Not only did Walker’s assessment of Jefferson’s towering intellect shine through in this example, but Walker used both Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the structural model for his pamphlet (his Appeal is in the form of “Articles”), citing the words of the Declaration as the model and rallying call for black freedom. “See your Declaration Americans!” he declared; “Do you understand your own language? Hear your language!” he exclaimed. Walker’s appeal, ironically enough from the blackest and most militant man alive in 1829, is implicitly and explicitly a tribute in so many ways to Thomas Jefferson. When Nat Turner planned his famous revolt of 1831, a revolt many feel to have been inspired by Walker’s Appeal, he chose July 4 as his ideal date to launch it, as a tribute to Jefferson’s words.
I do not mean to imply that all black activists were willing to embrace Mr. Jefferson as the new architect of the tenets of their freedom struggle, or that the process was not a messy one, full of contradictions. William Hamilton wrestled out loud with this dilemma, in the year before Walker would publish the first edition of his Appeal. Hamilton was one of the dominant black figures in the antislavery movement from 1800 to his death in 1836.
Hamilton, in a speech in 1827, called Jefferson an ambidextrous philosopher “who can reason contrariwise,” since he “first tells you that all men are created equal” and “next proves that one class of men are not equal to another.” But in that same year, Hamilton himself exemplified a bit of this ambidexterity when, in a Fourth of July oration, he proposed that African Americans discontinue celebrating independence on that date. Freedom’s Journal , in its July 11 and 18 issues, discusses the use of July 5, rather than the Fourth of July, as a sign of protest. Blacks such as William Wells Brown, Charles Lenox Redmond, and Charlotte Forten all spoke or wrote about the ironies of celebrating the Fourth of July in a nation where slavery remained legal. And no one was more vehement about this contradiction than was Frederick Douglass, whose Fourth of July oration of 1852 was delivered in Rochester at the request of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” Douglass asks. “This Fourth of July is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Nevertheless, despite his harsh indictment of the use of the Fourth as “a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages,” Douglass ends his speech by praising Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, “the great spirit it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”
James McCune Smith was another black thinker who notably and eloquently tried to show the error of Jefferson is his essay “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia,” published in the Anglo-African Magazine in August 1859. Calling Jefferson “the apostle of democracy,” McCune Smith laid claim to the principles espoused by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, arguing that “we the people,” on the eve of the Civil War, applied equally to white and black precisely because the so-called blacks in Jefferson’s day had become “colored people.” “Let the American public but call men people,” he write, “and those men . . . are already raised by the public voice into the dignity and privileges of citizenship.”
The line of thinking articulated by Walker continued well into the 20th century: black authors accepted the premise that a group, a “race,” had to demonstrate its equality through the creation of literature. When the historian David Levering Lewis aptly calls the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s “art as civil rights,” it is Jefferson who stands as the subtext for this formulation. Or listen to these words from James Weldon Johnson, written in 1922:A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. No people that has produced great literature and 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, 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:’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. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852) were fulsome in their praise of Wheatley and her poetry. We can trace the anti-Wheatley tendency at least to 1887, when Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the fathers of black nationalism, wrote about her contemptuously, and the tone was set for the century to come. James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1922, complained that “one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land,” finding instead a “smug contentment at her escape therefrom.”
But what really laid her low was ultimately a cultural critique of her work—less what she said than the way she said it.
Wallace Thurman, writing in 1928, calls her “a third-rate imitation” of Alexander Pope: “Phillis in her day was a museum figure who would have caused more of a sensation if some contemporary Barnum had exploited her.”
Vernon Loggins, in his masterful history of Negro literature, published in 1930, echoes Jefferson when he says that Wheatley’s poetry reflects “her instinct for hearing the music of words” rather than understanding their meaning, “an instinct,” he concludes, “which is racial.” She lacks the capacity to reflect, to think. For Loggins, as E. Lynn Matson puts it, Wheatley is “a clever imitator, nothing more.”
By the mid-sixties, criticism of Wheatley rose to a high pitch of disdain. Amiri Baraka, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, wrote in 1962 that Wheatley’s “pleasant imitations of eighteenth-century English poetry are far and, finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits.” For him, of course, these chants represent the authentic spirit of black creativity. Seymour Gross, writing in 1966 in “Images of the Negro in American Literature,” argued that “this Negro poetess so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome. . . . She is pious, grateful, retiring, and civil.” As William Robinson reports, other critics called Wheatley “an early Boston Aunt Jemima,” “a colonial handkerchief head,” and “utterly irrelevant to the identification and liberation of the black man.” She was finally, “oblivious to the lot of her fellow blacks.”
Stephen Henderson, writing in The Militant Black Writer, (1969), argues that “it is no wonder that many black people have rejected Phillis Wheatley,” because her work reflects “the old self-hatred that one hears in the Dozens and in the blues. It is, frankly,” he concludes, “the nigger component of the Black Experience.” Dudley Randall wrote in that same year that “whatever references she made to her African heritage were derogatory, reflecting her status as a favored house slave and a curiosity.” In 1971 Nathan Higgins wrote that Wheatley’s voice was that of “a feeble Alexander Pope rather than that of an African prince.”
Addison Gayle, Jr., a major black aesthetic critic, wrote in The Way of the World (1975) that Wheatley was the first black writer “to accept the images and symbols of degradation passed down from the South’s most intellectual lights and the first to speak from a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to [her] oppressors.” Wheatley, in sum, “had surrendered the right to self-definition to others.”
And the assaults continued, the critical arrows arriving in waves. This once most-revered figure in black letters would, in the sixties, become the most reviled figure. Angelene Jamison argued in 1974 that Wheatley and her poetry were “too white,” a sentiment that Ezekiel Mphalele echoed two years later when he indicted her for having “a white mind,” and said he felt “too embarrassed even to mention her in passing” in a study of black literature. Similarly, Eleanor Smith maintained that Wheatley was “taught by whites to think,” thus she had “a white mind” and “white orientations.” Here we’re given Phillis Wheatley as Uncle Tom’s mother.
As the scholar Russell Reising notes, this trend from the Black Arts Movement of the sixties has unduly informed criticism of Wheatley through the eighties: Angelene Jamison takes a pedagogical and political tack similar to Smith’s when she argues that Wheatley’s poetry “embraces white attitudes and values, and it characterizes Phillis as a typical Euro-American poetess.” She was detached from her people and her poetry could never be used as an expression of black thought (409). While Jamison grants that Wheatley should not be ignored because of her accommodationist stance, she asserts that “teaching Phillis Wheatley from a black perspective shows that she was simply an eighteenth-century poet who supported, praised, and imitated those who enslaved her and
her people” (416). Other critics echo these sentiments when they suggest that Wheatley “leaves the reader of her poems only slightly aware of her being a Negro and a slave” (Mason xxv), that her poems “serve as one measure of how far removed from the reality of her blackness Phillis had become” (Collins 149), and that “the Wheatleys had adopted her, but she had adopted their terrific New England conscience” (Redding 9). While progressively more modulated, similar sentiments inform Wheatley criticism of the 1980s. Alice Walker, for example, expresses a blend of compassion for and amazement at the “sickly little black girl,” but nonetheless regards her poetry as “stiff, struggling, ambivalent,” and “bewildered” (237). In 1986, June Jordan, while sensing the political and ontological ambivalence experienced by Wheatley and while grasping the explicit resistance to tyranny in a number of Wheatley’s poems, still assumes that much of what happens in Wheatley’s verse can be attributed to “regular kinds of iniquitous nonsense found in white literature, the literature that Phillis Wheatley assimilated, with no choice in the matter” (255). Kenneth Silverman’s cultural history of the American Revolution assumes this same trajectory, agreeing that Wheatley’s work is a simple paean to white, cultural hegemony (217).
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Page 4