Reimagining Phillis Wheatley - Let's Discuss! - BLK LIT

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 3 (00:46):
My name is Jack Queesse Thomas, and you're listening to
Black Lit, a podcast about black literature and the stories
behind the storytellers. Today we are have having a roundtable
conversation with the Tara Bynham, Associate Professor of English and

(01:08):
African American Studies at the University of Iowa, Cassie Smith,
Professor of English and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
for the Honors College at the University of Alabama, and
Don Holmes, the Assistant Professor of English at the University

(01:28):
of Pittsburgh. I'm so grateful to have had conversations with
them prior. We've heard from all of them in the
previous episodes, and they are here again in a round
table conversation about Phillis Sweetlee today. Tara, Don Cassie, thank
you so much for your time and for being here

(01:52):
and spending your time with me again. We're here to
talk about Phillis Sweetlee today. But I just recently had
an interview with George M. Johnson, who has one of
the most banned books in America called All Boys Aren't Blue,
which is totally different from what we're talking about right now.
But it is a very interesting time to see history

(02:14):
being erased, books being banned, and you know, our history
being contested in so many different ways, and I would
love to understand how you feel about that as scholars
as people who have dedicated your lives to uplifting our
stories and seeing it disappearing from headlines, websites, etc.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
I think the question that you have asked is a
multi layered and provocative question, in part because we are
all at universities, and we're all professors at universities and
at various levels and at various points in our careers.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
But I think that what we have in common.

Speaker 4 (02:59):
Whether we're talking about Tnsylvania, Iowa, or Alabama, is that
there really is a kind of anti intellectualism that threatens
the university and threatens our work. So, you know, I
think that I guess I want to start there because
the stakes actually are really high right now for us

(03:22):
as employees of the institution, and so you know, I
think that I guess I would want your audience to
understand that this is not a theoretical problem for us,
but one that we have to kind of confront in
various ways in our classrooms, in our interactions with uper administration,
uper administrations, interactions with key stakeholders. So you know, I

(03:46):
think that this ends up being a very high stakes
question in a very high stakes moment, and there's no
way to kind of not sort of confront that part
of the question. I think it's really important to acknowledge.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
I think what.

Speaker 4 (04:05):
Kind of interests me about the question is also the.

Speaker 1 (04:11):
Idea of a rasure go.

Speaker 4 (04:13):
On the one hand, like you said, they're people places
ideas that are being kind of literally removed from shelves,
literally removed from websites, literally removed from jobs. And yet,
you know, I think removing someone from an institutional space

(04:37):
kind of broadly defined, it doesn't actually erase the person.
It doesn't erase the memory of the person. You know,
I think that it I think that that is kind
of one thing that we have not figured out as
human beings, is like how to actually erase people, you know,
I think we don't get me wrong, We've come up
with creative strategy. It's to do in horrible ways by people.

(05:02):
But I think that there's still a way for people
to keep telling stories that is not necessarily institutionalized. There
are ways for the people to hold on to memory.
And I think that that's almost why the push to
a race has to be so strong, because you know,

(05:24):
I think what human beings do across time, across resources
is figure out how to connect with another human being
and part of that connecting process is storytelling. It's remembering
and so and so, it's remembering a place that no
longer exists. I mean, this is a much more benign example,

(05:45):
but a buddy of mine was talking about a restaurant
in a Baltimore shopping center and I said to her, like, where.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
The Heckingers was.

Speaker 4 (05:54):
Heckingers has not been there since I think the early nineties,
you know, like Heckendres is a store, it has not
existed for a very long time. I almost was like,
what am I doing? How bad am I dating myself?
And yet she was like, yes, it's where the hecken
Jis was. She too knows that the Heckenas has been

(06:14):
gone since the early nineties. But I guess I just
bring that up as a kind of a benign example
of something that has been literally destroyed.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
The building is not there anymore.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
You know, at this point, there probably is a very
specific demographic that can remember where, when, and where the
Heckenis was, and that demographics still exists. So I think
in much more high stake situations, it's also the case
that there are ways to remember those that have been
or those those persons. Places ideas that folks want to erase,

(06:50):
you know, there are ways to kind of keep those
stories alive. And I think that that's what human beings
do well.

Speaker 5 (06:56):
And then black people in particular. Yeah, I mean, like
you know, if you just think of about the history
of black encounters with the America, like this effort to
erase has been foundational, It's been fundamental and what has
shaped what is what has become African American culture. And like,
for me, the moment that we're in right now, in
a lot of ways, like it is so exhausted. I

(07:19):
was just having this conversation with the colleague a couple
of days ago, like, you know, dude, I just need
to you know, you know, grab my passport and cross
borders or what I mean. You know, like problems follow.
But anyway, the point is, for as exhausting as it is,
the one thing that I keep falling back on is
the fact that, like we've been here before, We've done

(07:40):
this before. You know, Phyllis Wheatley was in a moment
like you talk about erasial, like there was no erasire.
There just wasn't visibility, right, So, like to be erased
suggests that you have to first like be like, be present,
to have your presence acknowledged. And so she's writing in
a moment where just that very fundamental thing being visible

(08:01):
is an issue, right, And so like we get from
that moment to now having this conversations about culture being erased,
which suggesting that between those who posts, between the time
Phyllis Wheatley was in existence in colonial New England to
where we are right now, black folks had managed to arrive,
you know, at this place of visibility, to have the

(08:24):
culture recognized, to have it, to have it in some
ways institutionalized. Right, So now we have africanistige studies, we
have African American studies, we have you know, professors of
early African American literature. Yes, And so this idea of
trying to erase I think it's, like Tara just said, like,

(08:44):
it never actually works. So we know even in this
moment that it is a losing proposition, and yet it
is so difficult, It is so exhausting just having to
work through it and constantly, you know, feeling like we
have to constantly fight this fight.

Speaker 6 (09:04):
A couple of days ago, I was in the media
and someone called me a twentieth century African Americans and
I felt offended. I said, word a man. And now
you know, I barely get past the eighteen thirties, you know.
And the reason why I mentioned that going off Cassie's point,
because Cassie and I met years ago when I was
finishing up my undergrad degree and visited her at Alabama,

(09:25):
and the excitement about my being in early African Americans.
I was just young at that point, so I didn't
think that there were so few of us who are
specifically dedicated to Early America but also specifically dedicated to
exposing revealing the early African American experience, which of course
intersects not only literature, but history and other disciplines as well.

(09:48):
And so the reason why we perhaps know each other
because you know, there are so few of us right
in this particular field, but also just few of us
within English studies as a whole. So you at the
end of the day, you tend to meet the other
African Americans, you know, one point or another. But you know,
given what we're talking about in this very you know,

(10:09):
impressive historical time that we're living in, we have to
be like weakly ourselves. We have to be persistent in
our dedication to write. Tony Morrison famously noted that at
those moments of pressure is when you create the most
you know. And we can see weekly engaging those processes
since the Boss and massacre, before the Boss Semesteracre, actually

(10:30):
thinking about issues, thinking about violence, thinking about all kinds
of political, social, and religious concerns that she was interested
in well before she was publishing her book in seventeen
seventy three. And so we must become degree odds almost
so as people think about erasing history, and we know
so much more right in our brains than we could

(10:53):
ever put in a book than we could ever write
an article, and thus we become the holders of that information. So,
as my peers pointed out, they can't erase all they want,
you know, the historical roadmap points out that our ancestors
have not only been dedicated and persistent and actually using
quote unquote the Master's tools to say something, but they've

(11:13):
been active and inventing and been genitive in those processes
to create new ways of doing things. And so we've
been here before, you know, decade after decade, and thus
we're just going to do that same thing our ancestors
taught us. We're going to learn. We're going to survive,
we want to adapt, revise, and we're going to keep
you know, pressing forward with this important historical information that

(11:34):
really paints a visible picture about who we are as elation,
as a people. You know, without weekly you can't have
that conversation. In my opinion, there's a couple.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
Of things that set out to me while you were
all speaking. Confronting high stakes, eraser versus visibility and we
have to do as we lead it. I think that
that is all of those three kind of summarizing lines
from what you said. There is a consistency of that
throughout our history in this country, of confrontation, of visibility,

(12:09):
of fighting the good fight. I have to agree with you, Cassie,
though it's so tiring, it's so exhausting just thinking about
it sometime, the idea that this is again, we have
to do this again. And I wonder how do we
protect and preserve Black literary heritage. And you've answered this

(12:32):
question in so many different ways by keep telling our stories,
by keep you know, being degreats and being the knowing
the importance of our story and being able to share
it and without the fear of it being ereased. And
knowing that it cannot be. However, I wonder, and this

(12:53):
is partially why I even started this podcast, is how
do we encourage students and readers? Because yes, our disgeneration
may be you know, or interested in paying attention, but
if those who would come after us are not, how
do you then encourage those students and readers to see

(13:15):
Black literature not just as an academic study, but a
living and breathing cultural inheritance. And I think, like I said,
I think you have all answered that question to some degree,
but something that came up to me during our interviews.
I noticed that everyone, most of you have said that

(13:36):
even your introduction to Wheatly came later, like during college,
like you were more introduced to her after you reached
a certain level of education. How do we introduce her earlier?
And is that important to make sure that younger generations
as early as possible have access to Phillis Weekly.

Speaker 6 (14:00):
Specifically, you remember being introduced to Wheatly and doctor sharda
Johnson's African American lit Course, and that's when you know,
and of course the African American is here will tell
you can't teach African American literature. We need several surveys
to do that successfully. However, this was what twenty tens,
and that's usually how it was done. And I just

(14:20):
remember thinking to myself, I had never heard of this woman.
But in reality, I actually had been exposed to Weekly
prior to college. It was in that cartoon show called
Liberty Kids. It was this animated series that used to
come on PBS. I think about the Revolutionary War or
the efforts leading up to the Revolutionary War, and that
was the first time I was introduced to Wheatly as

(14:42):
a kid, but I didn't know it then. It wasn't
you know. It was inclusive and perhaps romanticized in the
history of the revolutionary effort, really harkened up the fact
that many of the people in colonial America saw themselves
as colonials. But I think one of the ways that
we can encourage students to see people like Weekly. For instance,
if you're teaching Mississippi at least that's when you do

(15:04):
American history, why not teach George Washington and feel this
Whekly together. I mean, that's a wonderful way to kind
of start the conversation about who was Feelings Weekly? Where
were she during the Revolutionary War moment. Her poem and
letter to him was very important. Thomas Paine published it
in his Pennsylvania magazine and it was published and read

(15:25):
before Jefferson's Decoration of Independence, so it played that document
is centered within this important region. It obviously impacted George
Washington so much so that he decided to take time
to write back. So there are many different ways to
have that conversation with students, to place her as a
very active, you know, individual within these processes in the

(15:47):
Revolutionary War moment versus let's discuss Weekly as one of
the black voices in the era, or she comes along
the way down the line in the footnote when you know,
she could be directly integrated into the conversations within the
classroom so that when students grow up, they're not randomly
discovering eighteenth and early nineteenth century African American writers and

(16:07):
thought readers. You know, that's just one way.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 5 (16:11):
Like I'm really thinking about your question just in terms
of like what the stakes are. How do we keep
not just feel this Weekly stored front and center, but
like the history of the cultural history, the cultural impact
of black folks front and center. In this latest move
to race, and like you're asking academics, so the answer

(16:32):
for us is always going to be curricula, like, gotta
build it into the institution somehow. But I'm also trying
to think, you know, keeping in mind the larger audience
for the podcast Thinking of Mind, just like the broader culture,
like what kinds of moves can we possibly make? And
you know, I'm not sure part of me wants to say,

(16:53):
just do what we've always been doing, because like, whatever
we always been doing, like we are still here to
get a fifty years later, still talking about Phillis Wheakly,
even though we have acknowledged at the beginning of this
conversation that there have always been moves to erase, to
minimize black culture, and still yet we're here. Phillis Weakly

(17:14):
is still here with us. And there's been this kind
of a thread even in mainstream black culture from seventeen
seventy three with Weekly, where we have culturally recognized her significance,
you know, whether it was through literary societies or through
you know, practitioners of the of the arts who have
been evoking her work. And so my short answer to

(17:37):
your question to stay the course what we've been doing
is working, it's continuing to work, and I'm thinking about
it from an academic standpoard, then yeah, you know, I'm
right on board with what Donna is saying about introducing
this to students as early as possible. And I was
one of those people who learn about who Phillis Wheely
was in grade school, like I was on maybe six
or seventh grade. I was in a language arts class. Importantly,

(18:00):
the teacher of that language Joss class was a black woman,
and she had Peelis Wheatley on the syllabus for that class,
and that was my first introduction to her. So that
just kind of reiterates what Dom is saying, you know,
the importance of incorporating this into the academic structure. But
going back to what Tara was saying a few minutes ago,
like we are in this anti intellectual moment, so that's

(18:23):
not going to be the answer for or We've got
to come up with like a multi prong type approach.

Speaker 7 (18:29):
I think, you know, because I too am you know,
an educator.

Speaker 4 (18:35):
You know, I thought of curriculum, but you know, I
think that one of the things that I have.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
Thought a lot about is.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
We're also all English professors, which means that story is
a really important part of what we are interested in.
And I think that I I guess I'll say it
this way. I recently had a conversation with my students
about reading. They and this was not weekly specific, This
was just a conversation about reading and for students who

(19:08):
ninety percent of them raised their hand and said they
wanted to be writers, creative writers. About seventy percent said
that they did not read. And I was like, let's
let's talk about this. I want to understand.

Speaker 7 (19:20):
And I think what they struggled with was the book.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
They had problems with the book, and you know, they
wanted to be able to interface with stories in different
ways in different media, So thinking about video games, thinking.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
About movies, thinking about all these other.

Speaker 7 (19:43):
Forms, and you know, I think I ended up saying
to them is that like those forms still rely on
writing that needs to be read.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
You know. So like that.

Speaker 4 (19:53):
Movie that you love, there's a scriptwriter or scriptwriters behind
that TV show that you like, the the video game,
everything kind of has a script. And you know, I
think I've realized in talking to them in that moment,
was like, somehow we've kind of undermined the importance of
the story. And I don't necessarily know the trajectory of

(20:14):
that undermining, but I think that even in this important
historical moment that we, you know, kind of are living
in and talking indirectly about, I think the crisis is
in part connected to stories and how we relate to
those stories or don't relate to those stories weirdly, or

(20:36):
how we've decided that this story belongs to this person
and not to that person, and not realizing that like once,
the story is in the ether, like it it has
no ownership. It's something that ends up being kind of consumed,
taken in, interpreted by whoever's ears it lands on our

(20:57):
eyes or whatever. So when I think about how do
we get folks to think about Wheatley and sort of
thinking about that broader than the actual kind of curricular
concerns that we've brought up, I guess I'm I am
reminded of kind of the power of story and helping
the next generations understand that we are a story driven species.

(21:21):
We need stories, We rely on stories, and there's not
quite the kind of insider outsider to story either, you know,
Because I think that what has happened also, interestingly is
that when it comes to black people's stories, they now
kind of have to look a certain kind of way
for you know, I think students remind me of this.

(21:45):
Like students in particular, and presumably not just students, but
consumers writ large, they don't want stories about slavery, whatever
that means. They don't want stories of suffering, even though
if we think about what a story is, whether it's
the little boy who had the no good, very bad
day or Tony Marson's Beloved, like suffering is in it.

(22:06):
I think it's interesting to me the sort of parameters
that that my students and others have kind of put
around so called black stories because they have too much
of this suffering. And yet it's like, well, if you
read anything, I think for it to hit there has
to be some level of suffering. There has to be
some level of tension. There has to be something in

(22:27):
the plot that gets us locked in. If my story
is that I went to the grocery store today, no.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
One's going to read that.

Speaker 4 (22:36):
Now if on the way to the grocery store it
turns out I have a no good, very bad day
at you know, like suddenly there might be some points
of interest. So all of This is to say that
I think when we think about Wheatley, when we think
about kind of staying the course in the way that
Cassie mentioned, I think part of the staying the course

(22:56):
is at every turn reminding people that we are story
driven and that stories are meaningful, and that stories are
not specific to groups of people, but instead, like, we
all have the opportunity to inhabit a story and to

(23:17):
interpret that story, and to make sense of that story,
and to hold on to it in whatever way is
meaningful for us.

Speaker 5 (23:24):
Even like people bring up a good point tower about
the power of narrative, and like where our current generation
of students are, particularly black students by who are who
don't want more of the stories about black suffering And
that may be something that is exceptional about the moment within,
and it's like the further we get from you know,

(23:46):
let's say the civil rights movement or from Jim Crow.
Like I was just watching something recently where it said
that like my generation, so like older millennials, like younger
gen X, older millennials are actually the first generation of
Black Americans who are truly free in American culture. So

(24:06):
like in the sense that like we don't have to, Like,
my mom will tell you stories about how when she
was a child she had to step off the sidewalk
when white people paying right, right, So like, but I
don't have those stories. Or you know, she graduated from
a segregated high school, and this was in the seventies.
Like segregation, you took a long time to happen, y'all
in the South. I didn't graduate from segregrated high school, right, So, Like,

(24:28):
my generation is the first one when you think about
the struggle, where like, you know, we have the legal protections.
You know, a lot of the institutional like some stuff
for equality and equity has been institutionalized.

Speaker 6 (24:43):
Right.

Speaker 5 (24:43):
So now to maybe one or two generations after that,
we have these students who coming up and they come
into our early African American LT classes and like for me,
when I teach the we now have two sections of
African American lit. This goes back to what the I
was saying. One goes from the beginnings up to nineteen
thirty five, so the end of the Harlem Renaissance, and

(25:05):
then the second one that's fromnineteen thirty five to the present.
Right when you come into my class and I'm teaching
African American literature one, like we're going to spend the
first twelve weeks of the semester going from like fifteen
fifty to about eighteen twenty, so we got a bunch
of text and conversations about the Transatlantic slave trade, and

(25:26):
about four weeks in, students are like, man, you know,
when are we going to get to like Tony Morrison. Never,
that's not what's in this class. And so it's just
this idea that like, I don't there's this there's something
about the students we're currently teaching where they feel like
conversations about African American history don't have to focus on

(25:49):
like they want the good time stories. And I'm like, yeah,
there is a we have some of that, you know,
Like I mean, I can we talk about some funny
stuff that happens, for example, with you know, Frederick Douglass
or whatever. But I mean, at the end of the day,
this is part of the history. This is the foundation
for where we are right now. But the kind of

(26:10):
hesitation for students to engage the material right now is
really tricky and it can be problematic in this moment
where there's this push for cultural erasure because it suggests
there's some complicity on all sides to move toward the
situation because now people don't want to have those conversations.

(26:31):
It's like we forgot, well not forgot, because I'm like, again,
my generation and younger, we haven't had the experience of
walking off the sidewalk when a white person passes because
we just we didn't have to do that.

Speaker 3 (26:44):
That makes me wonder, like, Okay, so the students at
your teaching, I mean, I'm missed. The age range is
under twenty years old approximately, would you say, or twenty
four or ninety.

Speaker 6 (26:56):
Thousand, two thousand and sixty thousand and seven born days around.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
To some degree, they haven't even watched or learned about
the struggle.

Speaker 6 (27:09):
These are the students who use late twentieth century to
describe the nineteen nineties. Okay, so this is what we are,
this is what we're dealing with.

Speaker 1 (27:17):
Eighteen hundred nineteen.

Speaker 6 (27:23):
I said, the nineteen nineties were not that long ago
for you to give it that kind of designation. Come on,
But I love this point about storytelling, right because when
I walk into my classroom and I'm about to teach
you this slave narrative and this experience about this individual
who had a horrific experience in slavery. I suppose that
some students have the expectation, wole black people, Oh my god,

(27:47):
they suffered so much, you know, that is all Those
things are valy only true. But my game for them
is to expose to them how those systemic pressures, even
though they were so thick, they were not so think
enough that these individual examples that we have couldn't subvert them,
which suggests to me that others were subvert and even
though it's not necessarily in the record, which also gets

(28:10):
us to where we are today. So I remind my
students that if your ancestors accepted slavery, then you would
still be on the plantation in Mississippi and in South Carolina, right,
And so it's important for them to understand how the
enslave individual never accepted that position, even though it took
decades for them to reconcile and resolve it. They were

(28:31):
active in that process since the seventeenth century. Before the
end perhaps, but specifically since the seventeenth century, they had
been dedicated to processes that were about enacting freedom and
the establishing what I like to claim about certain cultural
practices that later African Americans would then start to use
in them writing, but then continue to go on using

(28:53):
in their everyday practice. Right Genevra Smithman had said this
wonderful thing about nothing works with the words without language.
Everything starts with the story, with how people have been
told to survive and all those different things. So we
can expect some of those things we're still being passed down.
But how we invite students to the narrative and exposing

(29:14):
them to early America I think helps settled perhaps even
that's the word I'm looking for here, not be stabilized.
Disarmed them if you will, when it comes to the
kind of barriers that they've set up about, oh, slavery,
and I let them know, this is early America. Slavery
is going to be intersected. Even in takes that are
not specifically about slavery, We're going to be talking about

(29:35):
it because it was a normalizing parameter at that time.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
You are listening to black lit.

Speaker 7 (29:47):
I also think it's important to, I guess, wrestle with
the shame that seems to be part of the disinterest
right now. There's a lot of shame around U or
I think black young people in a way that I
never learned. And I'm also like an exennial elder millennial,

(30:08):
you know, so I did not grow up thinking that.

Speaker 4 (30:15):
My parents' generation was shameful or that my grandparents' generation
was shameful. But I do think that students now, their
refusal to hear the slavery stories and the desire to
get away from suffering, I think is aligned with a
certain amount of shame.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
And I think that the.

Speaker 7 (30:37):
For reasons that are not clear to me, you know,
the shame becomes.

Speaker 4 (30:40):
The burden of the descendant of the black and slave person.
Shame is not something that the descendants of slave owners
have to wrestle with, you know, like it becomes our burden.
And you know, I agree with the idea that somehow
that makes us complicit in.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
The a rasure.

Speaker 7 (31:01):
Yeah, I think I think shame is is definitely a
part of the story.

Speaker 4 (31:07):
And I'm not entirely sure how you go from my parents,
who are likely the grandparents of my current students, like,
you know, like and to think that like what my
my parents as like the youngest in the civil rights generation, like,

(31:29):
go from them to their imagine grandchildren being kind of
ashamed that they had to endure segregation or had to
figure out ways to combat it, and then if you
go back even further, like there's still shame around what
previous generations had to endure as well as a student

(31:49):
was she wasn't a black student, but we were talking
about segregation, and she was kind of like, why did yeah,
why did black people say yes to.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
This or like allow it to happen?

Speaker 4 (32:01):
And you know, there's always moments in the classroom that
are like, it's just Tuesday. I was mine in my business.
I did not wake up this morning to answer this
version of a question, but I've figured out how to
answer it. And the thing that kind of struck me
in my answer. My answer kind of spoke to the
authority between me as the teacher and her as the student.

(32:26):
And I think when I pointed out my authority and
the fact that, you know, I could give her directives
that she then would do without the threat of death
or job loss or anything.

Speaker 7 (32:39):
She could say no to me, you know, because the
stakes are super low.

Speaker 4 (32:43):
But she didn't say no, And I think that was
a moment where a light bulb kind of went off
to have her thinking about like the fact that we
are talking about real systems and real consequences, like not
just a complicity because some how black people.

Speaker 1 (33:00):
Are less than or whatever, you know. So, you know,
I think that that is what we.

Speaker 4 (33:04):
Are we as educators certainly, and also I guess it's
everyday folks are kind of wrestling with right now.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Is the shame you.

Speaker 4 (33:13):
Know, students, students and other young people may not necessarily
have the same sort of interactions, but the legacy of
some of these things, there's still.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
A through line.

Speaker 4 (33:28):
There's still you know, kind of these conversations that are
happening and still impacting and affecting them and maybe affecting
them without as much context. So like when it's your
mother's generation kind of sharing those stories, like it's a
different kind of conversation than when it's your grandparents' generation

(33:51):
sharing or maybe not sharing those stories because there's been
enough distance, there's been enough time that those experiences aren't
top of mind for the grandparent way that they might
have been for the parents.

Speaker 7 (34:03):
So I think that that's just interesting too.

Speaker 6 (34:06):
This is the through line that we've all been talking about.
We've been here before, and as those of us in
the room, who are you know, culture and stories to
explored at some horrific times in African American history, you know.
And as I try to teach to my students, I
try to express to them that a history is under
no you know, obligation to make sense to us unless

(34:26):
we make it make sense. But also the future is
under no obligation to be better, you know, and history
just explicates how it's just been, you know, one great
difficulty utter the next, not just for African Americans, but
when you think about it, you know, the world you
know over and so you know, it's I think about
how we've been taught this history, this romanticized version of

(34:47):
American history, the quote unquote the bad part. So what
did they say? The dark history? And so maybe the
issue has been especially around these concerns around shame. And
perhaps even had you didn't apologize to me for slavery
his ancestor and then a slave owner, you could you
imagine my face when that question came up. I gave

(35:08):
him one of those those profound, you know, aerodyne answers
about you were responsible for your own future kind of thing.
But I think that because we've taught, for instance, we've
taught the revolutionary moment. Oh, certain paradoxes and certain contradictions right,
which in my mind logically that suggests that, oh it
was a mistake. It was you know, they were kicking

(35:30):
it down the road. It was eventually going to get
to it, but when and how right? In other words,
these things were intentionally done. Throughout history, bad things had
intentionally been done by people in power. And because we've
not assessed those power structures and how those structures have
worked themselves into systems, we today in the twenty first
century are debating whether or not the system is problematic

(35:53):
versus actually having conversations about how these entrench values have
been so you know, structured in our systems that we
are trying to you know, dismountle those kinds of processes.
And and a lot of it is because so many
people have just been taught you know, the greatness or
you know, the exceptionality, if you will, about our country's history,

(36:13):
the history of the world. And thus, when you go
into your classroom and you're exposed to them, these hard
truths with the actual documentation you know, on paper, it
can be very as one grass student put it, that
knowledge can you know, we'd like to think about knowledge
as power, but it can also be pained as well,
And so some of the students are dealing with how

(36:34):
did I get to college and didn't know this? How
did I get to this morning my life and I
didn't know this? And so that shame they feel is
from that the information itself, but from the lack of
the fact that didn't know it already or that no
one had taught them that already, you know. And so
I think all of that contributes to how they feel,
you know, now with these great efforts of eratia, Yeah,

(36:56):
I think.

Speaker 5 (36:56):
The sort of a conversation about shame is even more
complex than and that. So, like it's you know, about
not knowing some of this history. And then another part
of it is because I mean, even though what happened
in the post Obama era contradicts it, I still think
that at this moment there are a lot of us
who are working with this idea that we were that

(37:18):
we were in some kind of post racial moment, or
that we were moving toward it, right, And so then
having all of these reminders about what has happened in
the past just literates the fact that Okay, maybe it's
not post racial, like maybe there is something that makes
me exceptional that I stand out, but not necessarily in
a positive way, right. I do want to say as

(37:41):
well that I there's a part of me that sees
the moment that we're in right now as a gift,
a gift in the sense that we can no longer
take for granted anything we've ever thought about the United States,
the good, the bad, and ugly, all of it, right,
and so that we have this like, oh, you know,
us as a greatness democracy that ever existed in the

(38:02):
history of the world. And yet here we are right
now with the person who has dictatorial ambitions, and god,
it looks like there's an old map that's just you know,
guiding him right there. Even though we know that executive
orders are not laws, not laws, every time he signs
once we act like, oh my gosh, the Department of

(38:22):
Education is now no more. No, that's not exactly what's
going on. But that's how we talk about it, that's
how we act, that's how we are, and that's really
I think, well, that's one of the things that this
administration is counting on. It is counting on being able
to speak something into existence and or speak it out
of existence or it to become reality. So that's how

(38:45):
this erasire thing is working in this moment. And so
the reason I'm saying this as a gift is because
it's we don't have room for the anti intellectualism. And
I'm not even talking about institutionally. You don't forget about
the university and going to schoo and get in the college.
It's about critical thinking and it is existential, right. I mean,

(39:06):
like if we are not being if we are not
willing to just kind of take a step back and
be able just to you know, think rationally, then we
are going to be consumed by this. And you know
I was talking about how exhausting all of this is,
like we will be overwhelmed by it. So as we
kind of think about the kind of shame that is

(39:28):
defining some of our younger generations, as we're thinking about
this moment that we're in, as we're thinking about this
project of erasure, we also need to be thinking about
what it means to confront all of these myths and
these ideas that we've had in the past about us
exceptionalism and be willing to confront them as such. I

(39:49):
think that is so fundamental to us getting to the
next step or get getting beyond this political moment.

Speaker 6 (39:56):
In other words, just helping students to understand that all
these things about as people say, where we are supposed
to be, how we are supposed to be, x, y
and z, we just won't get there right without fully
and truly understanding who we are. There's so many grievances
in our historical past that just it's not that reconciliation
is giving me something, right, It's reconciliation means knowing and

(40:19):
being more informed that even though we maybe different and
that difference exists amongst us, that difference should not immobilized.
It shouldn't force us to become so you know, fear,
Fear becomes the provocation, and fear matches how people feel,
they go and they vote, and those fears then go
right into policy, right or what have you. And so

(40:42):
I just think it's important that we know more about
each other, and that means just being exposed to the
history and not having to qualify with an adjective dark history.
Good history is just history, right, it rocks you know
one that just it just exists, and so therefore we
have the potential know more about ourselves. You know, as

(41:03):
a people, who would you know be talked less exceptional history,
if you will.

Speaker 3 (41:09):
And when I interviewed Bridgette Fielder, one of the things
that she mentioned was that, you know, after Phyllis Wheetly,
there was like a major gap between Phyllis Sweetly and
zero no Hearston and of intellectual women writers. That's a
big gap and as a huge gap as far as

(41:30):
like who were the women, the black women writers during
that time and were they celebrated, were they highlighted? Were
they were they as are we do we see them
in curriculum as we see Phillip Sweetly or is It
makes me think about that how do we stop that
from happening again in our curriculum, in our studies and

(41:50):
our teachings, for these these gaps not to occur again,
as far as like in our school systems and the
women that are highlighted during that time period in the
nineteenth century.

Speaker 5 (42:02):
Yeah, for you don't get no love.

Speaker 6 (42:05):
No love, No love gotas doing now.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Right?

Speaker 6 (42:15):
You know?

Speaker 4 (42:16):
I think that it for me kind of goes back
to the idea of story and like needing to tell
the story of black people in.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
A very particular kind of way. So, you know, I
think that the generation.

Speaker 4 (42:33):
The boomers who end up being have the the black
folks that get to white universities in these large numbers
and then go on to graduate school to get PhDs
at fancy places like that kind of I don't I
don't know that they have a name, but you know,
I think there's a cohort of folks that I'm sure

(42:54):
that we could all think of who who were in
the position to kind of add validity to African American
literature as a category. And I think that the way
they get to that vbildity is using kind of high
theory to interpret African American literature and also figuring out
how to include African American literature courses in the curriculum

(43:20):
in English departments.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
Across the country.

Speaker 4 (43:24):
And I think that their work is invaluable, like this
is why I have a job now. But I also
think that one of the kind of consequences of the
need to make African American literature sort of a part
of the curriculum is meant that that there's a particular
kind of story that we expect when it comes to
what counts as African American literature. So like really is

(43:47):
the start, I think she often is the you know,
kind of the unique, the first, the miraculous, the only.
And I think the nineteenth century ends up being kind
of a tricky time and it is not a century.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
That I know a whole lot about. I reject it.

Speaker 4 (44:07):
I have my reasons, but that's not what we're here
to talk about.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
You know.

Speaker 4 (44:11):
So I wonder kind of the gap that Bridget identifies.
I wonder how much that gap is a part of
kind of a having in developing an African American literature
curriculum that can then be anthologized in an easy way
that kind of like does the work of narrating resistance,

(44:32):
narrating kind of black creativity in a particular kind of
way that then could allow it to be marketable to
the institution, both the publishing houses but also the academic
institutions that would then sort of validate African American literature
as a field. So now I at least my first
thought about why there is that gap, you know, I

(44:56):
wonder how much of that is kind of connected to
the story that African American literature as a cannon as
a tradition is supposed to represent.

Speaker 6 (45:07):
A great scholar wrote a book, and several lines in
this book but one of the lines she put in
there was that we can rethink authorship. Come on, you
know what I'm going with this cast. We can rethink
authorship without having to, you know, forego the quote unquote
role or the author, but to extend how we are
thinking about African American literature and looking at other texts

(45:29):
that you know, aren't quote unquote a fiction, a piece
of poetry. And of course that scholar is Cassie Smith.
Take it over, set.

Speaker 5 (45:38):
Me up, listen just real quick, you know, in this
conversation about erasia, like I just feel compelled to just say,
Mariah Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins, Harper, Harriet Jacob, Anna, Julia Cooper,
Natcy Kress, you really you're your foot. I mean, we
can do like a laundry list of black women who

(46:00):
were writing and who were intellectuals in the nineteenth century.
So this really gets at the point that Bridget is
alluded to and what we can talk about here about
erasure and why there might be that eration in the
nineteenth century. I think what's really interesting is that that
erasure takes on a very gendered dynamics, specifically in terms

(46:21):
of background, because like nobody has like we all know
who Frederia. Like if you don't know anybody else in
early Africanamerican nature, you know Frederick Douglas and no Booker T.
Washington problem. So like, if nothing else you can you
can name some black men writers from the period, so
that there isn't that huge leap from the eighteenth century
into the twentieth. But that's not necessarily the case with

(46:43):
black women.

Speaker 6 (46:44):
I wanted to add to that, And especially when it
comes to you know, black women writers, there are so
many important ways to think about, Like, for instance, that
letter from Virginia on that plantation, I think it was
a woman that wrote it. I don't know why, really
I feel I do. I just because when they're advocating
for children, women always advocate for children. That's something that's

(47:05):
very central, and I just I don't know if a
male writer would have taken that level of advocacy to
kind of fight for their progeny the way that a
woman would have. And the historical, the rhetorical record at
least plus that out women had always been interested in
describing thinking about their children in ways that men getting

(47:26):
perhaps in the ways that men could perhaps use them,
and or perhaps the way that men talk about their
children as just part of the family or some to
this effect. But the nineteenth century, though, is full, I
mean full of African American thought, intellectual thought, historical thought.
The slave narrative oftentimes gets to be the bulk of

(47:48):
the tradition, whereupon which we think about African American writer
of the nineteenth century. But the first sustained writing campaigns
from African Americans were these published orations from eighteen oh
eight to about eighteen teen twenty three, and so every
year in Philadelphia, New York and New York they would
give these speeches, like two or three of them. And
then there was a sister tradition that started in Boston

(48:11):
and by eighteen fifteen, I think, but it was primarily
with like white creatures. But nevertheless they I mean records
of documents and pamphlets and speeches. Not only that, we
have petitions that African American people were using other eighteenth
century These things could be used as literary you know,
documentation as well. That could help us, you know, understand

(48:34):
a lot more about African American cultural expressions. By the
time we get to what eighteen thirty, you get the
first fusion of slave narrative in eighteen twenty five. So
there's so much, you know, informations from African American people,
even well prior to the abolition of slavery. The first
what fiction we believe is that Haitian story. I don't

(48:55):
know if you're all noticed, what Agi Theresa from eighteen
twenty eight, right, is that like eighteen twenty eight something
like that.

Speaker 4 (49:01):
Yeah, and it's serialized in Freedom's Journal too, right.

Speaker 6 (49:05):
Right, yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah paper, which is
a black newspaper. So it's so in other words, I
guess what I'm getting at, and this follows Cassie's work
and Zach's word, But what I'm getting at is that
we have to look back for African American lives in
texts that we otherwise wouldn't be thinking about looking at,
So from the newspapers, from other types of I had

(49:27):
a student just writing an archival paper about the first
black doctor, and he used the obituary in order to
recover this man's history. Right, So the obituary becomes the
literary document, right, it becomes something that holds his life
and it shows how his African American community thought about him.
And these are important documents. That could help us understand

(49:48):
the fullness of this, you know, the nineteenth century in particular.

Speaker 5 (49:52):
That's the storytelling. We keep coming back.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
To it, similarly to the letters from Phylliswheetlyy to over
Tanner and to the letters overall, how that became a
part of her story.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
Don't get me talking about account books, because that's another
genre that we never talk about ether.

Speaker 3 (50:12):
You are listening to black lit. One of the things
I also found to be beautiful when, like researching, I
came across, you know, poems of people who wrote they
wrote poems about Phyllis Wheatley's life before coming to America
and what they thought that was like. And Cornelis e

(50:32):
who was also on the first episode, he shared one
of his poems. So I think there's influence in so
many different ways of finding the story, as we were saying,
of understanding the story before the story that we know,
and because obviously we won't ever know what truly was,
but having that beautiful imagination to kind of fill in
those blanks and write that those poems. But I wanted

(50:55):
to switch gears a little bit and talk to Tara
about reading pleasures You invited. Your book is the reason
that we started this. So I thank you again for that,
and Jason shout out to you, our producer. But I
think that is kind of answering some of the questions
that we have too, like how do we bring these
stories that are set in a certain time period which

(51:18):
is a struggling period for black people and a struggling
time and a hard time. But you were able to
find the joy and rethink that black interiority and showing
Wheatly not just as this figure of resistance, but showing
her pleasure and showing her joy and sharing that and
making that the forefront of the story. And it's funny

(51:39):
because I was thinking when you said this. I thought
this to myself the other day, and I was like,
if we made a film about Phyllis Sweetly, what would
need to be included?

Speaker 7 (51:50):
And how yeah, right, Like what.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Would absolutely needs to be included, Like what would be
the first act, what would be the second? And also
how important it would be to show the joy? Because
I don't and I might be wrong. I watch a
lot of films, but I don't know if I've ever
seen that perspective when it comes to that time period
or slavery. Yes, the environment will still be there, the war,

(52:17):
that the pain, the suffering will still be there, but
being able to tell it through that lens of joy
is kind of really really beautiful and I love that
that's the perspective that you took. But would you could
you answer that question, like, if you were to make
a film about feel as weekly, yeah, I'm going to
We're going there, do you think would need to be

(52:37):
included into her story?

Speaker 7 (52:40):
I think that's a really interesting question.

Speaker 4 (52:42):
And also, like I'm not a screenwriter, I have no idea,
but I think that if I am, you know, done,
And Cassie chime in with your thoughts too, But I
think that the one and this might be controversial, but
I stand by it. The one movie that I can
think of that kind of does this is Django. Yeah,

(53:09):
so I think Django there's a love story at the
center of you know, like Jamie Fott.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Wants to fight his wife.

Speaker 6 (53:17):
It's a love story.

Speaker 4 (53:19):
It's a love story, and I think what's interesting about
it is that like at its center, it's almost like
a princess story, like the woman gets saved by the
night and shining armor or whatever, and we can we
can you know, do work with that but like I
think at base it's a love story and it's a
victorious one in the end. So I think that for

(53:41):
the Wheatly story, the question would be, like what it
is the motivating something, you know, like would you want
to tell it as a love story and kind of
center John Peters? Would you want to tell it as
a friendship story and think about the various sort of
friendships that that Wheatley has. But I think that that

(54:01):
ends up being kind of the way to shape the
story that then allows the world to do what the
world is doing, because we have to talk about the
revolutionary war, we kind of have to talk about her enslavement.
But I think that remembering that she is a friend,
a wife, or you know, like is something other than

(54:22):
enslaved or in addition to being enslaved, Like, I think
that that is what I would want the story to
kind of center on. And I think that what Django
does well is kind of make clear those power dynamics.
And I think that the I think Tarantino doesn't sidestep
those power dynamics, and you know, I think is gory

(54:46):
and all kinds of things, but I think he doesn't
lose sight of the fact that he's telling a love story.
So you know, I know that Tarantino can inspire all
kinds of feelings in folks, but in my mind, he
would kind of be the model sort of like three
dimensional like he he models what a three dimensional kind

(55:08):
of black person can be in in Jango.

Speaker 1 (55:13):
You think that, I.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
Mean, here's the thing, Cassie, we can't go too deep, like,
let's not let's not do that. It's like, I understand
that this is controversial and problematic, and you know, we
got we got big old brains that kim Can Keny
can put forth a critique. But I do think that
there is something about just of the existing models that

(55:40):
I've seen, Djengo is probably the best one. Yeah, And
I say that knowing knowing that you are right, Cassie,
this is not There are far better representations of black
men and women than Tarantino's Django. But if I'm thinking
of about a story that's set during slavery, it is

(56:02):
meant to represent, you know, kind of black people at
that time.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
Yeah, it puts the love story at the forefront, and
that to drive the story that he wants to tell.

Speaker 6 (56:16):
Well, there's the whole issue in Django and this is
one of the things that Bill Andrews and I chatted
about when it came out the horse issue. Why is
this black man on the horse? That was a crime
black man could not ride horses, and so just plan
on that absurdity that how ridiculous is that law? How
ridiculous is that rule? And Tarantino is known for his aperbo.

(56:39):
He's known to excraver, you know, to be really you know,
out of this world, you know, in terms of speaking
to the absurdity of whatever it is that he's trying
to represent. But it's like those little nuanced things that
he puts in the movie, and that helps us, as
you always find it out, to know that slavery is
here and this is a very violent tradition, but this

(56:59):
man is dedicated to fighting his damsel in distress and
singing her. I used to tell this a whole story
about a nineteenth century movie that I would love to see.
It would be The Avengers, Okay, of the nineteenth century.
John Brown is going to be Captain America. Come on,
Frederick Douglass is gonna be fat at Carriet up Man.

(57:20):
You know what I'm saying. So listen, this would be
your great, you know, fictional, of course, ridiculous, seclatively moody,
you know, but that's what they were. They were the
Avengers of the nineteenth century. They didn't have all the
tools and technologies like the ones we see in the
modern movies, but they were literally trying to fight and
save you know, people's lives. But a movie about Wheatley, though,

(57:41):
I don't know how do I feel about I would.
I would feel some kind of way. I'd be like, Oh,
they're gonna mess up our history. They're gonna put all
kinds of claims in there that probably isn't true. I
don't know, but I would be on edge. Would I
go and view it? I would, but I would love
it if they would focus it on I'm just really interested.
I feel like her interactions in Boston sometimes get kind

(58:05):
of misrepresented, and so when people when she's getting to
you know, selecting George Washington, I'm going to send you
this poem and letter and say I support the American colonials,
people are like, why did she do that? Why didn't she,
you know, stay in England when she was in England,
And I think a lot of it bears fruit from
her colonial experiences. So I would love for the movie

(58:26):
to kind of really represent some of those interactions that
she was having on the streets that are in and
around Boston right after the French and Indian War, and
thinking about when she first got here, what was she
was seeing, and you know, imaginations about those early years
would be so very interesting to me because I think
they play a very important role to her ideology development

(58:48):
by the time she's writing George Washington in seventeen seventy five,
short amount of time, but I think very impacting on
her her young life for formative years. In other words,
I think.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
You know, honestly, when I pull a question to myself,
the first thing that came to my mind as far
as like who she was, the perspective that I would
want to see is a story of self worth. I
think she really knew who she was and value that
because her tenacity to write the letters to go after

(59:23):
to get her work out, Like, there's such a beautiful
story of knowing value and knowing that she had value
despite being a slave, you know, And I think that
that could be a really really beautiful leaning into the joy,
leading into the self worth, leading into this woman who

(59:44):
was in some regards an entrepreneur because she was selling herself, right,
she was selling her work and doing what she had
to do. So I would love to see that and
that way, of course, with all the things that were
happening around her, but somehow making that be what drives
the story. This beautiful black valued woman at the forefront

(01:00:09):
and never never, never, just just unapologetically, never wavering, you know,
and even contesting anyone who thought otherwise.

Speaker 6 (01:00:19):
And think about how brave she I mean Weakley, I mean,
she could have wrote anyone who she wanted. She wrote
people who were slave owners Selena Haysten's had owned slaves.
That this the you know. She wrote people who clearly
she felt that she could help. She wanted to teach them, right,
you know. And I have here Terry. You read the

(01:00:40):
last time, so I want to read a little truth.
You read Paul last time. Remember I was, oh, I
didn't know I could read. I was listening and I
was like. This is after she comes back from London, right,
So Poems on Various Subjects is published. This is in
seventeen seventy four, and she writes to Samson ocument she says,

(01:01:02):
among many of the things she talks about equating herself
to the modern day jew as in the modern Egyptians,
as in the white oppressors. So she's presenting to him
in this letter her very poignant interpretation not only about
faith but also about the actual issues within the world.
And she's coming to realize that the great difficulty is

(01:01:23):
that it is white people who perhaps have has its
opacity to see how humanity could be expanded. She says this,
I desire not for their heurt, but to convince them
of the strange absertainty of their kunda, whose words it's
not the conduct is there, but whose words and actions
are so diametrically opposite. In other words, the logic logicing

(01:01:46):
that she's seeing here, and she's trying to, you know,
instruct these people. So she's very didactic, you know, and
I claim in my word because I'm trying to develop
that she she's positioning herself as this great humanist. Right,
She's acted by militronic poetry, she's impacted by Alexander Dun's,
you know, piety and all these different kinds of English
writers that she's reading. But then the actual traumatic experiences

(01:02:10):
on the ground don't match. All the ideas about liberty
don't match all the ideas about being good Christians, right,
and she's very concerned about that in that post trip
to London, which becomes part of what she's trying to
animate and show to the world. She was a powerful,
remarkable woman. You know, oftentimes people say that some of

(01:02:30):
these people were ahead of their times. I think she
was right where she was supposed to be. How unfortunate
in her life ended, how unfortunate it was. But I
feel that she presented so much stock and gave so
many ideas that would be so helpful for future generations
to kind of understand and use that. I think in
so many ways too, she helps to kind of create
and structure some African American cultural core ideas about our

(01:02:55):
peaceable nature and that we do not walk around with
avengeful heart and was really into all of that stuff.
And you know, so therefore she deserves to be honored
for that at all, because she had every right to
be mad as hell at this world that she was
tossed into. You know. Wish not to say that she
was in of course, but you know what I mean.
I want to stop preaching now.

Speaker 5 (01:03:17):
But on one thing that we might want to point
out to is that for like, as remarkable as Phillis
Whetly was, she was also quite ordinary. So you know,
if we're thinking and not to take anything at all
away from Phillis Wheetly, but to point out that what
she was able to do, how she was able to
speak true to power, how she was able to you know,

(01:03:37):
to acquire literacy skills in English and write poetry. She
was not acting in isolation, like she wasn't this lone
wolf just out there. So I don't know whatever kind
of movie production we're gonna do or whatever, like, it
would just be useful to kind of focus on those
parts of her that may not be so heroic. And

(01:03:58):
I don't know what that. Yeah, y'all still got me
messed up with the jangle. I know, I know there's
something in any kind of move like I would just
want to remind herself like she was an ordinary person too,
write like she wasn't. Yeah, she was an ordinary person too,
And that's important to acknowledge just so that we can

(01:04:19):
always carry along that humanity and just the complexity of it. Right,
because like, if we start to think about her in
these like really reveal terms, we kind of for example,
we don't think about the complexity, for example, in the
relationship between her and her enslaver, Susannah Wheatley. It becomes
really really difficult to think about how she felt about

(01:04:41):
her mistress, why she may have felt that way about
her mistress if we aren't reminding ourselves that she was,
you know, just orientin being who did some really extraordinary things.
So anyway out of that doesn't make for real good blockbuster,
you know, script writing. But still it is important for
us to acknowledge.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Maybe not for Hollywood standards, but by the standards that
I think as far as like what stories need to
be told, and all of these stories are being are
valid and should be told as their truth. So maybe
not Hollywood. Maybe we're getting past that. Hopefully one day

(01:05:23):
we can just tell stories as they are and find
their beauty and share their beauty as they were.

Speaker 6 (01:05:29):
Maybe you should send a proposal to Tyler Perry.

Speaker 5 (01:05:32):
Taller period get his hands.

Speaker 6 (01:05:38):
But do you think model is going to make an.

Speaker 5 (01:05:40):
I tell you what, we have some kind of representation
of John Pete.

Speaker 6 (01:05:45):
Yeah, that's that's fair. Yeah, you know, Tumas Jefferson famously wrote,
I teach Jefferson along with Benjamin Banneker. You know that
I think helps marry him. But we talk about Jefferson
a lot. He infamously wrote that Wheatley was beneath criticism,
had never made her. I don't even know if he
had read any of her poetry, you know, but.

Speaker 5 (01:06:04):
He read, he read than Yeah, he read. He knew
who she was. That's why he had to, That's why
he put it. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. You know where is
that line from Beyonce what you say like you know,
you the bitch when you call all that conversation?

Speaker 4 (01:06:20):
Yeah, because he was like, she's beneath criticism, but then
criticizes her, fucking criticized.

Speaker 6 (01:06:28):
Which one is it?

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
I wanted to also open the floor up to all
of you if you had any questions for each other.

Speaker 5 (01:06:35):
I think what don may be the You say you're
currently working on a weekly chapter.

Speaker 6 (01:06:41):
Yeah, I'm working on two parts. Well my book chapter
on Weekly it's about her courtship of London and thinking
about how she gets to London all that stuff. But
I'm working on another project too, about teaching weekly as well. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:06:55):
Oh so what's so what's going on? Because like when
we were thinking about movies, I was thinking why don't
we do one Whee Lee in London? That might be
really that would be.

Speaker 6 (01:07:02):
Very interesting, that could be that could be the whole movie. Actually,
right about her going to seven days?

Speaker 5 (01:07:08):
Was she there for like seven days?

Speaker 6 (01:07:09):
Six and then she had all kinds of experiences. She
saw lions and things of that nature.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
So yeah, thatt with Ben Franklin.

Speaker 6 (01:07:19):
She met with Ben frank Clinch, who was you know,
did you read that he didn't he seem perturbed about
the whole meeting right in the latters?

Speaker 5 (01:07:27):
Okay, I think they were like they didn't greet him
as warmly as he I think I think that he
should have been greeted or like that.

Speaker 6 (01:07:36):
Yeah, he felt some kind of way about it.

Speaker 5 (01:07:38):
Now, Oh, the ego, although I do love the chief
being Franklin.

Speaker 3 (01:07:42):
But yeah, my favorite takeaway from this experience will probably
be the letter to skip your Moorehead, which I wasn't
familiar with until this experience, and I just it's the
And that also lends to what I was saying as
far as like her understanding of how valuable she was,

(01:08:06):
how valuable other artists that she was living in the
same time with were, and this idea of immortality and
that like your fame, like living well beyond your time.
And I think she was aware of that and aware
of how whatever her words her poems, they had this

(01:08:30):
opportunity to live well past her physical life, and that
was just really, really beautiful to me. So I would
like to ask, what do you think Wheatley would want
us to carry forward most urgently from her work into
the next century or into this century.

Speaker 5 (01:08:48):
Rather, I'm I guess, like, if I'm taking her at
her word what she says in the volume, like you know,
on her poem on Messinas or in the talked about
Scipio moorehead, I'm guessing that one of the things she
would want us to take is just a recognition of
the idea of visibility, right, and a recognition of what

(01:09:13):
the poet brings to culture. I think Don was talking
earlier about Weekly as a humanist, and I really think
that's a useful way of thinking about her, because, like
all about her poetry, she's reminding us of the power
of writing, of creativity, of the imagine, like it's culturally transformative.
And so I think that maybe one of the things

(01:09:35):
that she would appreciate is knowing that we get and
appreciate how powerful that is. And I mean, here we
are twenty twenty five and we're still talking about her work.
We still talking about the afterlives of Weekly. So yeah,
I think thinking about the humanist project that is poetry.

Speaker 6 (01:09:54):
Yeah, there's that one letter she comes back from London
and you know, she's writing with old and she tells Obert,
Oh my god, all this fun I had. It's almost
as I'm reading it as if my aunties are on
the phone, you know what I mean, You know what
I mean, you know, it's almost Yeah, it's almost as
ire if you know, she was just super excited to

(01:10:15):
tell her friend everything that she's seen, everything that she experienced.
And then there's this little poet that reminds me of
my grandmother. She's like, but I got to keep my
humbleness about. I can't let always go to my head,
you know. And of course I don't know how one
reads that, but for me, it just seems like she
didn't want to lose sight of the fact that she
had a larger design, a larger campaign, Like of course

(01:10:38):
she can get all these flowers and she can become
this great poet, and they can give her all the
accolades and everything she wanted, but she didn't want that
she had other things that she wanted to do with herself,
and she didn't want to take that information. And then it,
you know, get the big head in other words, that
I'm this super badass poet, badass person. And so I
think that level of sincerity that she had about herself,

(01:11:00):
that she was so capable of doing all these different things,
but that she wanted to make sure that she used
her talents for things that made her feel good, for
things that made her feel as if she was making
inroads into the conversations that she wanted to have, you know.
And so I think I remember her in that regard

(01:11:21):
and the fact that again she was so able to
look at the situations that were in front of her
and find people who in so many ways would not
be supportive of her, would look at her as less
than X, Y and Z, but she was the one
who was superior because she still saw them as me men.
She still saw them for who they were and what

(01:11:44):
they were and what they were capable of doing, not
what they had done. And I think that's something that
we could learn from a personal right field, as we
repeat over and over again from her letters to the
poems that she writes for little kids dying, I mean
all kinds of things that she's writing in these poems.

Speaker 4 (01:12:01):
I think that I'm still going to argue for the letters.
You know, the second proposal has a whole bunch of
letters in it, and it's like.

Speaker 6 (01:12:09):
You know, I.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
I'm oh, go ahead, done.

Speaker 6 (01:12:15):
So the part is is that Weekly was moving towards prose.

Speaker 4 (01:12:20):
You know, I think expanding her corpus a bit, like
the second volume isn't just more poems, it's poems and letters,
you know. So I think that I know that part
of me is saying this because of my own preference.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
She does not know that preference.

Speaker 4 (01:12:36):
But I also think that there there's an interesting expansion
in that second volume to include letters. So it's like, oh, hey,
you know, maybe what we should also carry forward is
kind of additional engagement with the letters.

Speaker 6 (01:12:55):
Teaching the letters is a great way as well to
tell that story that we've been talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Yeah, starting with you, don and one word, how would
you describe philis?

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
Sweetly?

Speaker 3 (01:13:08):
Philis?

Speaker 7 (01:13:08):
Sweetly is our humanous, innovated a woman.

Speaker 5 (01:13:16):
Can I change my tom tireless? Yes, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:13:33):
I really appreciate your time.

Speaker 1 (01:13:35):
Thank you, Yes, delightful, it was Thanks so much for
heaving us.

Speaker 3 (01:13:39):
When the movie comes out, we'll have to all get
together and go see it together, critique it.

Speaker 6 (01:13:44):
We're going to read the consults. They're going to retire.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
Black Lit is a Black Effects original series in partnership
with iHeart Media. Is written and created by myself Queise
Thomas and executive produced alongside Dolly s.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
Bishop.

Speaker 3 (01:14:04):
Chanelle Collins is the director of production, Head of Talent
Nicole Spence, writer producer Jason Torres, Our researcher and producer
is Jabari Davis, and the mix and sound design is
by the Humble Duane Crawford. Gratitude is an action, so
I have to give praise to those who took the
time out to write a review. Please keep sharing and

(01:14:27):
we will promise to bring more writers and greater episodes
to you. Also, if you're looking to become a writer
or in search of a supportive writing community, join me
for a free creative writing session on my website black
writers Room dot com, blk Writer's Room dot com, or

(01:14:50):
hit me up directly for more details at Underscore t
h A T s P E ace E.

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
That's Peace stettstettsteeteeteeteeteetee

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Reimagining Phillis Wheatley - Let's Discuss!