May 13, 2020 • 38 mins
Phillis Wheatley’s real name is lost to history. The young girl was named for the slave ship that carried her to the United States from West Africa. Purchased as a house slave in Boston, Phillis defied all the odds to become a prolific poet celebrated around the world and the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry in the United States. Eventually, she used her considerable talents to convince the people who owned her to return her freedom to her.
The story of Phillis’s complicated journey is followed by a conversation with world renowned poet Nikki Giovanni, who talks to Jo about the origins of African American poetry and the evolving narrative about Phillis Wheatley’s place in history.
Main Sources
- Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, published by Archibald Bell in London in 1773
- Various publications mentioned throughout the episode which published Phillis Wheatley’s poems and letters during her life.
- Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage - by Vincent Carretta
- The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers - by Henry Louis Gates
- The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundtation.org)
- The Phillis Wheatley Historical Society (http://www.phillis-wheatley.org/)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
In February of seventeen seventy six, General George Washington took
time out from fighting a bloody war of independence to
correspond with a young woman. A poet, Phyllis Swheetley, had
just written a poem for him. It was titled to
His Excellency, General Washington. In it, she offered in visions
of victory and relief from British tyranny. Proceed Great Chief,
(00:32):
with a virtue on thy side, thy every action. Let
the Goddess guide a crown, a mansion, and a throne
that shine with gold. Unfading Washington be thine. Washington was
enchanted and wildly impressed. I shall be happy to see
(00:53):
a person so favored by the muses, and to whom
nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations.
I am with great respect, your obedient, humble servant. Phyllis
Wheatley was an extraordinary woman. She defied all the odds
to become the first African American to publish a book
of poetry in America. Her poems were lauded by kings
(01:16):
and presidents. She's recognized as the fore mother of African
American literature. That's vincent Karta, author of Phyllis Wheatley, Biography
of a Genius in Bondage. She published a book when
she was at most twenty years old, and she became
a transatlantic international figure when she was barely out of
(01:39):
her teens, while she was still a slave. I mean,
it's really a kind of astounding story of her life,
how much she achieved so early she became an international celebrity.
Phyllis was a poet, an elegist, and a woman who
used her considerable talents to convince the people who owned
her to return her freedom to her. From I Heart
(02:07):
Radio and Tribeca Studios, this is fierce. I can't type. Yes,
women were going to problem a podcast about the incredible
women who never made it in your history books and
the modern women carrying on their legacies today. Us to
the Lady, the Fair and the Week. I can't find
women workers don't mind routine, repetitive working. Will you make
(02:30):
a copy of this naturally? Each week we're bringing you
the story of a groundbreaking woman from the past who
made huge contributions to the present, but whose name still
isn't on the tips of our tongues. For whatever reason.
Maybe it's because men wrote most of history. At the
end of each episode, I'll be joined by a woman
(02:50):
living today who's standing on the shoulders of this historical figure.
Whether she knows it or not. Phyllis is better known
than a lot of women in this series. She has
libraries and schools named after her, and yet I've met
(03:12):
so many men and women in the writing and publishing
community who had never heard her name before. The woman
who would later write under the name Phyllis Wheatley was
only about seven years old when she was forced to
endure the Middle Passage from West Africa on a slave
(03:34):
ship called the Phillis. After an arduous journey, the ship
dropped her in Boston, where she was sold for a
pittance to Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a prominent Boston merchant.
The captain of the ship believed the girl was too
sick to survive much longer, and he wanted to recoup
at least some of his money for her passage. The
guests that she was seven because she had just lost
(03:56):
some of her baby teeth. Her own name, the when
her parents had given her when she was born, is
lost to us. The Wheatley's named her after the ship
she came over on a Wheatly relative described her as
tiny and nearly naked, covered only in a dirty carpet,
despite the fact that she was obviously ill. Phyllis had
(04:19):
been purchased to work as a house slave, but Susannah
Wheatley and her twin eighteen year old children, Nathaniel and Mary,
also began teaching her to read and write. There were
about fifteen thousand people living in Boston at this time,
maybe a thousand of them were black. Of those, most
(04:39):
were free, but no black children were known to be
enrolled in school. When she quickly took to both reading
and writing, they moved on to Latin, Greek, British literature, astronomy,
and history. Interestingly, if you compare her writing to that
of a number of the white women and that she
(05:00):
corresponded with, her writing is much better. Despite having begun
her English language education significantly later than most children in
Boston and under the extremely traumatic circumstances of slavery, her
skills far outstripped those of her peers. So they bought
this small child, and she quickly demonstrated that she was
(05:24):
a prodigy, because she within four years she was attempting
to write poetry, so they gave her access to an
education that was beyond the access to education that most
white children Boston were given. Anyone who spent any amount
of time studying this period of American history knows that
(05:45):
white slave owners most often prevented slaves from being educated.
But we shouldn't assign undue heroism to the Wheatlies living
in Boston in the mid seventeen hundreds. They weren't exactly
risking their social standing by doing this, and they didn't
sending legal repercussions for it. Actual laws prohibiting slave literacy
would become most prominent in the eighteen hundreds after Phillis's death,
(06:08):
and those laws were mostly enacted in the South. Even
in the South, it wasn't always illegal to teach people
to read. That's Stana Williams, chair of the Department of
English and interim dean of the Graduate School at Howard University.
And you don't have that same kind of difficulty in
the North in terms of the uprising and rebellion, in
part because plantation, labor, and the harshness of slavery in
(06:32):
the South is different. In the North. It can just
be de facto understood that this isn't in the interest
of slaveholding to teach people to read, because we see
the connection between literacy and humanity, literacy and freedom, literacy
and property. So although she was encouraged in unprecedented ways
(06:53):
to the Wheetlies, Phillis was also a curiosity in some
ways a social experiment, and she was not free. There
were networks of people who supported Phillis Wheatly's work, and
they were friends of the Wheatlies in some instances, so
it was almost an experiment in terms of thinking about
whether this was something that was viable and what the
(07:15):
implications would be of this kind of education, and then
this kind of support of a girl who's otherwise enslave.
We know that it's not all altruistic because they don't
free her immediately and that they own her to begin with,
so they aren't quote unquote good people. Viewing Phillis as
a commodity, the Wheatlies would likely have made certain calculations
(07:36):
as to her worth to them. Wheatly, for most of
her adult life, was fairly frail. She was not able
to do domestic work in the same way that other
people would have been people who worked terribly hard. There's
a value orientation there as well, that says she has
to be worth something, otherwise she can be sold or dismissed.
Had she been fully robust and able to complete domestic work,
(08:01):
it very well may have been a different scenario. They
might not have been looking for their giftedness in her
to take advantage of their purchase. Here's Vincent Coretta again.
The better she looked, the better they looked. It was
almost as if she was like a luxury good, the
kind of equivalent of you buy a BMW and you
(08:21):
park it from your house so all your neighbors can
envy you in their social circles. It also reflected well
on the Wheatley's that the education they were providing was
a Christian education. They taught her to read and paraphrase
the Bible. She was recognized very quickly as a phenomenon.
John Wheatley, Susanna Whetley's husband, wrote, without any assistance from
(08:43):
school education, and by only what she was taught in
the family, she in sixteen months time from her arrival,
attained the English language. She has a great inclination to
learn the Latin tongue and has made some progress in it.
She wrote her first known Poe him at eleven. When
she was about thirteen, the Newport Mercury newspaper published one
(09:04):
of her poems after Susannah Wheatley submitted it to them.
The poem described two men nearly shipwrecked in a storm
off of Cape Cod. Phillis had heard the story when
the men came to dinner at the Wheatly's house. Suppose
the groundless gulf had snatched away Hussy and Coffin to
the raging sea. Where would they go? Where would be
(09:28):
their abode with the supreme and independent God? Or made
their beds down in the shades below? Were neither pleasure
nor content can flow? That's an actress reading Phillis Wheatley's words.
The sources for her quotes throughout the episode are from
her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published
(09:51):
in seventeen seventy three, and also from various periodicals which
published her poems and letters during her life, So that
poem didn't get much attention it was a local publication.
She never republished it. Still, the publication of that poem
made Phillis among the first published African Americans in America.
(10:12):
Three years later, at age seventeen, Phyllis wrote a poem
about the Boston massacre and an elegy to a man
named George Whitfield. He was an incredibly popular evangelical preacher
and the chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon in England.
He leaves this earth for Heaven's unmeasured height and world's
unknown received him from our sight there with field wings,
(10:38):
with rapid course his way and sales to Zion through
vast seas of day. That poem caught on like wildfire
and was published all over the country, in Boston, Newport,
and Philadelphia. He was published in London the next year,
giving Phillis a kind of fame on both sides of
the ocean, which was the lie. What I'm saying, well,
(11:01):
you you've gone from publishing in Indianapolis to publishing in
New York City. London is where you wanted to publish.
The academic and biographer Henry Louis Gates said it made
her the Tony Morrison of her time. It was then
that the Countess of Huntingdon became interested in Wheatley. The
Countess sent a couple of ministers to interview Phillis. One
(11:24):
of them gave her writing assignment to see if she
could actually write poetry. Phyllis astonished the minister by writing
the poem right in front of him. He wrote to
the Countess that he was amazed by this young girl,
and remember she's an enslaved teenager. At this point he said,
she's the real deal. And this ultimately eventually led to
(11:46):
the Counts of Huntingdon's being the patroness of Wheatley's first
well only published book in seventeen seventy three that came
out in London and was dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon.
An engraving of Phyllis appeared in the opening pages. The book,
Poems on Various Subjects, religious and Moral, was the first
(12:07):
book of poetry published in the English language by a
person of African descent. Henry Lewis Gates said the publication
was greeted with something akin to the shock of cloning
a sheep. The book's publisher, Archibald Bell, put it this way,
the book displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure,
unassisted genius that the world has ever produced. The author
(12:29):
is a native of Africa and left not the dark
part of the habitable system until she was eight years old.
Voltaire writes about her as proof that people of African
descent are capable of writing literature, whereas some people had
denied that that was a possibility. Her book was reviewed
(12:51):
fairly widely in England, especially in London, and most of
the reviews were positive, though somewhere kind of begrudgingly so.
Phyllis was celebrated for her mastery of the English language,
but academics now believe her gift for language would have
been well established before she was forced to leave her home,
(13:12):
before she had ever even heard a word of the
English language. What we have to keep in mind is
based on where we think that they was taken from.
She would have been fluent minimally in Wolof and in Arabic,
and would have been able to move between languages fairly easily,
so her command of language would not have been anything unusual.
You have a number of literate enslaved people who are
(13:35):
writing but not in English but in Arabic. We see
so little of that in nineteenth century literature, in part
because people in the America's were not familiar with Arabic.
There are some conversations about Weekly being seen very early
on with charcoal making marks and some scholars speculate that
she was trying to write Arabic, but the Weekly is
unable to recognize it, saw it just as markings. I
(13:59):
think her gift of language is what makes it possible
for her to pick up English and pick up Latin
and integrate all of these different things into something that
is palatable for the people who are consuming her work.
Time for a quick break when we come back, will
follow Phyllis on her life faltering trip to London. In
(14:20):
seventeen seventy three, when she was about twenty years old,
Phillis traveled to London with Nathaniel Wheatley to oversee her
books publication. It was a whirlwind tour that included work, tourism,
and rubbing elbows with the literary elite. While there, she
received a visit from Benjamin Franklin and toured the Tower
of London with anti slavery activist Granville Sharp. That London
(14:44):
visit would forever change the course of Phillis Wheatley's life.
See The year before her visit, the British courts had
handed down the Mansfield Decision. Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice
ruled that no slave brought to England from the alumnies
could forcibly legally be brought back to the colonies as
(15:05):
a slave. That ruling was widely publicized in the colonies,
in fact, that newspapers that would be warnings, don't bring
your slaves to England because they can run away and
you won't be able to bring them back. People used
to think of Phillis Wheatley as a fairly passive young
(15:26):
girl who just benefited from the charity of others. Phillis
Sweetley is a much more assertive young woman, and so
what I think she did. She said to her master's son, Look,
I'll go back, but I need to have your word
given to me in front of these people that I
will be freed if I go back. The wheatley Is
(15:49):
granted her freedom, and Phyllis, demonstrating remarkable business savvy for
her age, took several steps to distribute written proof of
that freedom. She was meant to see of the sales
of her book, and she wanted to be sure that
money went to her and not the Wheedlies. But freedom
didn't come with kind of guarantees of protection or rights
(16:09):
for a young black woman in pre Revolutionary War America,
and life was precarious enough for any person trying to
live by their pen People who were free people of
African descent often were property or had a skill set
that made them indispensable. And because she wasn't a seamstress,
(16:30):
she wasn't a laundress. There weren't things that she could
have done where she could have made a good living
independent of working with other people in her community. There
was no such thing as complete freedom at any moment.
Without a white person to affirm her identity and affirmer freedom,
those papers can become meaningless. There were plenty of instances
(16:53):
of free black people being enslaved despite having viable papers.
The volatility even for free people is something that we
have to take into consideration and understand that the options
that people had would have been very limited. Phyllis knew
she'd made resistance from people in Boston, so it is
in her best interest to keep the Wheatly family close
(17:13):
as her allies. She went back, and she recognized that
she had to become a businesswoman. She returned to live
with the Wheatlies. Literary critics in the Civil rights era
would later point to at least seeming ambivalence towards the
institution of slavery upon her return from London, though we
do get to see her decisively condemned slavery imprint. She
(17:35):
had long shared a correspondence with a minister named sansomcom
One of her letters to him was published in March
of seventeen seventy four in the Connecticut Gazette. In it,
she responds to a strong argument he's made against slavery,
and she takes it even further. In every human breast,
God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom.
(17:57):
It is impatient of oppression and hants for deliverance. How
well the cry for liberty and the reverse disposition for
the exercise of oppressive power over others agree. I humbly
think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher
to determine. And this is why I think it's so
important to read weekly holistically, because her letters are far
(18:21):
more revealing and she's far more critical of the state
of enslavement than in the poems that we get. And
I say the ones that we get as opposed to
saying the ones that she wrote, because we have no
idea if she wrote twenty poems that made it clear
that enslavement was completely wrong, and none of those came
(18:41):
to the surface because it would not have been in
the interests of the Wheklies to bring those to the four.
So between the Wheklies as her immediate kind of sensors
to um, the editors and the presses that she would
have had to work with to try to get her
work out, there was absolute censorship. Phillis had to survive
(19:02):
as best she could in the context she was forced into.
She used her talents to forge a path forward for herself.
Part of being a good business woman was keeping her
name in print. Phyllis knew that writing poems about high
profile people would get her attention and accolades, so in
seventeen she sent George Washington her poem about him. She
(19:23):
enclosed a letter. I have taken the freedom to address
your excellency in the enclosed poem and entreat your acceptance.
You're being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be
Generalist sum all of the armies of North America, together
with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy
(19:46):
to suppress. Wishing your excellency all possible success in the
great cause you are so generously engaged in. I thank
you most sincerely for your polite notice of me. The
elegant lines you enclosed, however undeserving I may be of
such encomium and panegyric. The style and manner exhibit a
(20:09):
striking proof of your poetical talents. If you should ever
come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy
to see a person so favored by the muses, and
to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in
her dispensations. I am, with great respect, your obedient, humble servant.
(20:30):
I think it was very intentional. So when she talks
about the pursuit of freedom from tyranny and celebrates it
in an elegy of heroic person, her point in doing that,
I think overwhelmingly is I am one of you, and
I too want my freedom. We want freedom from the
tyranny of oppression. Historians differ as to whether Phillis actually
(20:54):
visited Washington and Cambridge or not. Some say she passed
a half hour with them, Some say she delighted him
and his troops. Others say they never met at all,
but he would later help her publish that poem in
the Virginia gazette. The poems to specific people are also
customary for the time where that was part of how
(21:15):
you got some fame by writing to someone and in
celebration of someone, petitioning someone who is your benefactor, to
celebrate them because they give you money, because you make
them look good. Despite her publications and accolades, life as
a free woman was never going to be easy for Phyllis.
For one, the country was at war in turmoil, and
(21:37):
to her long time benefactor, Susanna Wheatley passed away in
seventeen seventy four. Most of Phyllis's supporters were preoccupied or
long dead. She attempted to print a second book, dedicated
to Benjamin Franklin, but she couldn't get it published. That's
probably in part because there was a depression going on
the war was going on. She couldn't publish it in
(21:59):
Lunn because of the war. Gates beautifully wrote that phyllis
is freedom enslaved or to a life of hardship. In
seventy eight, when she was about twenty four, she married
John Peters, a free black person like herself and a
man of many talents. He worked as a lawyer, a doctor,
(22:19):
and a businessman. He seemed to have a finger in
just about every pot, and yet as a black man,
he was always on the edges of society, feeding at
the crumbs of the business world. He hit bankruptcy more
than once. The challenges that we see with her husband
and his legal issues, I think would have everything to
do with the time in the space where he wasn't
(22:44):
propertied and he didn't have a skill set that was
indispensable either. So we see disputes happening that can't be
resolved and where there is some discrimination involved. We imagine
it's just a very difficult time for free people to
be independent of the society that they find themselves in.
(23:07):
The options just were limited for people of color. There
aren't many records of Phillis from seventeen eighty four. Her
husband was in and out of legal trouble and struggling
to find work and pay bills as a free black man.
Vincent Coretta speculates that the couple may have tried to
stay out of the public eye to avoid trouble. In
seventy four, Phillis did attempt to publish another volume of poems,
(23:31):
but she passed away before she was able to She
probably died of asthma, because she says that in previous winters,
and she mentions in various letters to people, I have
my asthmatic condition again. I'm ill again from that. Phillis
died in four she was only about thirty years old.
(23:54):
Her book wasn't published in America until two years after
her death, and sudden it wasn't published until seventeen six
in Philadelphia. She was only the second American woman after
and Brad Street in the seventeenth century, who published a
book in America. Then in the nineteenth century, on both
sides of the Atlantic, she was used as an example
(24:21):
of the abilities of people of African descent by both
people who are in favor of the slave trade or
against a slave trade on both sides. One of her
most famous and most controversial poems is found in her
book Poems on Various Subjects, religious and moral. It's called
on being brought from Africa to America, which was mercy
(24:44):
brought me from my pagan land, taught my benighted soul
to understand that there's a God, that there's a savior too.
Once I redemption neither sought nor new. Some view our
sable race with scornful eye. Their color is a diabolic die.
(25:06):
Remember Christians negroes black as Kane may be refined and
joined the angelic train. I think a particular kind of
reading of that poem makes it clear that it's not
as conciliatory and conservative as one might imagine, where she,
you know, writes towards mercy that brought me from my
(25:27):
pagan land, which suggests that you know, she was grateful
for being taken from Africa because she was introduced to Christianity.
And I think if we read it differently, we see
the irony of mercy. If it is mercy that brought
her from a pagan lands, then how do you explain
the violence and the enslavement, which is not characteristic of
her land of peace. She probably had different ideas of
(25:50):
what pagan meant, particularly in relation to Christianity, which you
know comes out of paganism. I think we can see
that there are at least two meanings happening in that poem.
I think she's feeding into that discourse at the time
where religious leaders were trying to decide whether or not
(26:11):
a person who had been indoctrinated into Christianity should then
be free. Um it's a real discourse that's happening at
the time to say, all right, if a person is
baptized and they become Christian, can you continue to enslave them?
So I think she's very clearly writing herself into that
discourse to say, I see your debates, and the way
that you're leaning is Christians or Negroes, unco blacks, cane
(26:35):
from the supposed curse have access to Christianity too, and
as such should be free. It's only recently, in the
past few decades that this type of nuanced interpretation of
Phyllis's work has gained more recognition and appreciation. In the
twentieth century, people didn't write as much about her, and
(26:59):
then in the nine seventies there was a lot of
criticism of her by both white and black literary critics,
one of whom accused her of having a white mind,
that she wasn't black enough, she wasn't political enough. From
the eighties on, we've become much more sophisticated in the
(27:20):
way we're reading her works, and we're much more conscious
of the fact that what we need to take into
consideration when we're reading a particular poem, was it written
while she was a slave or after she was free.
There are a number of schools named after Phillis Wheetlely
and in the country, but we can always do more
(27:40):
to make her known. Time for a break. When we
come back, I sit down with the renowned poet Nikki Giovanni. MS.
Giovanni was kind enough to share her thoughts on Phillis
Wheetley with us and describe her own path to becoming
a published poet at an extremely young age. Opinions of
Phillis Wheetley have changed drastically over the years, and even
(28:01):
though her work is increasingly recognized, she hasn't always been
included in the Western canon of great poets that get
taught in schools. The nature of the art world is
that you never know how long it's going to take
people to understand what great work you did. That's the
poet Nikki Giovanni. She's one of America's most celebrated living
poets today. Two centuries after Phillis made her mark in
(28:24):
the world, Nikki Giovanni created her own success by self
publishing her first book of poetry when she was just
twenty four years old. She sold a hundred copies of
that book out of the trunk of her car, kick
starting a career that spanned five decades. Miss Giovanni has
won the Langston Hughes Medal and the un Double A
CP Image Award. She's also been nominated for a Grammy
(28:44):
for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. We
spoke to Miss Giovanni at Virginia Tech, where she teaches poetry.
We talked about how she handles Phillis Whetley in the
classroom and the complexity involved in referring to Phillis as
a first in the world of poetry. Do you discuss
Phillis sweetly in your classes. We talk about people like
(29:07):
Phillis Wheatley and the fact that she had a voice
and she was determined to use it. That's what's important. Now.
Miss Wheatley, of course, was enslaved. She was purchased by somebody,
and I think it's important not to be purchased by somebody. Now.
Miss Wheatley couldn't help it because that was the age
you grew in. But now you have to own yourself.
(29:27):
You just have to own yourself. I have a copy
of her first edition. I was at an auction. I
was able to do it as hanging in my house.
So my respecting, my love of phillis what she had
was she had something to say, and she was in Boston,
and we forget that Bostonians and Mr Wheatley would be
a part of it. Had slaves And someone said, oh,
they taught her to read and write, But the enslaved
(29:49):
had learned to read and write a long time. They
had to because they're learning to listen to people and
they're talking back. What was the landscape like when you
first broke into the world of poetry. I'm not even
sure that I've broke into the poetry world. It's what
I can do. I couldn't sing, I don't know how
to dance. I'm not an actress. I had a really
very pretty sister, so I didn't want to try to be,
(30:10):
you know, the most beautiful person in the world. All
I could do, actually, and all I enjoyed doing, was watching.
And that's what writers do. We watch where there's still
barriers to you when you want to get published for
the first time. One of the big problems is that
everybody thinks somebody ought to be there to help them
do their work. It's not true. It's your work, you
get there and you take it to the people that
(30:30):
you want to hear. So the main thing that you
have to know, especially if you want to be a poet,
is that you have to find your audience and let
them hear what you're doing. There are no barriers to that.
The problem will be, of course, that you're not gonna
make a million dollars, that you're not gonna have your
private plane to pick you up, you're not gonna have
your limousine, you're not gonna have some big fat guy
being your security guard. All of that is crapped. Anyway,
(30:53):
how's your own poetry evolved since you first started out.
I've been in this business, if you want to call
it that, for over fifty years, so I should have
grown some, which I hope I did. I think my
first book was published when I was twenty four, and
I have a book that will be out in the
fall called Make Me Rain. And if I didn't grow
between my first book and the one that's coming, something's
(31:14):
wrong with somebody. You were young when you first published,
Can you tell us a little bit about how you
made that happen? Well, the first book that I published
called Black Feeling, Black Talk, and I published it. I
lived in New York, had a friend in the village.
We published it, and I asked him, you know, if
I published a hundred books, what would it cost me?
And he said, oh, I can do a hundred books
for a hundred dollars, which to me, I'm a good
(31:36):
business person. I'll never be rich because I don't want
to be rich, but I could do that. Division Oh,
that means I can sell the book for a dollar
a piece, and I'll break even. I had little votes
of wagon. Just put the books in the votes wagon.
And you know, you go around and you read your
poetry and people like a form or something, and you
can sell anybody anything for a dollar. If you can't
sell something for a dollar, or something wrong with you.
(31:57):
William Morl came to me and said, oh, you know,
we'd love to published your your next book, and I
said fine, because I didn't want to be I don't
want to be in business. Really. I wanted to get
the work out, but I didn't want to have to
spend my time doing that. When you think of Fellas,
do you think of her as someone who paved the
way for women poets and poets of color in America.
But miss Wheatley had to hear when she went to
the market, and she's in Boston, what she had to
(32:20):
hear when she went to the market. And she heard
those black women singing in the market, and she heard
the stories that they told, and she heard, as we
were talking about before, she heard a language that that
the white people who owned her, if I can use
that term, didn't know what they were talking about. Her
path was led by some of those old ladies in
the market. So we don't know who leads a path.
(32:41):
That's why you walk together, children, and don't you get weary.
And once we got out of slavery, we could go
back to doing what we want to. But you have
to remember that the poetry, which is actually the poetry
of the world, are the spirituals. The enslaved created the
music that is still heard around the world. The New
York Times recently did an article on Walt Whitman, and
(33:05):
I don't know why they called me, because I'm always
disappointing those people. And they said, uh, you know, Walt
Whitman is our first poet, and we'd like for you
to respond, And I did respond. Walt Whitman was not
our first poet, Our first poet was those women, particularly
who were in the field, who were singing songs, who
were putting a rhythm together, who were finding a way
to get up before light and cooking a meal and
(33:28):
putting something together so that they could go out and
pick cotton or pick peanuts or whatever it is that
they were being expected to do and come home at
night and there be a meal there. They were the
first poets. And if we recall Walt Whitman, you know,
used to hang around black people and then hanging around them,
whether it was in the hospital for Civil War and
all of that. That's what he heard, That's what he
(33:49):
learned something. And you get tired of that. You get
tired of white men stealing from black people. You get
tired of men stealing from women. You get tired of that.
But how do you push a gun stir? What do
you tell? I don't know what you do. I know
what I do is that when I run into it,
I said, you know you're wrong. That's I won't take that.
I won't let that happen. And I can't. But I
(34:10):
know this. You can't say foolishness in front of me
without me responding why are we constantly changing our opinions
of women like Fellis? We change our opinion on everything.
We change our opinion because everybody grows, We've learned a
little more, We've paid a little more attention. And it
wasn't that Phillis Sweetley wasn't neglected or anything. It's just
the world kept changing and changing, and now we have
(34:31):
time to sit down and say, well, what's going on here?
When did you first feel like people were taking you
seriously as a poet. I still try very hard not
to be bothered with thinking how people take me. And
I'm not good, I'm not friendly. I don't really care
what most people think about most things. I just don't
think it's my job. That's not what I am. I right.
I hope people like it. But if you start to
(34:53):
be bothered with what people think and how they think
of you, it will affect your work. It's so basic.
You know want that to happen. But it's hard not
to worry how people think about you, how people receive you.
In all fairness, because I know a lot of famous people,
and the one thing that that you can see is
that it makes you crazy. If you take it seriously,
(35:13):
you know. So I go to my grocery store. I
know people, I go get my gut. I'm not gonna
let my life be taken away from me. Is it
your responsibility to his poetry as activism or do you
write the poems for you? And if they happy to
perform the functions and social justice, that's just what they do.
I know I'm not going to change the world. I
know that, and I think I'm a pretty good poet.
(35:34):
But I know that I will never write the poem
that changes the world. So I don't have to worry
about that. I can write a poem and enjoy writing
it and enjoy reading it and sharing it with people,
because I know I'm not going to change the world.
But why are you so sure you're not going to
change the world? Because the world is too stupid. It
was a bad idea, and I'm really glad that God
doesn't call and ask me, Nikki, what do you think
(35:56):
you think I should let earth continue? I'd have to
be honest is God. You know you can't allow to God,
and so you know it didn't work. So that said,
what's your advice for the next generation of poets, particularly
women poets. There's no such thing as a bad poem.
You can make a mistake mathematically speaking, and everybody will
(36:16):
will suffer. You know, if you make a mistake, the
building will fall down, or the rocket will explode, or
you know, you have to drop, as they did recently,
the fuel out of the plane and bring it back.
But if you write a bad point, people read and say, oh,
it's bad point, and then a hundred years from him,
everybody's just, oh, it's brilliant. We're very grateful to our guests.
(36:38):
Author and professor at the University of Maryland, Dr Vincent Kretta,
Chair of the English Department and Interim Dean at the
Graduate School at Howard University, Dr Dania Williams, and renowned
poet and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Nikki Giovanni.
Phil As Sweetly is voiced by Ebony Booth. The male
voices in this episode, We're All done by Jacob bon
Eacle Pierce is hosted and written by O Piazza, produced
(37:01):
and directed by me Anna Stump. Our executive producers are
Joe Piazza, Nikki Etre, Anna Stump, and from Tribeca Studios
Lea Sarbefe. This episode was edited by Aaron Kaufman and
soundscaped by Anna Stump and Aaron Kaufman. Our associate producer
Emily Maronov was also instrumental in putting this episode together.
Fact checking by Austin Thompson, researched by Lizzie Jacobs. The
(37:21):
Fierce theme is by Hamilton Lighthouser and Anna Stump. Additional
music for this episode by Blue Dots Sessions and by
Aaron Kaufman. Our very sincere thanks to mangesh Had Tichador
for making this series possible. And now a special message
for someone who needs to be mentioned one more time, Nickyt,
thank you for everything. Sources for this episode Poems on
(37:42):
various subjects, religious and moral by Phillis Wheatley, published by
Archibald Bell in London in seventeen seventy three. Various publications
mentioned throughout the episode which published Phillis Wheaton's poems and
letters during her life. Phillis Wheatley Biography of a Genius
in Bondage by Vincent Koretta. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,
America's first Black poet, and her Encounters with the Founding
Fathers by Henry Lewis Gates, the Poetry Foundation at Poetry
(38:05):
Foundation dot org, and the Phillis Wheatley Historical Society at
Philis desh Wheatly dot org. Thanks so much for listening.
For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
In February of seventeen seventy six, General George Washington took
time out from fighting a bloody war of independence to
correspond with a young woman. A poet, Phyllis Swheetley, had
just written a poem for him. It was titled to
His Excellency, General Washington. In it, she offered in visions
of victory and relief from British tyranny. Proceed Great Chief,
(00:32):
with a virtue on thy side, thy every action. Let
the Goddess guide a crown, a mansion, and a throne
that shine with gold. Unfading Washington be thine. Washington was
enchanted and wildly impressed. I shall be happy to see
(00:53):
a person so favored by the muses, and to whom
nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations.
I am with great respect, your obedient, humble servant. Phyllis
Wheatley was an extraordinary woman. She defied all the odds
to become the first African American to publish a book
of poetry in America. Her poems were lauded by kings
(01:16):
and presidents. She's recognized as the fore mother of African
American literature. That's vincent Karta, author of Phyllis Wheatley, Biography
of a Genius in Bondage. She published a book when
she was at most twenty years old, and she became
a transatlantic international figure when she was barely out of
(01:39):
her teens, while she was still a slave. I mean,
it's really a kind of astounding story of her life,
how much she achieved so early she became an international celebrity.
Phyllis was a poet, an elegist, and a woman who
used her considerable talents to convince the people who owned
her to return her freedom to her. From I Heart
(02:07):
Radio and Tribeca Studios, this is fierce. I can't type. Yes,
women were going to problem a podcast about the incredible
women who never made it in your history books and
the modern women carrying on their legacies today. Us to
the Lady, the Fair and the Week. I can't find
women workers don't mind routine, repetitive working. Will you make
(02:30):
a copy of this naturally? Each week we're bringing you
the story of a groundbreaking woman from the past who
made huge contributions to the present, but whose name still
isn't on the tips of our tongues. For whatever reason.
Maybe it's because men wrote most of history. At the
end of each episode, I'll be joined by a woman
(02:50):
living today who's standing on the shoulders of this historical figure.
Whether she knows it or not. Phyllis is better known
than a lot of women in this series. She has
libraries and schools named after her, and yet I've met
(03:12):
so many men and women in the writing and publishing
community who had never heard her name before. The woman
who would later write under the name Phyllis Wheatley was
only about seven years old when she was forced to
endure the Middle Passage from West Africa on a slave
(03:34):
ship called the Phillis. After an arduous journey, the ship
dropped her in Boston, where she was sold for a
pittance to Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a prominent Boston merchant.
The captain of the ship believed the girl was too
sick to survive much longer, and he wanted to recoup
at least some of his money for her passage. The
guests that she was seven because she had just lost
(03:56):
some of her baby teeth. Her own name, the when
her parents had given her when she was born, is
lost to us. The Wheatley's named her after the ship
she came over on a Wheatly relative described her as
tiny and nearly naked, covered only in a dirty carpet,
despite the fact that she was obviously ill. Phyllis had
(04:19):
been purchased to work as a house slave, but Susannah
Wheatley and her twin eighteen year old children, Nathaniel and Mary,
also began teaching her to read and write. There were
about fifteen thousand people living in Boston at this time,
maybe a thousand of them were black. Of those, most
(04:39):
were free, but no black children were known to be
enrolled in school. When she quickly took to both reading
and writing, they moved on to Latin, Greek, British literature, astronomy,
and history. Interestingly, if you compare her writing to that
of a number of the white women and that she
(05:00):
corresponded with, her writing is much better. Despite having begun
her English language education significantly later than most children in
Boston and under the extremely traumatic circumstances of slavery, her
skills far outstripped those of her peers. So they bought
this small child, and she quickly demonstrated that she was
(05:24):
a prodigy, because she within four years she was attempting
to write poetry, so they gave her access to an
education that was beyond the access to education that most
white children Boston were given. Anyone who spent any amount
of time studying this period of American history knows that
(05:45):
white slave owners most often prevented slaves from being educated.
But we shouldn't assign undue heroism to the Wheatlies living
in Boston in the mid seventeen hundreds. They weren't exactly
risking their social standing by doing this, and they didn't
sending legal repercussions for it. Actual laws prohibiting slave literacy
would become most prominent in the eighteen hundreds after Phillis's death,
(06:08):
and those laws were mostly enacted in the South. Even
in the South, it wasn't always illegal to teach people
to read. That's Stana Williams, chair of the Department of
English and interim dean of the Graduate School at Howard University.
And you don't have that same kind of difficulty in
the North in terms of the uprising and rebellion, in
part because plantation, labor, and the harshness of slavery in
(06:32):
the South is different. In the North. It can just
be de facto understood that this isn't in the interest
of slaveholding to teach people to read, because we see
the connection between literacy and humanity, literacy and freedom, literacy
and property. So although she was encouraged in unprecedented ways
(06:53):
to the Wheetlies, Phillis was also a curiosity in some
ways a social experiment, and she was not free. There
were networks of people who supported Phillis Wheatly's work, and
they were friends of the Wheatlies in some instances, so
it was almost an experiment in terms of thinking about
whether this was something that was viable and what the
(07:15):
implications would be of this kind of education, and then
this kind of support of a girl who's otherwise enslave.
We know that it's not all altruistic because they don't
free her immediately and that they own her to begin with,
so they aren't quote unquote good people. Viewing Phillis as
a commodity, the Wheatlies would likely have made certain calculations
(07:36):
as to her worth to them. Wheatly, for most of
her adult life, was fairly frail. She was not able
to do domestic work in the same way that other
people would have been people who worked terribly hard. There's
a value orientation there as well, that says she has
to be worth something, otherwise she can be sold or dismissed.
Had she been fully robust and able to complete domestic work,
(08:01):
it very well may have been a different scenario. They
might not have been looking for their giftedness in her
to take advantage of their purchase. Here's Vincent Coretta again.
The better she looked, the better they looked. It was
almost as if she was like a luxury good, the
kind of equivalent of you buy a BMW and you
(08:21):
park it from your house so all your neighbors can
envy you in their social circles. It also reflected well
on the Wheatley's that the education they were providing was
a Christian education. They taught her to read and paraphrase
the Bible. She was recognized very quickly as a phenomenon.
John Wheatley, Susanna Whetley's husband, wrote, without any assistance from
(08:43):
school education, and by only what she was taught in
the family, she in sixteen months time from her arrival,
attained the English language. She has a great inclination to
learn the Latin tongue and has made some progress in it.
She wrote her first known Poe him at eleven. When
she was about thirteen, the Newport Mercury newspaper published one
(09:04):
of her poems after Susannah Wheatley submitted it to them.
The poem described two men nearly shipwrecked in a storm
off of Cape Cod. Phillis had heard the story when
the men came to dinner at the Wheatly's house. Suppose
the groundless gulf had snatched away Hussy and Coffin to
the raging sea. Where would they go? Where would be
(09:28):
their abode with the supreme and independent God? Or made
their beds down in the shades below? Were neither pleasure
nor content can flow? That's an actress reading Phillis Wheatley's words.
The sources for her quotes throughout the episode are from
her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published
(09:51):
in seventeen seventy three, and also from various periodicals which
published her poems and letters during her life, So that
poem didn't get much attention it was a local publication.
She never republished it. Still, the publication of that poem
made Phillis among the first published African Americans in America.
(10:12):
Three years later, at age seventeen, Phyllis wrote a poem
about the Boston massacre and an elegy to a man
named George Whitfield. He was an incredibly popular evangelical preacher
and the chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon in England.
He leaves this earth for Heaven's unmeasured height and world's
unknown received him from our sight there with field wings,
(10:38):
with rapid course his way and sales to Zion through
vast seas of day. That poem caught on like wildfire
and was published all over the country, in Boston, Newport,
and Philadelphia. He was published in London the next year,
giving Phillis a kind of fame on both sides of
the ocean, which was the lie. What I'm saying, well,
(11:01):
you you've gone from publishing in Indianapolis to publishing in
New York City. London is where you wanted to publish.
The academic and biographer Henry Louis Gates said it made
her the Tony Morrison of her time. It was then
that the Countess of Huntingdon became interested in Wheatley. The
Countess sent a couple of ministers to interview Phillis. One
(11:24):
of them gave her writing assignment to see if she
could actually write poetry. Phyllis astonished the minister by writing
the poem right in front of him. He wrote to
the Countess that he was amazed by this young girl,
and remember she's an enslaved teenager. At this point he said,
she's the real deal. And this ultimately eventually led to
(11:46):
the Counts of Huntingdon's being the patroness of Wheatley's first
well only published book in seventeen seventy three that came
out in London and was dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon.
An engraving of Phyllis appeared in the opening pages. The book,
Poems on Various Subjects, religious and Moral, was the first
(12:07):
book of poetry published in the English language by a
person of African descent. Henry Lewis Gates said the publication
was greeted with something akin to the shock of cloning
a sheep. The book's publisher, Archibald Bell, put it this way,
the book displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure,
unassisted genius that the world has ever produced. The author
(12:29):
is a native of Africa and left not the dark
part of the habitable system until she was eight years old.
Voltaire writes about her as proof that people of African
descent are capable of writing literature, whereas some people had
denied that that was a possibility. Her book was reviewed
(12:51):
fairly widely in England, especially in London, and most of
the reviews were positive, though somewhere kind of begrudgingly so.
Phyllis was celebrated for her mastery of the English language,
but academics now believe her gift for language would have
been well established before she was forced to leave her home,
(13:12):
before she had ever even heard a word of the
English language. What we have to keep in mind is
based on where we think that they was taken from.
She would have been fluent minimally in Wolof and in Arabic,
and would have been able to move between languages fairly easily,
so her command of language would not have been anything unusual.
You have a number of literate enslaved people who are
(13:35):
writing but not in English but in Arabic. We see
so little of that in nineteenth century literature, in part
because people in the America's were not familiar with Arabic.
There are some conversations about Weekly being seen very early
on with charcoal making marks and some scholars speculate that
she was trying to write Arabic, but the Weekly is
unable to recognize it, saw it just as markings. I
(13:59):
think her gift of language is what makes it possible
for her to pick up English and pick up Latin
and integrate all of these different things into something that
is palatable for the people who are consuming her work.
Time for a quick break when we come back, will
follow Phyllis on her life faltering trip to London. In
(14:20):
seventeen seventy three, when she was about twenty years old,
Phillis traveled to London with Nathaniel Wheatley to oversee her
books publication. It was a whirlwind tour that included work, tourism,
and rubbing elbows with the literary elite. While there, she
received a visit from Benjamin Franklin and toured the Tower
of London with anti slavery activist Granville Sharp. That London
(14:44):
visit would forever change the course of Phillis Wheatley's life.
See The year before her visit, the British courts had
handed down the Mansfield Decision. Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice
ruled that no slave brought to England from the alumnies
could forcibly legally be brought back to the colonies as
(15:05):
a slave. That ruling was widely publicized in the colonies,
in fact, that newspapers that would be warnings, don't bring
your slaves to England because they can run away and
you won't be able to bring them back. People used
to think of Phillis Wheatley as a fairly passive young
(15:26):
girl who just benefited from the charity of others. Phillis
Sweetley is a much more assertive young woman, and so
what I think she did. She said to her master's son, Look,
I'll go back, but I need to have your word
given to me in front of these people that I
will be freed if I go back. The wheatley Is
(15:49):
granted her freedom, and Phyllis, demonstrating remarkable business savvy for
her age, took several steps to distribute written proof of
that freedom. She was meant to see of the sales
of her book, and she wanted to be sure that
money went to her and not the Wheedlies. But freedom
didn't come with kind of guarantees of protection or rights
(16:09):
for a young black woman in pre Revolutionary War America,
and life was precarious enough for any person trying to
live by their pen People who were free people of
African descent often were property or had a skill set
that made them indispensable. And because she wasn't a seamstress,
(16:30):
she wasn't a laundress. There weren't things that she could
have done where she could have made a good living
independent of working with other people in her community. There
was no such thing as complete freedom at any moment.
Without a white person to affirm her identity and affirmer freedom,
those papers can become meaningless. There were plenty of instances
(16:53):
of free black people being enslaved despite having viable papers.
The volatility even for free people is something that we
have to take into consideration and understand that the options
that people had would have been very limited. Phyllis knew
she'd made resistance from people in Boston, so it is
in her best interest to keep the Wheatly family close
(17:13):
as her allies. She went back, and she recognized that
she had to become a businesswoman. She returned to live
with the Wheatlies. Literary critics in the Civil rights era
would later point to at least seeming ambivalence towards the
institution of slavery upon her return from London, though we
do get to see her decisively condemned slavery imprint. She
(17:35):
had long shared a correspondence with a minister named sansomcom
One of her letters to him was published in March
of seventeen seventy four in the Connecticut Gazette. In it,
she responds to a strong argument he's made against slavery,
and she takes it even further. In every human breast,
God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom.
(17:57):
It is impatient of oppression and hants for deliverance. How
well the cry for liberty and the reverse disposition for
the exercise of oppressive power over others agree. I humbly
think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher
to determine. And this is why I think it's so
important to read weekly holistically, because her letters are far
(18:21):
more revealing and she's far more critical of the state
of enslavement than in the poems that we get. And
I say the ones that we get as opposed to
saying the ones that she wrote, because we have no
idea if she wrote twenty poems that made it clear
that enslavement was completely wrong, and none of those came
(18:41):
to the surface because it would not have been in
the interests of the Wheklies to bring those to the four.
So between the Wheklies as her immediate kind of sensors
to um, the editors and the presses that she would
have had to work with to try to get her
work out, there was absolute censorship. Phillis had to survive
(19:02):
as best she could in the context she was forced into.
She used her talents to forge a path forward for herself.
Part of being a good business woman was keeping her
name in print. Phyllis knew that writing poems about high
profile people would get her attention and accolades, so in
seventeen she sent George Washington her poem about him. She
(19:23):
enclosed a letter. I have taken the freedom to address
your excellency in the enclosed poem and entreat your acceptance.
You're being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be
Generalist sum all of the armies of North America, together
with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy
(19:46):
to suppress. Wishing your excellency all possible success in the
great cause you are so generously engaged in. I thank
you most sincerely for your polite notice of me. The
elegant lines you enclosed, however undeserving I may be of
such encomium and panegyric. The style and manner exhibit a
(20:09):
striking proof of your poetical talents. If you should ever
come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy
to see a person so favored by the muses, and
to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in
her dispensations. I am, with great respect, your obedient, humble servant.
(20:30):
I think it was very intentional. So when she talks
about the pursuit of freedom from tyranny and celebrates it
in an elegy of heroic person, her point in doing that,
I think overwhelmingly is I am one of you, and
I too want my freedom. We want freedom from the
tyranny of oppression. Historians differ as to whether Phillis actually
(20:54):
visited Washington and Cambridge or not. Some say she passed
a half hour with them, Some say she delighted him
and his troops. Others say they never met at all,
but he would later help her publish that poem in
the Virginia gazette. The poems to specific people are also
customary for the time where that was part of how
(21:15):
you got some fame by writing to someone and in
celebration of someone, petitioning someone who is your benefactor, to
celebrate them because they give you money, because you make
them look good. Despite her publications and accolades, life as
a free woman was never going to be easy for Phyllis.
For one, the country was at war in turmoil, and
(21:37):
to her long time benefactor, Susanna Wheatley passed away in
seventeen seventy four. Most of Phyllis's supporters were preoccupied or
long dead. She attempted to print a second book, dedicated
to Benjamin Franklin, but she couldn't get it published. That's
probably in part because there was a depression going on
the war was going on. She couldn't publish it in
(21:59):
Lunn because of the war. Gates beautifully wrote that phyllis
is freedom enslaved or to a life of hardship. In
seventy eight, when she was about twenty four, she married
John Peters, a free black person like herself and a
man of many talents. He worked as a lawyer, a doctor,
(22:19):
and a businessman. He seemed to have a finger in
just about every pot, and yet as a black man,
he was always on the edges of society, feeding at
the crumbs of the business world. He hit bankruptcy more
than once. The challenges that we see with her husband
and his legal issues, I think would have everything to
do with the time in the space where he wasn't
(22:44):
propertied and he didn't have a skill set that was
indispensable either. So we see disputes happening that can't be
resolved and where there is some discrimination involved. We imagine
it's just a very difficult time for free people to
be independent of the society that they find themselves in.
(23:07):
The options just were limited for people of color. There
aren't many records of Phillis from seventeen eighty four. Her
husband was in and out of legal trouble and struggling
to find work and pay bills as a free black man.
Vincent Coretta speculates that the couple may have tried to
stay out of the public eye to avoid trouble. In
seventy four, Phillis did attempt to publish another volume of poems,
(23:31):
but she passed away before she was able to She
probably died of asthma, because she says that in previous winters,
and she mentions in various letters to people, I have
my asthmatic condition again. I'm ill again from that. Phillis
died in four she was only about thirty years old.
(23:54):
Her book wasn't published in America until two years after
her death, and sudden it wasn't published until seventeen six
in Philadelphia. She was only the second American woman after
and Brad Street in the seventeenth century, who published a
book in America. Then in the nineteenth century, on both
sides of the Atlantic, she was used as an example
(24:21):
of the abilities of people of African descent by both
people who are in favor of the slave trade or
against a slave trade on both sides. One of her
most famous and most controversial poems is found in her
book Poems on Various Subjects, religious and moral. It's called
on being brought from Africa to America, which was mercy
(24:44):
brought me from my pagan land, taught my benighted soul
to understand that there's a God, that there's a savior too.
Once I redemption neither sought nor new. Some view our
sable race with scornful eye. Their color is a diabolic die.
(25:06):
Remember Christians negroes black as Kane may be refined and
joined the angelic train. I think a particular kind of
reading of that poem makes it clear that it's not
as conciliatory and conservative as one might imagine, where she,
you know, writes towards mercy that brought me from my
(25:27):
pagan land, which suggests that you know, she was grateful
for being taken from Africa because she was introduced to Christianity.
And I think if we read it differently, we see
the irony of mercy. If it is mercy that brought
her from a pagan lands, then how do you explain
the violence and the enslavement, which is not characteristic of
her land of peace. She probably had different ideas of
(25:50):
what pagan meant, particularly in relation to Christianity, which you
know comes out of paganism. I think we can see
that there are at least two meanings happening in that poem.
I think she's feeding into that discourse at the time
where religious leaders were trying to decide whether or not
(26:11):
a person who had been indoctrinated into Christianity should then
be free. Um it's a real discourse that's happening at
the time to say, all right, if a person is
baptized and they become Christian, can you continue to enslave them?
So I think she's very clearly writing herself into that
discourse to say, I see your debates, and the way
that you're leaning is Christians or Negroes, unco blacks, cane
(26:35):
from the supposed curse have access to Christianity too, and
as such should be free. It's only recently, in the
past few decades that this type of nuanced interpretation of
Phyllis's work has gained more recognition and appreciation. In the
twentieth century, people didn't write as much about her, and
(26:59):
then in the nine seventies there was a lot of
criticism of her by both white and black literary critics,
one of whom accused her of having a white mind,
that she wasn't black enough, she wasn't political enough. From
the eighties on, we've become much more sophisticated in the
(27:20):
way we're reading her works, and we're much more conscious
of the fact that what we need to take into
consideration when we're reading a particular poem, was it written
while she was a slave or after she was free.
There are a number of schools named after Phillis Wheetlely
and in the country, but we can always do more
(27:40):
to make her known. Time for a break. When we
come back, I sit down with the renowned poet Nikki Giovanni. MS.
Giovanni was kind enough to share her thoughts on Phillis
Wheetley with us and describe her own path to becoming
a published poet at an extremely young age. Opinions of
Phillis Wheetley have changed drastically over the years, and even
(28:01):
though her work is increasingly recognized, she hasn't always been
included in the Western canon of great poets that get
taught in schools. The nature of the art world is
that you never know how long it's going to take
people to understand what great work you did. That's the
poet Nikki Giovanni. She's one of America's most celebrated living
poets today. Two centuries after Phillis made her mark in
(28:24):
the world, Nikki Giovanni created her own success by self
publishing her first book of poetry when she was just
twenty four years old. She sold a hundred copies of
that book out of the trunk of her car, kick
starting a career that spanned five decades. Miss Giovanni has
won the Langston Hughes Medal and the un Double A
CP Image Award. She's also been nominated for a Grammy
(28:44):
for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. We
spoke to Miss Giovanni at Virginia Tech, where she teaches poetry.
We talked about how she handles Phillis Whetley in the
classroom and the complexity involved in referring to Phillis as
a first in the world of poetry. Do you discuss
Phillis sweetly in your classes. We talk about people like
(29:07):
Phillis Wheatley and the fact that she had a voice
and she was determined to use it. That's what's important. Now.
Miss Wheatley, of course, was enslaved. She was purchased by somebody,
and I think it's important not to be purchased by somebody. Now.
Miss Wheatley couldn't help it because that was the age
you grew in. But now you have to own yourself.
(29:27):
You just have to own yourself. I have a copy
of her first edition. I was at an auction. I
was able to do it as hanging in my house.
So my respecting, my love of phillis what she had
was she had something to say, and she was in Boston,
and we forget that Bostonians and Mr Wheatley would be
a part of it. Had slaves And someone said, oh,
they taught her to read and write, But the enslaved
(29:49):
had learned to read and write a long time. They
had to because they're learning to listen to people and
they're talking back. What was the landscape like when you
first broke into the world of poetry. I'm not even
sure that I've broke into the poetry world. It's what
I can do. I couldn't sing, I don't know how
to dance. I'm not an actress. I had a really
very pretty sister, so I didn't want to try to be,
(30:10):
you know, the most beautiful person in the world. All
I could do, actually, and all I enjoyed doing, was watching.
And that's what writers do. We watch where there's still
barriers to you when you want to get published for
the first time. One of the big problems is that
everybody thinks somebody ought to be there to help them
do their work. It's not true. It's your work, you
get there and you take it to the people that
(30:30):
you want to hear. So the main thing that you
have to know, especially if you want to be a poet,
is that you have to find your audience and let
them hear what you're doing. There are no barriers to that.
The problem will be, of course, that you're not gonna
make a million dollars, that you're not gonna have your
private plane to pick you up, you're not gonna have
your limousine, you're not gonna have some big fat guy
being your security guard. All of that is crapped. Anyway,
(30:53):
how's your own poetry evolved since you first started out.
I've been in this business, if you want to call
it that, for over fifty years, so I should have
grown some, which I hope I did. I think my
first book was published when I was twenty four, and
I have a book that will be out in the
fall called Make Me Rain. And if I didn't grow
between my first book and the one that's coming, something's
(31:14):
wrong with somebody. You were young when you first published,
Can you tell us a little bit about how you
made that happen? Well, the first book that I published
called Black Feeling, Black Talk, and I published it. I
lived in New York, had a friend in the village.
We published it, and I asked him, you know, if
I published a hundred books, what would it cost me?
And he said, oh, I can do a hundred books
for a hundred dollars, which to me, I'm a good
(31:36):
business person. I'll never be rich because I don't want
to be rich, but I could do that. Division Oh,
that means I can sell the book for a dollar
a piece, and I'll break even. I had little votes
of wagon. Just put the books in the votes wagon.
And you know, you go around and you read your
poetry and people like a form or something, and you
can sell anybody anything for a dollar. If you can't
sell something for a dollar, or something wrong with you.
(31:57):
William Morl came to me and said, oh, you know,
we'd love to published your your next book, and I
said fine, because I didn't want to be I don't
want to be in business. Really. I wanted to get
the work out, but I didn't want to have to
spend my time doing that. When you think of Fellas,
do you think of her as someone who paved the
way for women poets and poets of color in America.
But miss Wheatley had to hear when she went to
the market, and she's in Boston, what she had to
(32:20):
hear when she went to the market. And she heard
those black women singing in the market, and she heard
the stories that they told, and she heard, as we
were talking about before, she heard a language that that
the white people who owned her, if I can use
that term, didn't know what they were talking about. Her
path was led by some of those old ladies in
the market. So we don't know who leads a path.
(32:41):
That's why you walk together, children, and don't you get weary.
And once we got out of slavery, we could go
back to doing what we want to. But you have
to remember that the poetry, which is actually the poetry
of the world, are the spirituals. The enslaved created the
music that is still heard around the world. The New
York Times recently did an article on Walt Whitman, and
(33:05):
I don't know why they called me, because I'm always
disappointing those people. And they said, uh, you know, Walt
Whitman is our first poet, and we'd like for you
to respond, And I did respond. Walt Whitman was not
our first poet, Our first poet was those women, particularly
who were in the field, who were singing songs, who
were putting a rhythm together, who were finding a way
to get up before light and cooking a meal and
(33:28):
putting something together so that they could go out and
pick cotton or pick peanuts or whatever it is that
they were being expected to do and come home at
night and there be a meal there. They were the
first poets. And if we recall Walt Whitman, you know,
used to hang around black people and then hanging around them,
whether it was in the hospital for Civil War and
all of that. That's what he heard, That's what he
(33:49):
learned something. And you get tired of that. You get
tired of white men stealing from black people. You get
tired of men stealing from women. You get tired of that.
But how do you push a gun stir? What do
you tell? I don't know what you do. I know
what I do is that when I run into it,
I said, you know you're wrong. That's I won't take that.
I won't let that happen. And I can't. But I
(34:10):
know this. You can't say foolishness in front of me
without me responding why are we constantly changing our opinions
of women like Fellis? We change our opinion on everything.
We change our opinion because everybody grows, We've learned a
little more, We've paid a little more attention. And it
wasn't that Phillis Sweetley wasn't neglected or anything. It's just
the world kept changing and changing, and now we have
(34:31):
time to sit down and say, well, what's going on here?
When did you first feel like people were taking you
seriously as a poet. I still try very hard not
to be bothered with thinking how people take me. And
I'm not good, I'm not friendly. I don't really care
what most people think about most things. I just don't
think it's my job. That's not what I am. I right.
I hope people like it. But if you start to
(34:53):
be bothered with what people think and how they think
of you, it will affect your work. It's so basic.
You know want that to happen. But it's hard not
to worry how people think about you, how people receive you.
In all fairness, because I know a lot of famous people,
and the one thing that that you can see is
that it makes you crazy. If you take it seriously,
(35:13):
you know. So I go to my grocery store. I
know people, I go get my gut. I'm not gonna
let my life be taken away from me. Is it
your responsibility to his poetry as activism or do you
write the poems for you? And if they happy to
perform the functions and social justice, that's just what they do.
I know I'm not going to change the world. I
know that, and I think I'm a pretty good poet.
(35:34):
But I know that I will never write the poem
that changes the world. So I don't have to worry
about that. I can write a poem and enjoy writing
it and enjoy reading it and sharing it with people,
because I know I'm not going to change the world.
But why are you so sure you're not going to
change the world? Because the world is too stupid. It
was a bad idea, and I'm really glad that God
doesn't call and ask me, Nikki, what do you think
(35:56):
you think I should let earth continue? I'd have to
be honest is God. You know you can't allow to God,
and so you know it didn't work. So that said,
what's your advice for the next generation of poets, particularly
women poets. There's no such thing as a bad poem.
You can make a mistake mathematically speaking, and everybody will
(36:16):
will suffer. You know, if you make a mistake, the
building will fall down, or the rocket will explode, or
you know, you have to drop, as they did recently,
the fuel out of the plane and bring it back.
But if you write a bad point, people read and say, oh,
it's bad point, and then a hundred years from him,
everybody's just, oh, it's brilliant. We're very grateful to our guests.
(36:38):
Author and professor at the University of Maryland, Dr Vincent Kretta,
Chair of the English Department and Interim Dean at the
Graduate School at Howard University, Dr Dania Williams, and renowned
poet and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Nikki Giovanni.
Phil As Sweetly is voiced by Ebony Booth. The male
voices in this episode, We're All done by Jacob bon
Eacle Pierce is hosted and written by O Piazza, produced
(37:01):
and directed by me Anna Stump. Our executive producers are
Joe Piazza, Nikki Etre, Anna Stump, and from Tribeca Studios
Lea Sarbefe. This episode was edited by Aaron Kaufman and
soundscaped by Anna Stump and Aaron Kaufman. Our associate producer
Emily Maronov was also instrumental in putting this episode together.
Fact checking by Austin Thompson, researched by Lizzie Jacobs. The
(37:21):
Fierce theme is by Hamilton Lighthouser and Anna Stump. Additional
music for this episode by Blue Dots Sessions and by
Aaron Kaufman. Our very sincere thanks to mangesh Had Tichador
for making this series possible. And now a special message
for someone who needs to be mentioned one more time, Nickyt,
thank you for everything. Sources for this episode Poems on
(37:42):
various subjects, religious and moral by Phillis Wheatley, published by
Archibald Bell in London in seventeen seventy three. Various publications
mentioned throughout the episode which published Phillis Wheaton's poems and
letters during her life. Phillis Wheatley Biography of a Genius
in Bondage by Vincent Koretta. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,
America's first Black poet, and her Encounters with the Founding
Fathers by Henry Lewis Gates, the Poetry Foundation at Poetry
(38:05):
Foundation dot org, and the Phillis Wheatley Historical Society at
Philis desh Wheatly dot org. Thanks so much for listening.
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