Phillis Wheatley Peters has gained broad recognition as the first African-American woman poet and only the third American woman to publish a book of poems. Her story is tragic and triumphal at the same time.
Slavers captured Phillis at age seven in Gambia and sold her to the Wheatley family in Boston in 1761. Her first name derives from the ship that brought her to America. By coincidence or providence, the name “Phillis” is also the name of an enslaved character in Mission 2: Unexpected Visitors.
Sixteen months after her arrival, she could read the Bible, Greek and Latin classics, British literature, astronomy, and geography. She published her first poem in 1767. In 1773, with help from the Countess of Huntingdon, she published her first collection of poems in England. The Wheatleys emancipated her after that.
Her poems reflect her knowledge of the well-known poets she studied and her pride in her heritage. In her native Africa, it was the role of girls to sing the funeral dirges. Her writing style embraced the elegy. Although Wheatley supported the American Revolution, she believed that slavery held the colonists back from true enlightenment. The following poem speaks of this:
On Being Brought from Africa to America
‘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,
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
In 1778, Wheatley married John Peters, an impoverished free Black man from Boston with whom she had three children, though none survived. He went bankrupt and then imprisoned for his debt. To support her family, she went to work as a maid. She caught pneumonia and she and her newly born child tragically died on December 5, 1784, at age thirty-one.
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