DECEMBER 19, 2022
NARRATOR: The room had a excessive ceiling and the oval desk gleamed. The faces of the boys she confronted weren’t smiling. On the head sat Governor Thomas Hutchinson, at his proper John Hancock, at his left Andrew Oliver, Lt. Governor, and across the desk students and distinguished males — John Mather, John Moorhead, James Pitts. And a small black woman confronted them because the governor mentioned:
GOVERNOR: Who christened you, woman?
PHILLIS: The Reverend Samuel Sewall, Sir.
GOVERNOR: Identify the Gospels.
PHILLIS: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. […]
MATHER: Communicate for me the primary line of Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.” […]
PHILLIS: “First comply with Nature and your judgment body by her simply normal, which remains to be the identical.”
MATHER: Translate this, woman: Delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi —
PHILLIS: “The monarch’s folly makes the individuals remorse,” sir. […]
NARRATOR: And when the testing was performed, John Hancock, on the Governor’s proper, took maintain of his pen and wrote:
HANCOCK: We whose names are under-written do guarantee the world that the poems specified have been (as we verily consider) written by Phillis, a younger Negro woman, who was however just a few years since introduced an uncultivated barbarian from Africa.
THIS SCENE WAS imagined by Shirley Graham (who would marry W. E. B. Du Bois two years later) for a CBS radio play, The Story of Phillis Wheatley, which was broadcast on January 25, 1949. In Graham’s telling, the examination is the concept of Mary Wheatley, the daughter of Phillis’s mistress, to show to skeptics that the “younger Negro woman” was certainly the creator of a group of poems that the household hoped could possibly be revealed. “Suppose I received a few of Boston’s most interesting males,” Mary asks, “perhaps even the governor, they usually requested you inquiries to just be sure you had written these poems. Would you do it, Phillis?”
All oral examination scenes have built-in drama. Is the particular person being examined ready? Will there be hostile or trick questions? Do the examiners need the topic to fail or is the entire thing simply theater? For Graham, Phillis Wheatley’s public examination is the climax of the play, taking on two full pages of questions and solutions, as elaborated within the ebook model, The Story of Phillis Wheatley: Poetess of the American Revolution, revealed the identical yr. Graham’s model of a public examination was so compelling that the journal Negro Digest revealed an excerpt in 1949. Wheatley’s success in profitable over her examiners, in Graham’s imagining, not solely facilitated the publication of her ebook of poems in London the next yr but additionally ensured her introduction to London royalty — even receiving, from the Lord Mayor of London, a replica of Milton’s Paradise Misplaced.
Graham was not the primary Black author to conceive of a public examination of Wheatley nearly as good theater. A decade and a half earlier, in 1932, for a bicentennial celebration to be held in Washington, DC, commemorating the start of George Washington, author, trainer, and activist Mary Church Terrell drafted a pageant on Wheatley’s life — and her well-known 1776 correspondence with Washington — that featured a parade of notable Bostonians “authenticating” Wheatley’s poetry. What questions have been requested, if any, is unclear, because the pageant-play underwent a number of revisions and was solely carried out as soon as, within the Washington Auditorium of Armstrong Technical Excessive Faculty, on November 19, 1932.
The thought of a public examination emerges from the historic file and from Wheatley’s personal ebook of poetry. On February 29, 1772, an commercial in Boston’s The Censor (reprinted on March 14 and April 18) states {that a} “Assortment of POEMS, wrote at a number of instances, and upon varied events, by PHILLIS, a Negro Lady, from the Power of her personal Genius, it being however just a few Years since she got here to this City an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa” would quickly be out there, if sufficient subscribers would underwrite the price of publishing. The commercial additional states:
The Poems having been seen and skim by the most effective Judges, who suppose them effectively worthy of the Publick View; and upon crucial examination, they discover that the declared Writer was able to writing them.
The commercial is clearly meant to sign that “the most effective Judges” had questioned her instantly and, after this “crucial examination,” had discovered the works of her pen “worthy.” The “Judges” may need discovered the poems alone “worthy,” however the level right here is to hyperlink them to this unlikely poet, who has herself been instantly questioned and located a “Genius.”
Readers of Wheatley’s subsequently revealed Poems on Numerous Topics, Non secular and Ethical (1773), which is taken into account the primary revealed quantity of poetry by an African American poet, encounter a prefatory “letter of Attestation” that states:
AS it has been repeatedly urged to the Writer, by Individuals, who’ve seen the Manuscript, that Numbers can be able to suspect they have been probably not the Writings of PHILLIS, he has procured the next Attestation, from probably the most respectable Characters in Boston, that none may need the least Floor for disputing their Unique.
WE whose Names are under-written, do guarantee the World, that the POEMS specified within the following Web page, have been (as we verily consider) written by PHILLIS, a younger Negro Lady, who was however just a few Years since, introduced an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now could be, underneath the Drawback of serving as a Slave in a Household on this City. She has been examined by a number of the greatest Judges, and is believed certified to jot down them.
Once more, the phrase “examination” seems. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary emphasizes, in its definition of the time period, the sense of “interrogation.” The repeated use of phrases like “judges,” “examined,” and “certified” lend themselves to the concept that some type of take a look at came about.
Why does this matter? New discoveries about Phillis Wheatley — together with Cornelia Dayton’s current findings bringing to mild the ultimate 4 years of Wheatley’s life, after her marriage to the shopkeeper-tradesman John Peters and the start and dying of probably three kids — urge us to reexamine what we all know and what we’d assume about how Boston luminaries of her time noticed her and her work. Dayton has uncovered public data that present John and Phillis Peters, between 1779 and 1784, caught up in authorized wrangling over property and compensation owed for his or her administration of a large property in Middlesex, Essex County, Massachusetts. Peters misplaced his fits, money owed mounted, and he was imprisoned; in the meantime, Wheatley’s manuscript of her second ebook of poetry was “borrowed” by somebody and subsequently misplaced. She died in December 1784, her former supporters lengthy useless or vanished. Within the context of Peters’s many authorized setbacks and the younger couple’s seeming lack of group, the 1772 public examination appears extra resonant than ever.
The particular occasions that led to the signed attestation are as but unknown. With far much less archival data out there to Terrell and Graham than to students now, these writers most actually took the concept for a dramatic group occasion from the prefatory letter itself, which says “She has been examined” slightly than a phrasing equivalent to “her poems have been examined.” For each activist ladies, the phrasing rightly positioned Wheatley at heart stage in a liberating public drama. None of us is aware of how Wheatley’s “examination” came about. However there clearly was considered one of some type or one other, because the Boston Censor advert makes plain. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was unwittingly following in Graham’s footsteps when he too speculated a couple of public examination, most notably in his 2002 ebook The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. Gates’s trial was an explicitly fictive act underscoring the racism of a Black poet being compelled to bear a take a look at to show her personal authorship earlier than being allowed to publish her personal ebook. For Gates, the imagined historic interrogation was an allegory for racist white authorial management of Black letters and Black authors inside Enlightenment discourse. The picture of gatekeeper judges dramatizes the burden on Black writers to jot down themselves into the human group slightly than being welcomed.
The “astonishingly influential group of the colony’s residents,” as Gates rightly describes them, whose names are listed within the prefatory letter, embrace Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant Governor Andrew Oliver, poet-clergyman Mather Byles (a correspondent of Alexander Pope’s who wrote verse on the anxieties of a provincial poet with cosmopolitan pretensions), poet Joseph Inexperienced, poet-clergyman Samuel Cooper, future governor James Bowdoin (additionally an occasional author of verse), John Hancock, and Samuel Mather. What was the muse of their curiosity? Why may they’ve taken the time to personally look at this younger poet, Phillis Wheatley, because the letter signifies? Had been Terrell and Graham merely recording a historic truth after they put the highlight of a public examination on this extraordinary younger lady poet? (In an early draft of her play, Graham even depicted a scene of public acclamation of Wheatley’s poetic means: “Gents: can we agree?” “Sure! Past query!”) Or was the letter merely, as Gates has argued, a manifestation of 18th-century racist attitudes about individuals of African descent, as expressed within the works of Hume, Kant, and Thomas Jefferson (who discovered nothing to reward in Wheatley’s poems whilst he was skeptical that she wrote them)?
Whereas for Gates, the trope of a “trial” enabled a pun on the “trials and tribulations” that Wheatley confronted throughout her lifetime (and after in Black damaging crucial assessments), for Terrell and Graham, the trial actually occurred. Students have rightly questioned whether or not a bunch examination ever came about. Joanna Brooks brilliantly decided the attestation was signed on October 28, 1772, although with out resolving the character of an examination. Seemingly unaware of Graham’s or Terrell’s work, Brooks challenged Gates’s imagined conjecture, as an alternative foregrounding Wheatley’s relationships with a group of white ladies who initially championed her sentimental verse however dropped her after the poet gained her freedom and married. Historian David Waldstreicher means that Wheatley was already, by 1772, asserting “political authority” in Boston, corresponding with notables equivalent to Lord Dartmouth. Any drama of a trial, “making Wheatley into an abject graduate pupil, a humble apprentice within the republic of letters,” Waldstreicher claims, has “the unusual impact of robbing her of her personal story.” For these students, Wheatley emerges as a stronger determine with out the scene of a public examination: she was totally in control of her personal public relations and didn’t must stare down consultants so as to exert her personal energy and authority. Extra not too long ago, John Levi Barnard has argued that, whether or not or not there was “an precise ‘qualifying examination,’” the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poetry would have piqued the cosmopolitan pursuits of her examiners, and it might be that the general public examination was extra about displaying their very own erudition than quizzing the younger lady poet’s.
Within the Obama period, Brooks’s and Waldstreicher’s narrative of literary self-fashioning undoubtedly had a sure enchantment. However as Graham’s imagined scene suggests, the questions that may have been requested and answered in an examination matter to understanding Wheatley’s poetry — particularly now, as she is more and more and rightfully (if belatedly) being taught in American lecture rooms. Within the twenty first century, what highschool trainer or faculty professor, introducing Wheatley, is aware of by coronary heart the opening line of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” (1711)? Who might translate a Latin phrase and know from which of Horace’s Epistles it comes? Who’s acquainted sufficient with Dryden’s translations of Virgil to catch the allusions in Wheatley’s works — phrases like “native clime,” “tyrannic sway,” or “shady groves”?
The primary time I learn Wheatley’s poem “An Hymn to the Morning,” the unique model of which she apparently wrote whereas a London service provider, Thomas Wooldridge, stood watching, I heard the echoes of Dryden’s 1697 translation of The Aeneid, which she had in all probability simply been studying. Wheatley’s well-known use of the phrase “silken fetters” in “On Creativeness” might be a reference to her personal considerably privileged servitude or it could possibly be an echo of William Godwin, Samuel Richardson, or John Bell, all of whom used the phrase of their works. As a scholar of allusions and different literary borrowing, I understand how unusual this sort of studying has change into however how essential it was in 1772, particularly to the Harvard-educated Boston elite who chafed at their marginalization from the London cultural heart.
To completely recognize Phillis Wheatley is to see the ability with which she dealt with the grasp’s instruments and, confronted with questions actual or imagined, turned them shrewdly to her personal functions. Frederick Douglass would do that nearly a century later with classical texts he memorized from The Columbian Orator. To completely recognize the richness of African American literature requires studying what these authors have been studying whereas they have been writing, and rewriting, the American literary canon. Wheatley’s examiners appear to have determined that her erudition mirrored effectively upon them.
It appears clear now from the ultimate years of her life that, nonetheless a lot Wheatley’s examiners cared about her erudition, they didn’t care about her, particularly when she married exterior of educated circles. The up to date African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa contemplates the posthumous destiny of Wheatley and her white examiners in his 2001 poem “Lament & Reward Music”:
At this hour
amongst canonical roses
with seditious thorns,
I ponder if the tongues
of that tribunal of excellent males
quizzing her turned to mud
in pure Latin & Greek.
We’re blessed if we will see her
on the streets of Cambridge,
in her heroic couplets,
rescued by our creativeness.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers additionally ponders Wheatley’s examination in her 2020 poem “How Phillis Wheatley May Have Obtained the Approval of Eighteen Outstanding White Males of Boston to Publish Her E book of Poetry: Boston, October 28, 1772,” asking “Did it even occur that manner?” earlier than deciding:
even when there was no examination,
sooner or later, she smiled in white
males’s faces to realize her freedom.
If Wheatley smiled, it was a grim and educated smile.
For Shirley Graham, whose papers, together with the radio play, have been acquired by Radcliffe in 2001, the drama of Phillis Wheatley’s success in Boston gives the muse for her return to New England and subsequent embrace of the revolution, dramatized by a poem to George Washington that was revealed by Thomas Paine and acknowledged in a 1776 letter from the overall himself. By emphasizing figures equivalent to Washington, Paine, and Hancock, Graham situates Wheatley within the bosom of freedom-loving Boston. Graham wrote the play 4 years after World Battle II and simply after Truman’s decree desegregating the armed forces; for her, the drama of Wheatley’s public examination was a supply of integrationist delight: this younger Black lady belonged within the room, in dialog with governors and future presidents, as a part of the nation’s expertise pool. However as Robert Hayden’s 1978 poem “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley, London 1773” foresees, when a chimney sweep, “fairly Black,” poses his personal tough query to the poet — “Does you, M’woman, sweep chimneys too?” — Wheatley’s erudition wouldn’t save her from the life that awaited her again in Boston.
Quick ahead to the scene of Amanda Gorman reciting poetry at President Biden’s inauguration. The examination of Phillis Wheatley ought to remind us of the struggles concerned in attending to that time, together with the grim historical past of dealing with such unanswerable questions as “What number of bubbles are in a bar of cleaning soap?” at voter registration workplaces throughout the Jim Crow South. Wheatley’s examination was the primary of many such struggles. If she handed with flying colours, it might have been sufficient to open doorways for publication, however it was not sufficient to safe her a future among the many Boston literary elite, who turned their backs on her when she married a struggling shopkeeper and started a lifetime of her personal.
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Hollis Robbins is dean of humanities on the College of Utah. Her most up-to-date ebook is Types of Rivalry: Affect and the African American Sonnet Custom (2020).
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Featured picture: Artist Unknown. “Peonies and summary waves,” mid 18th–early nineteenth century. Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Present of Helen Snyder. www.si.edu, CC0, Accessed December 16, 2022.
