Autobiography with I: A Portrait of Phillis Wheatley through Her Poetry

Information about Phillls Wheatley's initial arrival in America is widely available. She had been kidnapped along with many other children from their families in Africa and forced onto a ship that would take them to America where they would be enslaved, perhaps for their whole lives. While Wheatley's story began with the same opening themes as so many others, her life was drastically different. Landing in the Northern slave state of Massachusetts, the Boston merchant John Wheatley took up the terms of this “refuse slave” as a gift for his wife, Susanna. From these disadvantaged beginnings, Phillis Wheatley became one of the most famous African American authors in her lifetime. But here on the shores of Boston, not even eight years old, is the moment when Wheatley's biography begins, for virtually nothing is known of her life in Africa. Wheatley's most extensive biography, written by Vincent Caretta, notes that she only “mentions a specific location in Africa once in her known writings.” Her reluctance to put her personal experiences in writing has made her an elusive biographical subject, though, after learning to read a write, and establishing herself as one of the greatest female African American poets, an extensive body of work was left behind. Because little information is known of her personal life, it is tempting to read Wheatley's “I” in her poems as the poetess and not as a speaker.

Of her childhood, much is garnered through speculation based on generalizations about how life was for any African slave child. However, there is one outstanding fact uncovered by Carretta: Wheatley, whose purchase was almost purely ornamental, for she was too young to be put immediately to work, was the same age as the daughter of John and Susanna Wheatley, who died nine years prior. Perhaps the sentimental nature of her purchase would account for the extraordinary circumstances that would allow her the luxuries of learning to read and write. The Wheatleys did not put Phillis to work. Rather, they touted her as an example of their “status, piety, and charity,” by bringing her to church and allowing her leisure moments during which she could write poetry. She was especially interested in education and with the help of Mary Wheatley, a daughter of the Wheatleys’, became acquainted with the works of Horace, Vergil, Ovid, Terence, and English poets. She was encouraged in her intellectual pursuits, not only by the family, but by visitors and within the community.

Wheatley's placement in the house gave her the privileged listening space for pre-revolutionary acts that were discussed. Her poems took up these subjects, as well as religion, for she was devoutly Christian, and philosophical musings on many subjects, including the enslavement of her race. For all the subjects she wrote, and all of the thought and passion that is evident in the reasoning of her poems, her intimate personality is completely left out. What we know about her is rather objective and factual, and what so many desire to know must be found by the close analysis of her works and the works of those who knew and wrote about her. In 1925, Vernon Loggins wrote: “She composed verses on the deaths of those who meant little to her, but, so far as we know, she remained silent after the death of Mrs. Wheatley and Mrs. Lathrop and her own children.” Wheatley's “A Funeral Poem on the Death of C.E. An Infant of Twelve Months” is less a lament than an exultation at the infant’s joyful cherubic ride into heaven . Perhaps because Wheatley was more concerned with promoting ideologies than exposing inner feeling, her poems garnered the attention from publishers in London, and she soon set sail to meet the publishers. This was in 1773 when Phillis was just 20 years old. She began earning the interest of a wider group. In London she fell ill and had to turn down an invitation from the Countess of Huntingdon where she may have met the king. This was also the year that John Wheatley granted her freedom, and she was no longer a slave. Her status from the Wheatley family was great, and that carried over into status as an African American woman poet. Mary Wheatley, newly divorced, married a member of the first and second Continental Congresses, Edward Rutledge, who has also signed the Constitution and who was sat on the United States Supreme Court. Her poems were available to these men by way of Mary Wheatley, and this led to Phillis' acquaintance with George Washington, to whom she sent a poem.

Her rapid acclaim led to the publication of many works, yet none of them shed much light on the person of Phillis Wheatley herself. She was a public figure, and for this there is wide-spread information about her life, but in all of her poetry she remained quite objective. Her final published poem begins: “O DEATH! whose sceptre, trembling realms obey,/ And weeping millions mourn thy savage sway;/Say, shall we call thee by name of friend,/Who blasts our joys, and bids our glories end?” Her faith seems to eclipse anything that could point to a personal response, though it indicates that she felt her faith deeply. With the poem previously mentioned, death comes into a Christian religious context, and its lack of sadness is concretized in her matter-of-fact speech in the latter poem, and by her acceptance of death as a fact and a blessing for it points toward heaven, in the former.

Her later life was far from happy. She married a free black man named John Peters and suffered the loss of two infant children. Their living conditions were poor, and she soon died, followed by her third infant child. Though slavery was a common subject, and the state of her race, identifying and aligning her with the African people, when she died in 1784, it was as a member of the Wheatley family, for her formative years were greatly changed by her circumstances and her person was very much the sum of her experiences.

References

Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a genius in bondage. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Loggins, Vernon. The Negro author, his development in America,. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.

Wheatley, Phillis, and Julian D. Mason. The poems of Phillis Wheatley. Rev. and enl. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Wheatley, Phillis, and Vincent Carretta. Complete writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.