The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

A Book Review by Mary Anne Jusko

March 2009

How misleading a title at first - The Trials of Phillis Wheatley - . What have I chosen to study? As I read on and on, when was I actually going to get to “the trial” that so interested me in the first place? I chose this book to read because of the imagination and curiosity stirred in me by a parent reading aloud to my 5th grade class on NAAPID day. I can still hear her voice, reading page by page with perfect pacing and inflection, sharing each wonderful acrylic painting/collage as she wove the story for us. The children’s book Phillis’s Big Test by Catherine Clinton and illustrated by Sean Qualls came alive for us all that day. Poor Phillis, just 7 years old, shivering, covered with a scrap of carpet, bought by the Wheatley family in 1761 in Boston.

Just a few years later she walks the streets of Boston to meet 18 white men of prominence, to defend her authorship of amazing poetry. Just a few years after that she is walking with dignitaries and royalty in Europe, the first black woman published, the most popular black person of her time. This experience generated so many questions in my mind. Who were those men that were asked to gather by the Wheatley’s to validate this little girl? Did she really write those poems herself, or were the Wheatley twins that took her education upon themselves the real authors? And maybe Phyllis just had a good memory and was able to recite someone else’s work- photographic memory. Why did she and her baby die in poverty after being the most well-known black person on the planet at that time, and why did her husband leave her to die? Where is her missing second volume of poems? Why is she buried in an unmarked grave? As someone shared with Gates, some think Wheatley’s poems could have been a code. Was she so talented and intelligent to write the poems in code? I had so many questions that I was hoping this book would help me answer, but Gates’ work stirred up even more questions in me as I continued to read. As always, history opens a Pandora’s box, and it’s a never ending quest to find out more about characters in time that interest you, that touch your life, that clarify for a moment a time in history that can help make sense of how things are now, and why.

As I read on, the book seemed to be more about Thomas Jefferson than Wheatley herself. Was this to be a tangent focus on Jefferson and how he, as Gates claims, was the “mid-wife” to African American literature? Jefferson did not support Wheatley, saying that her poems were “mindless repetition and imitation”. (October 2003’s Choice Reviews). Because of Jefferson’s stance on his belief of blacks as being mentally inferior, Gates proceeds through the book to show that both Jefferson and Wheatley have had a great impact on African American Literature. The November 2003 Black Issues Book Review acknowledges that many authors have explored Wheatley’s seemingly “ambivalent poetry” and “Jefferson’s conclusions”, but “...what Gates does that is remarkably new is the conflation of Wheatley and Jefferson, and how they, in their differences, helped to mold the black literary tradition.” Black literature was born in part out of the need to repudiate Jefferson’s claims. I then realized that this book was so much more than Wheatley herself.

Little did I know but quickly did I find out that this book was perfectly titled, after all, and that that fateful meeting to defend herself (and the entire black race according to some) in Boston was just the first of many trials since then, to this very day, that Phillis would have to endure. Gates explores the notion that some view Wheatley as a race traitor. Was she too black? Was she too white? What is too white? What did that mean to Phillis, and what does it mean today? “For Wheatley’s critics, her sacrifices, her courage, her humiliations, her trials would never be enough.” ... “Today the question has become “Who is black enough?” The critics of the Black Arts Movement (1960’s) 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 1960s or 70s, 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?” (pg.83) Gates feels that this phenomenon continues even through today, in the Hip- Hop generation, where Gates describes a poll of inner city youth which revealed that “acting white” meant: “speaking standard English, getting straight A’s, or even visiting the Smithsonian!” (pg.84)

To the heart of the matter, and what I most gleaned from this book, is the message Gates clearly conveys in the concluding pages. He states that “cultures can no more be owned than people can.” He uses a quote from W.E.B. Du Bois to capture the spirit of the message:

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.” (pg. 85-86)

According to Gates, Jefferson and Wheatley should both be embraced by us for what they were and for what they gave to us. Gates has reaffirmed for me the importance of viewing all works in history, both past and present, in this vein.

It turns out this is a book based on Gates’ 2002 Jefferson Lecture in Humanities at the Libary of Congress. It is well-researched, with a comprehensive bibliography. This slim copy will inspire any reader interested in African American literature, Phillis Wheatley, Boston, Thomas Jefferson, racial identity, and/or race relations. It is well-supported with research over a lifetime of study by a well-qualified author. Gates’ authority and credibility is undeniable. He is director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Gates aptly traces through time the works of many scholars and authors in this book. I enjoyed the ebb and flow of the different perspectives he quotes, from the fellows who think of Wheatley as too white and dismiss her, to those that see her as too black and dismiss her, and the different time periods in which these ideas prevailed. Such an interesting, stimulating journey, with a plethora of citations that are clearly multi-perspective and all inclusive, makes for a stimulating, thought-provoking read.

As in everything I read and spend my time on, I am always striving to incorporate things into my classroom - how would this benefit my students? So surprisingly, this book went from a curiosity of mine about a young slave in Boston who wrote poetry, to a lesson learned on cultural and racial identity and how to “read” others in history. Using Phillis, her life and poetry to open further discussion and study with my students will be most beneficial in our striving to promote cultural, racial, and intellectual understanding in our world.

Resources

Children’s Books:

American Women of Achievement: Phillis Wheatley, Poet, by Merle Richmond

(1988)

Phillis’s Big Test, by Catherine Clinton, illustrated by Sean Qualls (2008)

A Voice of Her Own, the Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet by Kathryn

Lasky, illustrated by Paul Lee (2003)

Adult Books:

The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields (1988)

Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, edited by Vincent Carretta (2001)

The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, American’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters

with the Founding Fathers, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2003)