Freedom's Pen

by Wendy Lawton

  “With so many taxes levied by the king, is it any wonder that people are rebelling?” Mr. Wheatley continued to pace. Nothing got him quite so worked up these days.

  “Please sit down, John.” Mrs. Wheatley took him by the hand and led him into the sitting room. “If you don’t calm down you’re going to have an apoplectic fit.”

  “We’ll weather this, Father,” Nathaniel said. “It’s just getting harder and harder to stay neutral. How does one continue to be loyal to England when one feels the blood of a free American running through his veins?”

  “It’s that blood surging through American hearts that’s causing all this chaos.” Mr. Wheatley put his head in his hands. “If everyone could stop being so hotheaded.”

  Phillis understood the hotheadedness. Just a few weeks ago, a group of American patriots went to the home of a loyalist —a man they suspected of being a traitor to the colonies. A shouting match broke out, and the accused traitor, fearing for his home and family, took a gun and shot into the crowd. He struck a child—an eleven-year-old named Christopher Seider.

  Phillis couldn’t abide the violence. She took up her pen and wrote:

  In heaven’s eternal court it was decreed

  How the first martyr for the cause should bleed

  To clear the country of the hated brood

  He whet his courage for the common good

  She continued writing until she’d composed a full elegy for this boy she considered the first martyr of the revolution. Since then she had allowed her own blood to cool. She had remembered Sadie’s suggestion to pray for Lucy and decided to apply it to all her enemies. She had begun to pray for the king and for his ministers and soldiers. She prayed that they would understand the colonists’ hunger for freedom.

  “Whatever is happening?” Mary came rushing through the door, followed by her fiancé, Reverend John Lathrop. “I thought we’d never get home. We had to have Prince leave the carriage down the street and we walked. King Street is filled with soldiers and townspeople.”

  Nathaniel told his sister and John what little he knew as the shouting got louder.

  “Let me get Sadie to brew some tea,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Come everyone, sit and—”

  The unmistakable sound of shots rang out—volley after volley.

  “Oh, no! Lord, please, no.” Mr. Wheatley put his head in his hands once more.

  That night no one seemed inclined to retire in the Wheatley household. Nathaniel and John Lathrop went out to see what happened. When they came back, the sag of their bodies told the tale.

  “Three men are dead,” Nathaniel said, “including Crispus Attucks. Two more are gravely wounded.”

  Phillis gasped. She had met Crispus. He was half Negro, half Indian—a sailor and a free man of color.

  “It should never have started,” John said. “One of the hothead apprentices began taunting a British soldier about, of all things, his master’s unpaid wig bill.”

  “You know how tense everyone is at this point, redcoats and patriots alike. What a stupid thing to do.” Mr. Wheatley wanted the trouble, as he called it, to go away. As he said so many times, it was bad for business.

  “After the taunts went on for some time, the soldier struck the apprentice on the side of his head with the butt of a gun. The apprentice’s friend jumped into the fray, and the ruckus attracted a crowd.” John sat down and clasped his hands.

  “I can imagine the rest.” Mr. Wheatley started pacing.

  “I just don’t see where this is going,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

  Phillis did. The more she’d been out and about, the more she heard the cries for freedom from taxation, freedom from tyranny, freedom from England. The king was too far removed to understand these colonists.

  But Phillis had no trouble understanding. Freedom. Was there some innate hunger in each man for freedom? There had been slaves since at least the time of Joseph in Egypt, and yet everyone yearned to be free. Look at what Moses and the children of Israel risked for freedom. And many of them remembered the kind of enslavement she had—plenty of food, comfortable lodgings, captors who became like family. Yet the heart still beat for freedom.

  Phillis excused herself and went up to her room. There would be no sleep for her on this night. She took out her pen and a fresh sheet of paper and began to write. When she finished, she had put her impressions on paper in the form of a poem she called “On the Affray in King-Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March.”

  In part, she wrote:

  Long as in Freedom’s Cause the wise contend,

  Dear to your unity shall Fame extend;

  While to the World, the letter’s Stone shall tell,

  How Caldwell, Attucks, Gray and Mav’rick fell.

  When she finally finished her poem, she didn’t even bother to take off her day clothes. She just draped herself across her bed, shoes dangling off one end, arms the other, and fell asleep.

  She must have slept long past morning, because the next thing she remembered was being shaken by Lucy.

  “Wake up. Are you sick?”

  She shook the sleep from her groggy head. “No. I wrote for many hours and then just collapsed in sleep.”

  “Well, I brought your tray.”

  “Thank you.” She straightened out her clothes, best she could. “Do you ever think about freedom?”

  Lucy cocked her head as if it were a trick question. “You mean like for the colonies?”

  “Well, yes. The colonies or your own freedom or both.”

  “I don’t know. We talk about getting papers so’s we can be free. I wish my James, my little boy, had been born a free man. It’s not so bad here in Boston—here with the Wheat—leys—but there’s never no telling. We could get sold off should anything happen. Get sold down South and all separated.”

  “I guess I don’t think that much about being sold.” Phillis wondered how many other things she had never considered.

  Lucy clucked her tongue. “No. I’m thinking you wouldn’t have worried ‘bout that.” She opened the door and left without another word.

  Phillis sighed and prayed. Lord, help me watch my tongue. I want to build a bridge to Lucy, not say words that remind her of the gulf between us.

  Plans for Mary’s wedding filled many a day. Phillis was happy to help and even penned invitations to the wedding supper. Mrs. Wheatley talked with Sadie at length about food.

  “Because the wedding will be in winter, let’s have something warm and heartening. Perhaps a New England boiled supper, apple tansy, and finish the meal with Dutch cheese, then a dish of coffee.”

  Mary spent so much time preparing her linens and the things she would need to set up a new household that she didn’t worry much about the marriage ceremony or supper. She worried most about being a good minister’s wife.

  But all the while they worked on preparations, Phillis noticed a new weariness in Mrs. Wheatley. Her mistress—the woman who had become like a mother to her—was getting on in years. She’d be sixty-two on her next birthday.

  “Mrs. Wheatley, why don’t you sit down and let me pin that bodice on Mary.”

  “She ‘s right, Mother. You sit and we’ll work.”

  “But Phillis should be upstairs writing.” Mrs. Wheatley lowered herself into a chair as she spoke. “I don’t want to take her away from her work.”

  “I need a break from my writing every now and then. Surely you don’t want my eyes to get squinty and my shoulders crabbed from too many hours huddled over my writing.”

  Mary laughed. “Methinks you’re playing it a bit dramatic, dear student.”

  They all laughed at Phillis’s expense, but laughter and work made for a merry late summer afternoon.

  As Phillis watched Mary and her mother she couldn’t help thinking back to her own mother. Was she well? The brothers would be considered men now, living in their own huts. She wondered what kind of men they were. She was sure that like all young men they would continue to take care of their mother. Did M
aamanding still think of her? Did she have any idea her Janxa lived?

  Phillis hadn’t thought of that name in a very long time. Janxa. That girl felt like another person. Had Phillis ever walked through elephant grass listening to the chattering of monkeys?

  Did the same griot come through the village, or was it his son now? Did they sing of her and her father? Even after this time? She wondered what the griot would say if he could see her poems, written on paper or published in a newspaper.

  “Phillis, you are woolgathering again,” Mary said. “If you stick any more pins in me, I don’t think I shall ever get out of this bodice.”

  “Well, that may be a good way of keeping you here,” Phillis said. Until she spoke the words, she hadn’t realized how much she dreaded losing Mary. Nathaniel already spent most of his time away. He’d bought out much of his father’s business interests, and he kept busy trading between Boston and London, sailing on the family ship.

  “I believe if you tried to keep me here, my John would come to rescue me.”

  They all laughed, but Phillis couldn’t get rid of the feeling that things were changing way too fast. The riot last spring—the one they now called the Boston Massacre-seemed to usher in a new era of tension. With so many tariffs and taxes, boycotts and embargoes, Boston was a different city than the one in which she landed. And now, with all this talk of freedom, she couldn’t help thinking about her own place in this world.

  She loved the Wheatleys—especially Mary and Mrs. Wheatley. They had treated her like a daughter of the house. And Mrs. Wheatley was still determined to see Phillis published. She used the word book more and more lately. It sent chills down Phillis’s spine.

  But despite all that, she was still a slave. She wondered if Mr. Wheatley ever considered manumission papers, making her free? Perhaps she should ask. She was stuck in that uncomfortable spot her master talked about when he referred to something as “neither fish nor fowl.”

  As her master and mistress got older, anything could happen. She was still a slave, even though they didn’t call her that. In most homes in Boston, slaves were called “servants for life.” The terms didn’t change anything, though. They were still property. She would be noted as chattel in their last will and testament one day. Who could say she wouldn’t be sold then? Even sold down South.

  Things were changing. And Phillis’s hunger for freedom grew much like the fledgling colonies’ fight for freedom.

  An Elegy of Hope

  Boston, 1770

  Oh, Sadie.” Phillis went into the kitchen. “Mrs. Wheatley says to tell you we’re having company this evening.”

  Sadie shook her head. “How many this time?”

  “It’s to be twelve, but that’s not the news.” Phillis was now about seventeen years old, and she’d been used to Wheatley dinner parties for almost ten years.

  Sadie opened the larder to see what she would cook. “What news?”

  “The dinner party is for Reverend George Whitefield.” Phillis clasped her hands together. “Can you believe it?”

  “Lands above.” Sadie stopped taking inventory. “Reverend Whitefield is in America and will be eatin’ my cookin’ tonight?” She sat down. “I can remember the first time I heard him preach. It was a sight to behold.”

  “I know. I’d heard he could preach to tens of thousands, but I didn’t believe it at first. How could any man’s voice be heard by so many?” Phillis shook her head. “Our own Benjamin Franklin didn’t credit it, but when he heard him in Philadelphia he wrote that he couldn’t believe the reverend’s powerful voice. Mr. Franklin moved away from the reverend’s voice until he could only faintly hear the preaching and then he estimated the distance. He said if you figured two square feet per person, Reverend Whitefield had easily spoken to tens of thousands.”

  “He loves preaching to Negroes and working folk. It’s why he’s so admired.” Sadie stood up. “I need to be gettin’ that fine ham I have down in the cellar. I been saving it for something special.”

  “Mrs. Wheatley has been working with the Countess of Huntington to raise funds for the orphanage Reverend Whitefield started all those years ago in Georgia.” Phillis laughed. “If I know her, she’ll ask me to read my most poignant poem tonight to help squeeze as many purses as we can.”

  “Uh oh!” Sadie stopped.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to have to cook and wait tables tonight.”

  “Why? Where’s Lucy?” Ever since Phillis had begun praying for Lucy she’d been more aware of her than ever. Each time she saw her, she prayed. She didn’t know what God was doing in Lucy’s life, but even if those prayers hadn’t touched Lucy, they’d changed Phillis over the last two years.

  “Her baby boy is bad sick. Lucy’s beside herself. I told her to take time off so’s she can just hold the little James.”

  “I’ll help you wait table.” Phillis didn’t mind at all.

  “I can’t have you do that. What will the Missus say?”

  “I’ll tell her myself.” Phillis knew she wouldn’t mind. As the years had passed, Mrs. Wheatley cared less about the way things appeared. The thing she fervently cared about was spreading the gospel and squeezing every last coin she could finagle out of her friends and acquaintances to do that.

  That night, as Phillis began the dinner service, Mr. Wheatley introduced her to the guests. “You’ve all heard about our famous poet, Phillis Wheatley. I’d like to introduce her.” He proceeded to introduce her to everyone seated at the table.

  Phillis could see that some of the guests were uncomfortable. They didn’t know how to treat her—as a fellow diner or as a servant. Phillis wanted to put them at ease. “I’m helping with service tonight because Lucy, who usually serves, has a very sick child.”

  Mrs. Wheatley smiled. “Phillis is one of the family, and she ‘s always been there for us in a pinch.”

  “I like that about you, young lady,” Reverend Whitefield said. “Not many people know this, but when I was a student, I was so poor I had to start Oxford as a servitor.” He turned to Phillis. “That meant that I received free tuition in exchange for acting as personal servant to three other wealthy students.”

  There were whispers of surprise around the table.

  “I didn’t have a father—only my mother, an innkeeper. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I started my orphanage. I did not grow up the son of privilege.”

  Mrs. Wheatley began to speak about the orphanage. When Phillis had cleared the soup bowls and served the main course, the table still heard stories of children whose lives were changed at Bethesda Orphanage. She couldn’t help smiling as she looked around the table. There would be many more orphanage benefactors after tonight.

  As Phillis finished service, Mrs. Wheatley asked her to sit down with them. Phillis could hear Reverend Whitefield wheezing. She recognized it as the asthma.

  “Would you like a glass of cool water, Reverend White-field?” she asked.

  “I would, indeed. I’m guessing you are a fellow asthma sufferer to recognize it in me.”

  She smiled her answer and went to get a glass of cool well water. Sometimes when the tightness came, she could relieve some of it by sipping cool water. Or maybe it only helped relax her.

  As she went into the kitchen, she saw Sadie sitting by the stove with her hands pressing the skirt of her apron to her face.

  “Sadie, what’s wrong?”

  Sadie’s body convulsed with sobs. “Lucy’s child died tonight. He went home to be with the Lord.” She rocked back and forth. “He was just a little bit of a thing—Lucy’s only child.”

  “Let me take this water, and I’ll be right back.”

  She handed the water to Reverend Whitefield, excused herself, and motioned for Mrs. Wheatley to follow. In the butler’s pantry, she told her mistress the sad news and asked to be excused from reading and reciting for the evening.

  “Certainly, child. We will stop and ask prayer for them. You run along.” As she started back t
o the dining room, she turned around and said, “Thank you for tonight.”

  As Phillis went back into the kitchen, she put on a bigger apron. “I want to help you clean up tonight.”

  “No,” Sadie said. “I’ll get myself together. Jus’ give me a minute.”

  “Why don’t you take plates of food for Lucy and her husband and sit with them a while? You are like a mother to Lucy.”

  Sadie looked around the kitchen.

  “I can clean this up while I pray for Lucy. You go.” Phillis began cutting slices of ham and putting together plates of food, while Sadie washed her face and put on a clean apron.

  “Thank you, child,” Sadie said as she put a hand on Phillis’s cheek.

  Phillis waited until the last carriage left to begin to clear off the table.

  Prince came in to lend a hand, removing his frock coat. “Sadie asked me to help you out here.” He finished clearing the table and setting the dining room to rights. Phillis did the dishes, and he fetched water. It felt good to work hard.

  By the time she got to her room she was bone tired but keyed up. So many things went through her mind. What a night. She would never forget that she met Reverend George Whitefield and found out he, too, came from humble beginnings. She loved the stories they told of the revival they called the Great Awakening. She watched this man afflicted by lung ailments and yet working as hard as ever. As he told them tonight, “I’d rather wear out than rust out.”

  But then the sad news of Lucy’s little James. Praying for Lucy had become a habit with Phillis, but tonight, she prayed with new urgency. Lord, comfort them. Let them see things from an eternal viewpoint.

  She sat down at the desk, took out a fresh piece of paper, and opened her inkwell. Of all the poems she wrote, she loved writing elegies the best. Mary never did understand it.