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

near Piedmont, where I grew up—though it took until college for me to learn just who Miss Wheatley was.
    That Phillis Wheatley is not a household word within the black community is owing largely to one poem that she wrote, an eight-line poem entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The poem was written in 1768, just seven years after Phillis was purchased by Susanna Wheatley. Phillis was about fourteen years old.
    The eight-line poem reads as follows:
    â€™Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan
land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour
too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor
knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their coulour is a diabolic die,”
Remember, Christians , Negros , black as Cain ,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
    This, it can be safely said, has been the most reviled poem in African-American literature. To speak in such glowing terms about the “mercy” manifested by the slave trade was not exactly going to endear Miss Wheatley to black power advocates in the 1960s. No Angela Davis she! But as scholars such as William Robinson, Julian Mason, John Shields, and Vincent Carretta point out, her political detractors ignore the fact that Wheatley elsewhere in her poems complained bitterly about the human costs of the slave trade, as in this example from her famous poem, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth.”
    Should you, my lord, while you peruse my
song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom
sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common
good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy
seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breasts
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery
mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
    And there is Wheatley’s letter to the Reverend Samson Occom, “a converted Mohegan Indian Christian Minister” who was the eighteenth century’s most distinguished graduate from Moor’s Charity Indian School of Lebanon, Connecticut, which would relocate
in 1770 to Hanover, New Hampshire, where it would be renamed after the Earl of Dartmouth (and its student body broadened, against many protests, to include whites). The letter was published several months after her manumission. It appeared in The Connecticut Gazette on March 11, 1774, and reads, in part:
    In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and grant his honour upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise
of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.
    Despite sentiments such as these, the fact that Wheatley’s short poem has been so widely anthologized in this century has made her something of a pariah in black political and critical circles, especially in the militant 1960s, where critics had a field day mocking her life and her works (most of which they had not read).
    Until the emergence of Frederick Douglass, Wheatley was commonly used as an icon of black intellectual perfectibility by the abolitionist movement. Even in the late 1840s and 50s works such as Wilson Armistead’s A Tribute for the Negro (1848) and Martin R.