Phillis Wheatley's Unfinished Revolution

Getting literary with Professor David Waldstreicher

Phillis Wheatley, the famous poet from the late eighteenth century, has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance of late, thanks in no small part to Professor David Waldstreicher. In his latest book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, Professor Waldstreicher explores how Wheatley waged antiracist battles that feel all too familiar today.

Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He’s written recently for the Boston Review and The Atlantic and is the author of several books on early U.S. politics and culture. In conversation, Professor Waldstreicher revealed the challenges Wheatley faced as an enslaved celebrity arguing for freedom through poetry.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. Paying subscribers can also listen to the audio of the conversation, which includes further literary analysis from Professor Waldstreicher, his recitation of some of Wheatley’s poems, my unfortunate reference to Lindsay Lohan, and more:

We compared poetry to social media

Ben: Professor Waldstreicher, it’s a pleasure to have you here.

DW: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Ben: Today, I’d like to explore the journeys of Phillis Wheatley. Up top, could you give us a general picture of who Phillis was? Like, when and how did she arrive in the US, who took her in, and why are all of those questions extremely euphemistic?

DW: Phillis Wheatley was an African girl who was brought on a slave ship to Boston in 1761. She was bought off that ship by Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a merchant and tailor named John Wheatley. In a couple of years, at about the age of seven years old, Phillis started writing poetry in English that really impressed her captors and many others, and initiated a process whereby she became a famous published poet.

Ben: You point out that “the slave narrative, so crucial in exposing what New World slavery had become, did not yet exist: Wheatley’s generation created it.”

Can you elaborate on that point a little bit, please?

DW: Our sense of how to understand the experience of slavery and especially slavery for Africans and their descendants is shaped by this genre known as the slave narrative. During the period we think of as the revolutionary era, there was a lot of experimentation by enslaved people speaking out and talking about themselves and their experiences. 

Wheatley was part of that process, which culminated in the slave narrative becoming a work of literature and a great form of protest document. And she did it through poetry, a kind of writing that was extremely popular, often political as well as spiritual, and public-facing. Wheatley knew the power of the medium, and I think that's why she chose it.

Ben: I found it a helpful way to understand poetry at the time when you wrote, “If print, as it is said now, was the internet of the eighteenth century, it may not be too much to say that couplets were the tweets of the time.”

I was then thinking that copying poems down was like retweeting, crossing out a poem was like deleting a tweet, and writing a poem in the sand that no one would see and would soon disappear was like switching to a Twitter competitor. 

DW: Ha!

Ben: As word of Phillis’ talents spread, can you talk about what she came to represent within the antislavery movement, and the growing personal stakes for her?

DW: There's dispute about whether it could be called a movement, but there was certainly a lot more public criticism of slavery in the 1750s, 60s, and 70s.

One reason criticism grew is that the slave trade wasn’t lessening—it was expanding. Today, some historians insist that colonists didn't question slavery because nobody knew that it was wrong. That’s not true. As slavery grew, there was a growing appreciation of how bad it was; that it was a death trap in the Caribbean, and that it was a hereditary institution creating an elite, extremely wealthy aristocracy in the colonies that had power over everybody. That's the kind of stuff that people were starting to realize and understand.

Then Phillis Wheatley came along, and she was a genius. She was obvious disproof of pro-slavery racist notions that Africans were inferior. And you could argue, as some have, that it almost didn’t matter what she wrote—just the fact that she was a child prodigy writing poetry and doing these learned things made her a one-woman antislavery argument.

I think that’s completely true, but her poetry also became gradually more and more overtly antislavery—which in turn made her more famous, all by the time she was seventeen. 

Ben: As an example, let’s discuss arguably her most famous poem, “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” Contrary to what many people have argued, you describe “On Being” as really subversive—in fact, almost too subversive. 

DW: Yes, it was originally unpublished and didn’t really appear in public until she published a book in 1773. It was too risky.

In the famous eight-line poem, Phillis starts out by seeming to say that she's lucky she's been saved from Africa and from being a pagan:

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

This poem is controversial because Phillis seems to be playing into the pro-slavery narrative that says oh, well, slavery is not bad. It's actually good for Black people. But I think what she's doing is setting up well-intentioned white people and mocking the way other white people made up these crazy, magical ideas about Blackness being diabolic.