both Tories and Patriots, were more concerned with winning the war than with the African prodigy. By late 1776, Wheatley had moved back to Boston. In 1778, she married a black man named John Peters. Peters was a small-time grocer and a sometime lawyer about whom very little is known—only that he successfully applied for the right to sell spirits in his store, and that a Wheatley relative remembered him as someone who affected the airs of a gentleman. Meanwhile, the poet continued her efforts to
publish a second volume. In 1779, she advertised six times in the Boston Evening Post & General Advertiser, mentioning that she intended to dedicate the book to Benjamin Franklin. The advertisement failed to generate the necessary number of subscribers, and the book was never published.
    Wheatley’s freedom had enslaved her to a life of hardship. Peters abandoned her soon after she gave birth to their third child (the first two died in infancy). She placed her last advertisement in the September, 1784, issue of The Boston Magazine and died in December, at the age of thirty, poor and alone. Her baby died with her. Peters is thought to have sold the only copy of the second manuscript. Several poems from this manuscript have survived. A few years ago, one surfaced at Christie’s and sold for nearly seventy thousand dollars, but the full manuscript has never been recovered.
    And what happens to her literary legacy after she dies? Interwoven through Phillis
Wheatley’s intriguing and troubling afterlife is a larger parable about the politics of authenticity. For, as I’ve said, those rituals of validation scarcely died with Phillis Wheatley; on the contrary, they would become a central theme in the abolitionist era, where the publication of the slave narratives by and large also depended on letters of authentication that testified to the veracity and capacities of the ex-slave author who had written this work “by himself ” or “by herself.”
    One might be forgiven, too, for imagining that Phillis Wheatley would be among the most venerated names among black Americans today, as celebrated as Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was probably true that, as one writer claimed several years ago, “historically throughout black America, more YMCAs, schools, dormitories and libraries have been named for Phillis Wheatley than for any other black woman.” And, indeed, I can testify to the presence before 1955 of the Phillis Wheatley
Elementary School in Ridgeley, West Virginia, a couple of hours up the Potomac,