At the top of the stairs at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston sits a slender, mahogany desk, its clawed feet each clutching an orb.
It belonged to the enslaved Boston poet, Phillis Wheatley, long recognized in academic circles as the first person of African descent in North America to publish a book.
Wheatley’s work has been probed and scrutinized, both during her short life and after her death. But despite that, her verse — and her crucial, early voice against slavery — have endured. Now, as the country revisits its history ahead of the 250th anniversary, scholars are shining more light on the poetess, and her astonishing life journey.
The burden of proving genius
Wheatley’s journey from enslaved child to published poet is singular. Captured in West Africa when she was about seven or eight years old, she was trafficked to Boston in 1761 and purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley, a local merchant and his wife. She was named after the ship she arrived on, the Phillis, and references her capture in her poetry.
“She has one poem where she uses the phrase, ‘I believe, I was snatched from my father’s arms,’” said Cornelia Dayton, a history professor at the University of Connecticut.
By age 15, she was composing elegies, a standard form of poetry at the time. She quickly learned English, and began to read in Latin with the Wheatley children, demonstrating the depth of her intellectual potential.
“And it became apparent that the young girl they named Phillis was a very quick learner,” said Dayton.
Her collection, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” was published in London in 1773, only after she was unable to find an American publisher. The writing brought both critical acclaim and intense scrutiny amidst the colonists’ fight for independence and a rising abolitionist movement. Wheatley was emancipated around the same time as her book publication.
At the time, there was widespread skepticism that an enslaved African American woman could write such sophisticated poetry. While white men of this time period only had to defend their intellect as a scholar, Wheatley had to go much further.
“When you think about Phillis Wheatley being a Black woman, that intersection of being Black as well as a woman, she was having to prove herself on two fronts,” said Angela Tate, curator and director of collections at the Museum of African American History in Boston and Nantucket.
Tate says Wheatley’s involvement in the abolitionist movement speaks volumes of her courage and genius. She traveled to London with the Wheatley family seeking a publisher for her book, and entered British abolitionist circles. During that trip, the young poetess shared her poetry — and her dreams — with the aristocracy. That included the Countess of Huntingdon, who was one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in England at the time, according to Vincent Carretta, professor emeritus of English Literature at the University of Maryland and author of the book, “Phillis Wheatley Peters, Biography of a Genius in Bondage.”
“She was courageous,” Carretta said. “You couldn’t have a wider social gap than enslaved girl and the Countess of Huntingdon, except for the queen.”
An enduring myth: the ‘attestation’
Because her poetry was so unusual for a person in her social class, Wheatley’s writings were often steeped in controversy.
For a century, a longstanding “historical tale” circulated that claimed Wheatley had to defend her writings in a verification process in front of several prominent white men in Boston, including John Hancock and Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson.
“It didn’t happen that way at all,” said David Waldstreicher, professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence.”
Wheatley never sat “before a trial or a group of Boston worthies who were shocked that they’d never heard of her before and had to see that she had really written the poems,” Waldstreicher said.
Instead, the attestation was likely an original piece of paper signed by John or Nathaniel Wheatley, members of her enslaver’s family, attesting that she had written the book before they traveled with it to London. And rather than an affront to Wheatley’s talent, Waldstreicher describes this as a savvy move and a marketing tool to sell the book in London, where the poet became somewhat of a celebrity after its publication.
Name-dropped by the founders
Roughly a decade after her emancipation, Wheatley died at the age of 31 in poverty and obscurity. The writing desk, along with her other possessions, went to the auction block to pay her debts.
But despite this, Wheatley’s deliberate approach to publishing and marketing herself has ensured that long-term, her legacy has endured.
The simple fact that Wheatley was able to get her work published was radical for the time period. But Angela Tate said her strategy of writing tribute poems and letters to people like George Washington was meant to showcase herself in their archive and in the greater record of the country’s history.
“She was obviously making a strategy towards remembrance of her lifespan, not just having this book of poetry published,” Tate said.
The responses to her work were mixed, especially among the wealthy Virginia landowners who used hundreds of enslaved people to fuel their plantations. Washington responded by publishing an understated letter congratulating Wheatley on being a great poet. But Thomas Jefferson wrote disparaging Wheatley’s talent after her death; he dismissed her poetry and said the works were derivative and “below the dignity of criticism.”
These responses show how central Wheatley was to the politics of slavery in the 1770s and 1780s, according to Waldstreicher.
“It’s not who liked her and who didn’t. It’s like [Washington and Jefferson] are the very symbols of America and represent America on the political and military stages,” he said.
“They have to talk about her. That’s how important she was in her lifetime and even after it.”
Even as Wheatley’s legacy endures more than 200 years after her death, her burial site remains uncertain. For years, Wheatley was believed to have been buried in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End. But Kelly Thomas, manager of Boston’s Historic Burying Grounds, said there is no evidence of that fact.
“I would love dearly for someone to dig up some original source document that says where she’s buried. But I don’t know if that exists,” Thomas said.
It’s been more than 250 years since Phillis Wheatley first raised her pen in bondage. And despite the criticism and doubts, she demonstrated intellectual capability and artistry that fundamentally challenged the contemporary ideas applied to an enslaved woman.
Today, in Massachusetts and around the world, she’s seen as an enduring historical figure and a guiding light in the pantheon of the Black female literary tradition.
