Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons

by Ann Rinaldi

  Again the footsteps; and from behind the half-open door, the officer nodded to me. "He'll see you now," he said.

  The room was large and welcoming. A fire burned in the hearth. The wainscoting was seasoned and burnished, the rugs somewhat faded, the desk piled with papers. It was an old house and it had that look of solid, even shabby comfort that was the watermark of so many New England homes. No fancy furbelows like in England.

  There was pleasant clutter, candleholders, books, maps. I felt in familiar surroundings, as if I'd come home.

  And there was the man at the window, framed in its light.

  The Fox Hunter.

  "Ah, Miss Wheatley."

  For a moment I was taken aback. He had called me Miss. No nigra woman was ever addressed as "Miss," be she bound or free. It just was not done.

  This man had done it. Lightly, with no effort. Yet the knowledge of what he had done was there in his eyes.

  I felt things falling into place inside me. And for the first time in a long while everything seemed of a piece.

  I was whole for the first time in my life. I felt becalmed in his presence, with a peculiar sense that everything would be all right.

  His voice was as it should be, deep but with a tone of rich amusement. And the eyes—oh yes, they were hunter's eyes.

  They were like my father's, missing nothing.

  I curtsied. I moved across the Persian carpet. I moved like words across a page, hoping he would read me as I had written myself to be.

  He did. "I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me. The poem, I mean."

  "It was my pleasure, sir."

  He gestured that I should sit. I did.

  "Everyone wants to notice me these days, it seems. They come here just to gawk. I hear I am the topic of conversation in every common room from Maine to Georgia. But your elegant lines were written without seeing. Though I am undeserving of your praise."

  "You are head of our army, sir, a task that befits your talents."

  "I'm the head of an army that has neither food, gunpowder, nor clothes."

  "Supplies, sir. They can all be procured. What can never be procured, and what you bring, is leadership. The men all rally around your name."

  He nodded approvingly. His eyes took in every aspect of my appearance. I was glad, of a sudden, that I had not accepted Mary Lathrop's offer of her one good velvet frock. My own neat linen and cotton seemed to please him.

  "How long have you been in this country?" he asked.

  "Since I was seven years old."

  "Are you still in bondage?"

  "My master freed me."

  He sat in a satin-tufted chair. He was a very tall man, I minded. "Would you do the honor of pouring us some tea?" he asked.

  I did so.

  He took a cup. "There's some gingerbread there. Mrs. Greene sent it. She's always sending things for my comfort. The general has a good woman for a wife. Are you married?"

  "No, sir, but I could be if I wished."

  He took his tea and a slice of gingerbread. His movements were graceful, in spite of his size. "I miss my Martha. She's due tomorrow. We must have women about. Their presence gives the army civility. Otherwise the men are a pack of hounds braying for the kill."

  He smiled at me. "You understand this, I see."

  "My father was a hunter."

  "Was he?"

  "Yes, sir. Where I come from, which is Senegal on the Grain Coast, he was known as a great hunter."

  "What did he hunt?"

  "The black-legged mongoose." I told him about it then, how it seemed tame and children would try to catch it. And get bitten.

  He was much interested, so I elaborated.

  "It's very crafty. It lives in termite hills. And it attacks our poultry."

  He nodded slowly. "Crafty like our fox. I would like to hunt such a creature."

  I told him then how my father also hunted the bat-eared fox, and so then he would know all about the bat-eared fox, too. I told him.

  "You miss your father," he said.

  Tears came to my eyes. "Yes."

  "I was eleven years old when my father died. My half-brother Lawrence saw to my upbringing. He was older by fourteen years—like a father to me, but also my best friend. I would have been schooled in England if I hadn't lost my father. You have been to England, I hear."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I have never been there. But in my youth I called England home."

  "I have many friends there," I told him.

  "But we have become a different people. So now it is up to us to find our destiny in our own way."

  "That frightens me, sir," I allowed.

  "It frightens us all. But we do it because we must. As we Americans have always done things because we must. I have many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. I pace alone, reflecting on my situation and that of this army."

  "You, sir?"

  "Yes. But then I think we Americans have always found our own way. And sometimes we must sacrifice to break new ground for those who will follow. I think that is our destiny. Do you know, the volunteers from Virginia and Carolina said they would not fight with free Negroes? I insisted the Negroes remain. And Congress has supported me."

  "I was told you had Negro soldiers," I said.

  "Yes. We break new ground every day. There is nothing to fear."

  His gray-blue eyes met mine. I saw a peace in them, a fatherly concern, a tranquil assurance. And in that quiet moment, while the fire crackled and muffled sounds came from the far reaches of the house, I knew that it was right that I be here this day, that I meet this man, hear the quiet dignity of his words, bear witness to his subdued strength.

  I had come for the wrong reasons, written my poem for the wrong reasons. But all that did not matter now.

  All that mattered was that I met him.

  "When one cultivates the affections of good people and practices domestic virtues, there is nothing to fear," he said again.

  We spoke more. He told me of Mount Vernon and how he missed it, of how he never separated his slaves from their families, and someday he would find a way to free them all. Of how he wanted to have my poem about him published, but then it might be considered a mark of his own vanity.

  He asked me who my admirer was, whom I might marry if I chose. I told him about John. And my doubts.

  "May I give some advice?" he asked.

  "Oh, sir, I would be honored."

  "Do not look for perfect felicity before you consent to wed. Love is a mighty pretty thing, but like all delicious things, it is cloying. It is too dainty a thing to live on alone, and ought not to be considered more than a necessary ingredient for that happiness that results from a combination of causes. None of which is of greater importance than that the object of your devotion have good sense, a good disposition, and the means of supporting you."

  "Thank you, sir," I said.

  "The sun grows weak." He stood. "I would talk more, but duty calls," he said.

  I stood.

  "I am happy to meet a person so favored by the Muses. I wrote poetry when I was young, you know."

  "Did you, sir?"

  "Yes. To girls. It was grievous bad."

  We laughed. He took my hand. "Good-bye, Miss Wheatley."

  "Good-bye, General."

  "Nature has been liberal and beneficent in her dispensations to you. Use them well."

  I did not walk back across the carpet. I floated.

  Somehow I found my way out of the house. Somehow, in the confusion of men and officers moving about, I found John, with the wagon, a little way down the hill.

  He was grinning at me. "I don't have to ask you how the interview went, Phillis. I can see it went well. Am I right?"

  I got into the wagon. I drew my cloak around me. "John," I said, "I can only quote what the Queen of Sheba said on meeting Solomon."

  "Very well, Sheba, I'm listening."

  "'The half was not told me,'" I said.

&nbs
p; I married John Peters. Did I do the right thing? Times I think yes, other times no. But I know this: I am no longer afraid. Always, you see, I recall what the Fox Hunter was trying to tell me that day.

  Love is a mighty pretty thing. And too dainty a thing to live on alone. But just an ingredient for that happiness that results from combined causes.

  It was what my own father would have told me, I am sure of it.

  If I never got the combined causes all of a piece, the fault was mine. It wasn't the Fox Hunter's fault. He tried to tell me.

  I think of him often, and what he said to me that day when I and the country were so young and unformed and hopeful. And he was right.

  We Americans sometimes must make sacrifices. And break new ground for those who follow.

  * * *

  Author's Note

  After the British troops left Boston in March of 1776, Phillis returned, to find devastation. The Wheatley mansion was hit by cannonballs that had been sent across the bay by American soldiers on Cobble Hill in Charlestown. She lived alone, no one knows where, until April of 1778, when she married John Peters.

  Just a month earlier, her master, John Wheatley, died. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to Nathaniel. Phillis was not mentioned in his will.

  Although Peters has been described as "a respectable colored man who kept a grocery store in Court Street, very handsome and well-mannered, wearing a wig, carrying a cane, and acting the gentleman," soon after they were married he failed in business.

  Phillis kept on with her writing. But she had no real moral support for her work. Mary Wheatley died in 1778, at age thirty-five. Phillis's Tory friends had deserted Boston once the Americans regained it. All the Wheatley relatives were doing their best to get along in the war, dealing with inflation and shortages.

  By 1778, half the men who signed the paper attesting to the fact that Phillis wrote her poems were dead. Others were scattered and doing their best to survive.

  Some people say that John Peters failed in business because he would not stoop to do jobs that he considered beneath him. Having failed, he was thrown into prison to relieve himself of debt.

  Yet others say that he became a lawyer and took up the cause of Negroes in court. Indeed, Josiah Quincy, a renowned lawyer in Boston at the time, remarked that he recalled seeing Peters in Boston courts of law.

  Both these reports about the man could be true. Perhaps Peters "read law," as was done in those days, and tried his hand at it.

  At any rate, the marriage flourished in the beginning. Reports say that John and Phillis lived on Queen Street, a fashionable part of town. And even had servants.

  In 1779 Phillis found herself "in circumstances," the eighteenth-century term for carrying a child. As she was preparing to give birth, she was also preparing proposals for her second volume of poetry, which she hoped to dedicate to Benjamin Franklin.

  She was doing what Mrs. Wheatley had previously done for her, putting proposals for subscribers in the newspapers. She planned to publish thirty-three poems and thirteen letters in this book. The price was to be "twelve pounds, neatly bound and lettered, and nine pounds if sewed in blue paper."

  Her first book had sold for two shillings and sixpence. The new price was set by John Peters, but it was not out of line, considering the inflation of the day.

  The proposals for Phillis's book ran for six weeks in Boston newspapers. Nevertheless, once again Bostonians rejected her work. It may not have been prejudice this time, but simply that people were, too busy with the war to care about something as frivolous as poetry.

  In her letters to friends, Phillis never complained about her husband or his inability to support her. Actually, there is speculation, by some, that the marriage failed because Phillis was raised to be a spoiled poetess and could not cope with the realities of everyday life. This may be true. The Wheatleys certainly did not prepare her with any real-life skills. They may have helped her, raised her out of poverty, given her every opportunity, coddled her, and eventually freed her, but I cannot help feeling they regarded her as a plaything, a possession to show off to their friends.

  Which is exactly what I have Aunt Cumsee and Obour telling her in my narrative.

  Obour also felt, and wrote, that "poor Phillis let herself down by Marrying." For some reason their correspondence dropped off. In 1779 Phillis wrote to Obour, hoping to revive their communication. But that is the last letter she wrote to her friend.

  Obour died in 1835. Upon her death she gave her letters from Phillis to the wife of Reverend William H. Beecher, who in turn gave them to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  Sometime after 1780, Phillis and John moved out of Boston to the small town of Wilmington, Massachusetts. No reason is given. Here Phillis did not flourish. It was a small remote village, not cosmopolitan like Boston. Research tells us that she suffered much, sometimes from want and sometimes from just plain hard work.

  Phillis was the mother of three children when she moved back to Boston to live under the care of Mrs. Elizabeth Wallcutt, a niece of her old mistress. Phillis earned her keep by teaching at a school run by Mrs. Wallcutt. But after six weeks, John Peters came by to take them away.

  In the spring of 1783, Nathaniel Wheatley died in London, leaving a wife and three daughters. He was wealthy and happily married. He left Phillis nothing in his will.

  Somewhere in these years, Phillis lost two children. In this time she also made thirteen attempts to solicit subscribers in Boston's papers for her second book of poetry.

  She never succeeded.

  While Peters languished in debtor's prison, she lived for a while in a "colored" boarding house in a bad part of town. Her health was failing. Several of Mrs. Wheatley's relatives, having heard nothing from her, sought her out. They found her living in filth and poverty, she and her remaining child both "sick unto death, in a state of abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of squalid poverty."

  Henri Grégroire, a French historian who wrote of colonial Boston, said, "The sensitive Phillis, who had been reared almost as a spoiled child, had little or no sense or need of how to manage a household, and her husband wanted her to do just that; he made his wishes known at first by reproaches and followed these with downright bad treatment, the continuation of which so afflicted his wife that she grieved herself to death."

  Is this what made Phillis grieve herself to death? Or was it grief at not being able to publish another volume of poetry? Or at the loss of her former life, friends, and status?

  At any rate, help came too late. Phillis Wheatley Peters and her last child died on December 5, 1784. A grandniece of Mrs. Wheatley's, who was passing up Court Street, saw her coffin being borne to the Old Granary Burial Ground.

  She was, by my calculations, thirty years old.

  After her death, when Peters was released from prison, he placed a notice in a local paper, asking the person who had borrowed Phillis's manuscripts to return them immediately, as all her works were to be published.

  Phillis had left her manuscripts with Mrs. Wallcutt She returned them to Peters. Obviously in need of money, he went about selling Phillis's gift books, books that had been presented to her in her celebrity days by famous and well-placed people.

  A copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost, for instance, with the inscription on the flyleaf reading, "Mr. Brook Watson to Phillis Wheatley, London, July 1773," is now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Watson was former lord mayor of London.

  Or Peters may have tried to sell Phillis's complete set of Alexander Pope's Works (thirteen volumes) that were given to her by Lord Dartmouth (and are now at the University of North Carolina).

  Although a grandniece of Mrs. Wheatley's saw Phillis's coffin being borne to Old Granary, no one really knows where she is buried. Her grave went unmarked.

  In today's world, Phillis would have been a celebrity, talking on morning shows, reading her poetry at presidential inaugurals, touring, and speaking. In eighteenth-century Boston, there was no
place for her. She died in poverty and obscurity. Yet, more than two hundred years later, she remains what she was meant to be from the day she was sold on the auction block next to Avery's Distillery in the South End. America's first black poet.

  As in all my historical novels, I will attempt to tell my readers what and who in the book is real and what and who was invented for the sake of story.

  Perhaps, where characters are concerned, it would be simpler to tell which ones I made up. They are Aunt Cumsee; Sulie; Bristol; Mrs. Chelsea, who traveled to London with Phillis; Kunkle, the first mate on the Phillis (although there were many like him); Maria, her maid in London; and the lady Phillis met who was a sister to Lopez the slave trader. All the other characters really lived and played a part in Phillis's life.

  However, I took risks with this book, in that I created my own Phillis, as I created my own Harriet in Wolf by the Ears.

  "Don't tell me someone is finally going to put flesh on that girl," an African American librarian and friend said when I told her I was writing this book. "It's about time."

  This is what I have attempted in my novel, to flesh Phillis out. All the books written about her at present are scholarly, concerned with the dry facts of her life or her classical poetry.

  We are told that Phillis was modest, shy, reverent, gentle, and unpretentious. Yes, I thought, that may have been her public persona, but what was she really like? So I set out to discover her.

  Phillis Wheatley presented herself to me as I read between the lines of all the scholarly work. My Phillis is vain, confused, silly, and at times conniving. She has moods. She falls in love indiscriminately. These are the watermarks of most teenagers. Imagine a teen given the celebrity, the adulation, that Phillis was given, yet held on the tether of slavery, sometimes given some slack and other times drawn in.

  I made Phillis real. Not in accordance with the speculation of the scholars. Because then I would have one more scholarly book. I did not set out to do that.

  So, then, my Phillis falls in love with Nathaniel. I developed relationships between her and the Wheatleys, between her and Mary, Prince, Obour—indeed, everyone who crossed her path. This is the job of the historical novelist. I took the facts and I ran with them.