“WE CANNOT KNOW AT HOW EARLY A PERIOD SHE WAS BEGUILED FROM THE HUT OF HER MOTHER. SHE DOES NOT SEEM TO HAVE PRESERVED ANY REMEMBRANCE OF THE PLACE OF HER NATIVITY OR OF HER PARENTS EXCEPTING THE SIMPLE CIRCUMSTANCE THAT HER MOTHER POURED OUT WATER BEFORE THE SUN AT HIS RISING.”
“PHILLIS WHEATLEY was a native of Africa; and was brought to this country in the year 1761, and sold as a slave,” wrote Margaretta Oddell. “She was purchased by Mr. John Wheatley, a respectable citizen of Boston.”
This short biography of Phillis Wheatley, introducing an 1834 volume of her poetry, was the first, and so far, the only effort to record the details of the life of the first published African-American poet by someone who was close to her.
According to Professor John Shields of Illinois State University, author of PHILLIS WHEATLEY’S POETICS OF LIBERATION (2008), “Oddell’s ‘Memoir’ contributes twenty-five pages of information about the life of Wheatley, the longest account of her biography available…probably the most reliable life sketch because its author was according to her own testimony, “a collateral descendent of Mrs. Wheatley.”
Margaretta Oddell claims that her sources knew Phillis Wheatley and were present when she visited their home.
“The reader may claim to be satisfied as to the authenticity of the facts stated in the preceding Memoir,” Ms. Oddell wrote. “They were derived from grand-nieces of Phillis' benefactress (Mrs. Wheatley) who are still living, and have a distinct and vivid remembrance both of their excellent relative and her admired protegee.
“Their statements are corroborated by a grand-daughter of that lady, now residing in Boston; who…recollects the circumstance of Phillis' visiting at the house of her father.”
This visit by Phillis to the Wheatley house was notable because she returned as a free woman. The Wheatley’s granddaughter recalled that the other family slaves remarked that “it was the first time they ever carried tea to a colored woman.”
It was July 11, 1761 when the slave trading schooner named the Phillis, arrived in Boston. Mrs. Susanna Wheatley, wife of properous Boston tailor and merchant John Wheatley, went to the wharf to purchase a house slave.
“She visited the slave-market, that she might make a personal selection from the group of unfortunates offered for sale,” Oddell wrote. “There she found several robust, healthy females, exhibited at the same time with Phillis, who was of a slender frame, and evidently suffering from change of climate…. The poor, naked child (for she had no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her) was taken home and comfortably attired. She is supposed to have been about seven years old, at this time, from the circumstance of shedding her front teeth.”
Susanna Wheatley named the child Phillis, after the ship that took her from her home in Africa.
“We cannot know at how early a period she was beguiled from the hut of her mother,” Margaretta Oddell wrote. “She does not seem to have preserved any remembrance of the place of her nativity, or of her parents, excepting the simple circumstance that her mother poured out water before the sun at his rising--in reference, no doubt, to an ancient African custom.”
In a poem published in 1774 when she was 21, Phillis wrote longingly of what scholars believe is a memory of her own African birthplace.
AND PLEASING GAMBIA ON MY SOUL RETURNS,
WITH NATIVE GRACE IN SPRING’S LUXURIANT REIGN,
SMILES THE GAY MEAD AND EDEN BLOOMS AGAIN.
THERE, AS IN BRITAIN’S FAVOR’S ISLE, BEHOLD
THE BENDING HARVEST RIPENS INTO GOLD!
JUST ARE THY VIEWS OF AFRIC’S BLISSFUL PLAIN,
ON THE WARM LIMITS OF THE LAND AND MAIN.
“Because she has left regrettably few details of the land of her origin,” wrote Wheatley scholar John Shields in 2008, “concentration beyond the acknowledged fact of her birth in African necessarily leads into speculation. I shall employ caution, therefore, as I move from the few but provocative details concerning Africa.”
Shields speculates that Phillis Wheatley probably came from the Fulani tribe in West Africa.
“Owing to her particularly fine features, thin lips, narrow nose and high forehead, as revealed in the portrait that introduces the 1773 volume (Her first book of poetry), she may well have been of the Fulani people, who lived on the meadow lands along the Gambia River.”
Shields notes that during most of the eighteenth century, the religion of the Fulani was a blend of native animism and an emerging Islam.
Oddell wrote that Phillis “must have thought of her mother, prostrating herself before the first golden beam that glanced across her native plains.” This may be a description of traditional Muslim prayer.
“That direction would, of course, have been toward the east, hence toward Mecca,” Shields wrote. “This ritual strongly suggests the first of Islam’s five daily prayers and Islam had indeed penetrated the Gambia region some two and a half centuries before Wheatley’s birth.”
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, December 27th 2009 at 2:09PM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
