February 18, 2025 • 39 mins
This conversation delves into the life and legacy of Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet. It explores her impact on Black literature, the complexities of her poetry, and the misconceptions surrounding Black literacy and slavery. The discussion highlights Wheatley's humanity, creativity, and the joy found in her relationships and writings, emphasizing that Black expression has always existed despite societal constraints. The episode concludes with a reflection on Wheatley's exceptionalism and the importance of joy in her life and work.
CREDITS
Tara Bynum - Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa.
Cassander Smith - Professor of English at the University of Alabama / Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the Honors College also at Alabama
Don Holmes - Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
Cornelius Eady - Poet, Playwright, Songwriter, Co-Founder of Cave Canem, and the endowed chair at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Brigitte Fielder - Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the College of Letters and Science
READ
Reading Pleasures - Everyday Black Living in Early America, By Tara A. Bynum
Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic, By Cassander L. Smith
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction to Phillis Wheatley
06:00 The Complexity of Wheatley's Poetry
10:55 Wheatley's Humanity and Early Life
17:35 Misconceptions About Black Literacy
23:46 Black Joy and Wheatley's Writings
35:59 Wheatley's Exceptionalism and Tenacity
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Jacqueese Thomas, and you're listening to Black Lit,
a podcast about black literature and the stories behind the storytellers.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm not sure that the world knows Phylis Wheeley, although
I think there are more people who know her now
than who knew her twenty years ago. And for those
who know Phyllis Wheatley, they know that she was a poet.
They know her as an anomaly. They know her as
this person who was so intellectually astute that because she
was able to write poetry, write quality poetry, she was
(00:39):
able to earn her krenom. She wasn't a lone wolf
writing at the end of the eighteenth century. For me,
Phyllis Wheatley is representative of a community of Black Americans
who were living and navigating the socio political spaces in
the early Americas. For me, she's a good example of
(01:00):
the ways that people of africants dissent or coping, living,
in some cases thriving.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Her life began in West Africa, but most of what
we know of her story begins in Boston. But her
words could not be confined to one city, one country,
or even one era. They crossed oceans on ships not
meant to carry her voice, landed in hands that never
(01:27):
expected to hold them. They wrote in a time that
demanded her silence, Yet her words found a way to speak.
They were not just records of survival, but evidence of
something more. In lines of verse and letters sent across distance,
there was laughter, There was hope, There was friendship, and
(01:54):
there was a joy that bloomed in the spaces between
expectation and possibility. Centuries have passed, but her words still sing,
still bring out, still carry her name, Phyllis Wheatley. Various
(02:15):
scholars throughout the centuries have gravitated towards her work. Each
person I interviewed during this exploration of Phyllis Wheatley had
a different calling card, a curiosity to understand black life
in early America, and a different reason behind there why.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I'm doctor Tara Baynham.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I'm an associate professor of English and African American Studies
at the University of Iowa. I don't quite remember the
very first time I encountered for this sweetly, but I
do remember the first time that she is most memorable,
and I was in an undergraduate English class at Spaman College,
taught by doctor Geneva Baxter and I and the rest
(02:59):
of the class were engaged in a conversation.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I'm pretty sure that was.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
About Phillis Wheeley's most anthologized poem, on being Brought from
Africa to.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
America, and that we were in a debate about it.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
And I think the debate is always pretty consistent, you know,
it's weekly for slavery, as weekly against slavery, as weekly
black enough or not. And I just remember kind of
being curious about the debate, not knowing a whole lot
about Phillips wheeleye.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And it wasn't until.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Maybe a couple of years later or so that I
end up kind of returned to Phillis Wheeley in a
different set of poems and a different set of reading
in graduate school that I was like, oh that, you know,
I think that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
There might be more.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Wheeley's story begins in West Africa, and I become most
interested in her as a writer who is writing letters
to friends and acquaintances.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Smith I am a professor of English at the University
of Alabama, and I'm associating for academic affairs for the
Honors College also at Alabama. My number one goal is
to make visible the cultural contributions of people of African
descent in this space that we now call the United States.
Particularly the contribution is before the eighteenth century.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
John Holmes, Assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
I've always wanted to be a teacher, and I've always
known that I wanted to tell the stories of my
ancestors to kind of capture how profound they were.
Speaker 6 (04:39):
But we cannot put.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Into our brains the kinds of worlds that they had
to interact with, which would definitely impact the kinds of
choices that they thought would be helpful for themselves, for
their progenity, and of course for us. Right, So they're
making choices about situations that they know they won't necessarily
get to, you know, be involved in. If I'm making
an argument for abolitionism, am I making that argument for me?
(05:03):
Or am I making that argument for my children? And
so I see that a great deal in Weebley's poetry,
not in this sense for her children she had children,
but they were, you know, die very young, but in
the sense that she was looking out at a future
that was bleak for people who looked like her, that
was unfortunately having to exist in North America, and I
(05:24):
wanted to tell that story. I wanted to capture how
these individuals were creating ideologies that would be quite useful
for who we are today in the twenty first century.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
And I believe earlier America is a great site for that.
I'm Cornelia Sidi, and I'm a poet, playwright, songwriter, co
founder of Copycolum and at the moment, a endowed chair
at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And I became aware
of Weekly probably in high school. There are probably the
idea that she was the first African American. I always
(05:57):
trip over that, because, of course, there was no such
thing as African America back then. She was a slave.
She was the first slave to publish a book of poetry,
a full length book of poetry, instead of just one
or two poets or poems or broadsides. And that fact
sometimes clogs the achievement of her work. And it's a
brilliant book, her only book. There is an incredible book.
And the more you read it and the more you
(06:18):
start thinking about it, the more you start thinking about
the circumstances that make the book and make her And
I'm sorry that people don't really study the book more
because it is really an incredible document about a lot
of things, about the idea of slavery, about the idea
of the voice of an African American, the location of
the speaker of the poem, the audience that she's talking to. Right,
(06:42):
So it's really rich. I know, it's not really easily
consumed by a contemporary eye and ear, but it's worth
the time and effort to linger and unravel it.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
My name is Bridget Fielder, and I'm an associate professor
at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the College of
Letters and Science. When I teach a class in African
American children's literature, I start with her, and I start
with her poem. To SKIPI a more head the young
African painter on seeing his works, a poem by the
(07:18):
most prominent Black poet before we get to the twenty
first century. You know, when we think about women poets,
she's one who is more prominent than other black women
writers in general. She has a clear poem right there,
written to a black child, as somebody who was younger
than her at the time of this book's publication. According
to scholars who have researched it skip more heads life.
(07:40):
It seems like he would have been a kind of
young teenager at the time. And there are a lot
of things in Wheatley's work that are that there are
a lot of themes that one could speak to today
in a lot of things in her life that we
might usefully include her in conversations about. So if one
wants to think about mourning, we could think about the
(08:03):
elegy and her elegies. Or if one wants to think
about the American Revolution, it helps to think about other
kinds of people who lived through the revolution, then the
people who just like orchestrated it. And so there are
lots of literary reasons and historical reasons to attend to Wheatley.
(08:25):
But for thinking about that longer thread of black women's voices,
one of the most interesting things.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
For me.
Speaker 7 (08:35):
Is thinking about her as an enslaved child who had
so much potential and possibility, not as an exceptional person necessarily,
even if we want to think about her as a prodigy,
(08:56):
but as a representative example of the potential and possibility
of all of those enslaved children.
Speaker 6 (09:04):
Come to this country a slave, And how should you
sing June Jordan. How do you say this in Senegalese?
My mother is gone, my dream. My father calls my name,
but I cannot fill his arms. The ship is a
crazy beast. These irons cut my legs in the air
(09:28):
reeks of shit and piss. I am sick and thinning
from hunger. What happens to me in this strange place?
What is the tongue of this hostile tribe? New birds,
cold air, narrow streets, hard and uneven to walk, slop
(09:54):
and thirst on the tongue. If you screen your name
and no one listens, if you yell where you come
from and people stare through you, are you a girl
or a ghost? What did Phillis tell the wheat Lace
that first day? With them close? They say broth, They
(10:18):
sing soak and water to soothe whatever she babbles.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Doctor Cassie reads an excerpt from her book Race and
Respectability in the Early Black Atlantic. She writes in a
way that puts Wheatley's humanity front and center to remind
people that she is not an object of study, but
a thinking and feeling human being.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Phyllis will you Peters enters a discussion about respectability as
a seven year old girl maybe eighth facing the slave market,
perceived as the leads least desirable. A human cargo that
comes into a Boston harbor on the slave ship Phillis
in seventeen sixty one. The ship's captain, despite the explicit
(11:10):
orders of his employer to purchase prime boys and men,
nonetheless snags this black girl and adds her to the stop.
The advertisement that announces the sale of this child speaks
to her lack of value. In the words of the advertisement,
to be sold a parcel of likely negroes imported from
Africa cheap for cash or short credit, inquired of John
(11:34):
Avery at his house next door to the White Horse,
or at a store adjoining to said a Grey's distellhouse
at the South End near the South Market. Also, if
any persons have any Negro man strong and hardy, though
not of the best moral character, which are proper subjects
for transportation, may have in exchange for small negroes. The
(11:58):
ad is disrespectful of multiple levels. Most obvious is the
inhumanity of peddling human beings as chattel. Beyond that is
the specific disregard for those black men sought for purchase.
The desirability located in a presumed absence of morality, which
also makes them fit only for transportation out of the colony.
(12:19):
There is even less regard for those black children weakly,
presumably among them whose youth and gender drive their devaluation.
They are bartered for able bodied men of ill repute.
The lack of regard for those enslaved men and children,
the disrespect forms a warped economic logic, whereby they are
positioned as exchange commodities of equal devalue to some prospective buyer.
(12:45):
At seven years old, Wheatley would not have grasped the
import of being exchanged for men of questionable character. At
at a young age, she would not have understood the
economic stakes attached to public perceptions of her Black female.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
She barely survives. She gets sick on the passage over.
She's kind of naked. Someone gives her a carpet to
put on her when the weakness came walking through, and
they buy her. But that sevenate eight year old knows
what all That seven eight year olds know every place
in the world. They know their parents, they know their
family name, they know their own name. They know their neighbors,
they know the neighborhood, they know the food. They know,
(13:23):
I mean, they know all this stuff. And occasionally in
the book it pops up wheatly, you know, did talk
about being in Africa. There was this one poem that
she wrote where she talks about thinking about her parents, right,
my parents thinking right, because when you're a slave, you're
kidnapped and that's it. You know, when you leave Africa,
you don't come back and they never see you again.
(13:43):
They don't know whether you lived or die. You don't
know if you're survived. I don't know where you are.
You don't know if you ended up in the ocean,
you know, I mean, if this all that stuff. And
there's like four lines where she's actually talking about that,
and you have to see that. So she's conscious of that.
She just doesn't say it right because there's no place
to say it really right. But it does pop up.
So there's always different layers of phyllis that is sprinkled
(14:06):
in the book. It's sprinkled in But he also have
to realize that a lot of times in the poems
she's talking to an alliance and she's also challenging the audience.
And you also have to realize on some level this
that besides the poetry. This is just the fact of her,
the fact of her, the physical fact of her in
the room, in the air. Being a poet is a
(14:28):
radical statement because up until this point, I mean, yes,
Jupiter Hammond, and there's some other sprinkling of some other
African American poets there, but Phyllis is really that person
where basically there she is right the physical space that
she takes in like Frederick Douglas when he's doing his speeches,
right the physical space of the orator saying something is
(14:50):
something that's a new shock to that culture because it
never happened before up until that moment. And she's not
an orator like Frederick Douglass is. She's a poet. But
she's also seeing things. And the fact that I'm saying
that you're seeing me, seeing me saying this stuff, talking
in your language, talking in what you consider the highest
form of your language. It's an argument or a way
(15:14):
of declaring to you that I'm real and I'm human.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And just as importantly, we must let go of the
idea that black people have ever needed permission to create.
Creativity was never given, never waited for, never depended on approval.
It existed in whispers and in shouts, in secrets and
in full view, in moments of freedom and in spaces
(15:41):
of confinement, Black expression has always found a way, not
because it was allowed, but because it could not be contained.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I think that what feels most important is we've got
to dismantle the expectation that black people have ever needed
permission to do creative work. We've never needed permission and
we've never expected it kind of in real time, and
yet we assume that in decades past or centuries past,
(16:14):
black people were like, we don't have permission, We're not
going to do it, and I don't like that we
do that.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And instead, what I want us to.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
Do is kind of go back in time and to
be reminded that whether we're talking about for those we
Lee in the seventeen seventies, or Caesar Landen in the
seventeen sixties, or Venture Smith in the seventeen nineties, to
create these black women and black men, they did so
despite whatever limitations we might have decided we're imposed upon them,
(16:48):
or whatever real limitations were.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
And Weakley is absolutely an example of that.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
You are listening to lit most of us view this
time period incorrectly. It wasn't great for black people, but
it also wasn't always what many of us would imagine.
Beyond the pain and the oppression, there was resistance, There
(17:19):
was community, There were moments of love, of joy, and creativity.
People did not exist solely in suffering, but in the
fullness of life, navigating a world that sought to define
them while they continued to define themselves.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So I think one misconception is that black people couldn't
read or write because it was against the law. You know,
what I think is interesting about that particular misconception is
that reading and writing are hard to prove. So I
(17:59):
think with others laws, there's actual proof of something. You know,
like murder can only be charged if there's a body
drug possession. You need the drugs. Speeding you need the
vehicle that is moving too fast. But like if reading
is suddenly illegal and someone is like, prove to me
(18:22):
that you can read, how did they do that? How
do they compel you to read? So we've decided or
understand as like twenty first century people that because literacy,
reading and writing in particular, where we're made illegal at
different points, that black people were one compliant, which is
(18:45):
interesting when thinking about the effect of laws on people,
because I'm still not entirely convinced that there are laws
that stop human behavior effectively, Like if we figured out
how to get rid of murder, and we figured out
how to get rid of speeding, we figured out how
to prevent the use of illegal narcotics by way of laws.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
To my knowledge, the answer is no. You let me
know if I'm wrong. But somehow we come.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
To believe that because there were these laws against literacy,
that black people one were compliant and maybe the most
compliant people in all of history, and two that it
was somehow enforceable. And also, I would suggest lucky number
three is that laws only come into being because people
(19:30):
are doing the thing. So before there were cars, there
was probably not speeding laws. You know, a worse can
only go so fast. Misconception number one is that black
people couldn't read and write because it was against the law.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Jillis Wheatley, in addition poetry, she wrote letters, and one
of her favorite interlocutors was another black woman named Uber Tanner.
So Uber could read, we have to assume she could
write because she was writing back, even though none of
those letters. We haven't found any of those letters. But anyway,
all of that to say there was a community of
(20:08):
black people who could read and potentially do both in
that time period. We just can't know how extensive it was,
and I wouldn't necessarily make an argument that it was widespread. However,
one thing to keep in mind is that the Puritans,
whatever you want to think about the Puritans, they did
value literacy, particularly the skill of reading, so that the
(20:32):
members of the household could read the bike. I know
that the Wheatlys said that part of what motivated them
to teach Billis Wheatley was that they saw that she
had a natural aptitude and a natural curiosity. But it
was also the case that teaching the members of your
household how to read was a relatively common practice.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
I think misconception number two is that slavery is kind
of relegated to the southern United States. It is plantation based,
very large scale. Cotton is the driver. Maybe if you
know a little bit tobacco as.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
A driver, maybe if you know a little bit more,
you remember sugar.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
And I think that while that is all well and true,
there's also a very very present and important kind of
northern slavery that influences the shape of slavery as a
system slave trading. You know, if you wanted to be
the wealthiest slave trader in the eighteenth century, you should
(21:29):
be based in Rhode Island, not in the South, even
though one could debate that South Carolina might be a
good place to be too. But I think that what's
important is that there's this network of economies that make
slavery and slave trading important to colonies and the colonies
(21:50):
that later become the states as well, and I think
in all of those places, the goal is to figure
out how to kind of limit black people's movement, to
control black people's behavior, and I think that there are
many different ways to do that. There's laws, there's violence,
(22:11):
there's various forms of surveillance, and all of that influences
black people and the development of black.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Culture as well.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
So, you know, I think I'm hesitant to say, for example,
that Phyllis Whey's slavery is different in such a way
that kind of would have us think that there's a
good version of enslavement versus a bad version of enslavement.
I'm not prepared to do that, but I do think
that Phyllis Whey is based in a city, so the
(22:43):
look of her experience is going to be different than
someone who is enslaved in rural Massachusetts or in rural
South Carolina.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
But I think that that also seems to be kind
of tricky. Is like the impulse and compulsion to create
a hierarchy within. So I think those are the big
assumptions that I'm always working to fight against.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Wheatley wasn't just a poet. She lived in a world
shaped by power, hierarchy, and constraint, but she was also
a thinker, a friend, a woman who experienced love, and
perhaps most overlooked, a person who knew joy. Black Joy
is an essential part of this story, but not in
(23:29):
opposition to the realities of her time, but alongside them.
We see it clearly in Wakly's writings and in her connections.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
My path to thinking about joy in Wheatley's writing and
in eighteenth century black writing, actually starts with one of
her poems, thoughts on the works of Providence, And I
think what gives me pause and thoughts on the works
of Providence, So a moment in the poem where she says,
(24:04):
as reason powers by day our God disclosed, so we
may trace him in the night repose say, what is
sleep and dreams? How passing strange when action ceases and
ideas range licentious and unbounded over the plains, where fancies
queen and giddy triumph rains. Here in soft strains the
dreaming lover side to a kind, fair or raven jealousy.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I said, who is the dreaming love? What? What is that?
What is this twenty year old talking about? Who is
who is in bed?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
And then I read some more in this poem and
there ends up being this conversation between love and reason,
and reason is understood to be a companion of love,
and there seems to be some sort of beef between
these two kind of humanized nouns, and it too is
(25:04):
also like chock full of something that hey, at the time,
you know, when I first encountered this poem in graduate school,
like I don't know necessarily to call it joy, but
it's like, what what is phyllis are.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
They talking about?
Speaker 4 (25:21):
And I think there's another poem where Aurora's in Tithan's bed,
and I was like, this is something is happening here
that is certainly very different than on being brought from
Africa to America. And I think both the mention of
Aurora and Tithan's bed and the dreaming lover sighing. I
(25:44):
was kind of like, this is I might need to
read more closely check my own sort of expectations about
what Phyllis Wheeley is doing.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
What this reveals is that Wheatly, like any other human being,
was thinking about pleasure, love, and even desire. She was
not just a symbol of resistance or a figure of history.
She was a woman who dreamed, who wandered, who let
(26:16):
her mind linger on the feelings that make us all human.
Her words held more than just struggle. They carried the
intimacy of longing, the curiosity of youth, and the quiet
joys found in the spaces between survival and self discovery.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Francis Smiths Foster, who's a literary scholar who's worked with
Sweetly a bit as well, points to this language, and
you know, I think it is the language of sexuality,
the language of pleasure, and I think it sort of
begins to plant the seed in me that like, no,
this isn't just I shouldn't just be reading for resistance.
(26:58):
I shouldn't just be reading for or the Middle Passage.
I shouldn't just be reading for the line where Wheatley says,
I hate slavery because she's doing she's doing something else.
You know, that ends up being kind of my my
way into thinking about joy and Wheatley's life. And you know,
(27:19):
I think I moved from the poems into the letters
and think about her friendship with uber Tanner and the
way that that relationship is is talked about in the
extent letters that exist, and like I think that there
are in the in the kind of mention of the
every day, I think it becomes clear to me that
(27:41):
it Weekly enjoys her relationship with her friend and is
not hesitant to describe.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
That joy and joy and joy and joy and joy.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The records of her friendship with uber Tanner offer another
window into what black joy may have looked like for us.
Her joy was what she shared in these letters and
small moments of these connections, in words that traveled across
distance but never lost their warmth. It was a joy
(28:11):
that existed alongside struggle, not in spite of a reminder
that even in a world built to contain her, Phillis
sweetly found space for a full human experience.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
They had joy, which is the ultimate of form of
resistance because oh, you shouldn't be happy.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Why are you happy?
Speaker 5 (28:31):
You know, it's not the smile that one presents when
they're out, but it's a real joy.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
It's an intimate joy.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
And then sometimes it's even as Terror's book taught us,
which has been very helpful for my work on the
seventeenth century, really helpful is just reminding us that sometimes
these individual acts.
Speaker 6 (28:49):
We love to look for the collective.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
How are they advocating for all the black people?
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Right?
Speaker 5 (28:54):
But sometimes you're not going to find that right. So
what does it mean to look at these individual acts
freedom of all, these individual acts of joy as moments
that are important and they do not need to be
buttressed within the realm of how it's responding to white people.
I mean, you can, you know, but it can be
joy for the joy of that individual that you're writing
(29:16):
about and describing the world that they saw. So I
think it as another dimension, if you will.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
I love the letters between Phillip Wheeley and Obertanner, and
kind of Phillip Wheley's letters in general, she writes more
people than uber Tanner, but think uber Tanner's letters are
about eight or so that still exists, and these are
letters between two black women, two black women in the
seventeen seventies, which is also a war time. I guess
(29:45):
that's the other part that we don't necessarily think about
in relation to Wheatley always, is that, like, Wheatley is
writing and publishing.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
As a war is emerging, and it's not you know,
it's not just any war.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
It's the the revolutionary wards, the war that makes the
United States of America a country and too itself. And so,
you know, I think that there was so much about
my own set of assumptions that I had to sit
with debunk ask myself, why why am I so surprised
that there are two black women writing letters at this time?
(30:21):
Why am I so surprised too, that the letters are
not just trading stories of resilience or trading stories of resistance,
or trading stories of like, gosh, darn it, I'm enslaved again.
Why am I surprised that they actually have more to
say than that? And what does that tell me about
(30:42):
my own education? That I kind of am surprised that
even in the eighteenth century, black people are more complex
than I've been taught to think.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Wheatley's life makes us ask deeper questions. What did our
private moments look like when the world wasn't watching, when
she wasn't writing for patrons or corresponding with friends. Who
was wheatley to herself? Does she find stillness in the
(31:13):
early hours, reflecting on her own words? Did she laugh
in quiet spaces? Did she dream in secret? Does she
hold memories close like treasures? Her public legacy is evident,
but her private world is where the mystery lives, where
intimacy takes shape, where the fullness of her humanity resides.
(31:39):
Doctor Tara Biinum reads from her book Reading Pleasures Everyday
Black Living in Early America. Bynum wrote this book because
of her obsession with eighteenth century black literature and to
debunk assumptions that black people only recently found the concept
of joy.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Increasingly, I have been troubled by that assumption, and I
understand why there's a kind of commitment to discussions of
resilience and suffering, because we don't want anyone to assume
that slavery was enjoyable or that black people wanted to
be enslaved, And that is certainly not the argument that
(32:20):
I'm making. Instead, what I see this book doing is
expanding the ways that we are willing to talk about
kind of black experiences across time in an effort to
help us remember that we've always understood ourselves to be creative.
We've always understood ourselves to be part of the story,
(32:44):
and it's for other reasons that we learn otherwise. I
still wonder sometimes what Phyllishey thought about as she brushed
her teeth. At the time of this writing. There is
no extent information about we, at least tooth cleaning practices.
The historians have assured me the toothbrushes were not available
in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
I don't wonder.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
Because I actually care about Wheatley's teeth or a dental hygiene.
I care instead about the ways in which she experienced
herself when no one was looking for a servant or
asking for poetry. I suspect I wonder how weally took
care of herself, or those various selves full of religious
and moral subjects. When I speak of self, I mean
her body when it wasn't engraved on a frontis piece.
(33:29):
I also mean the self that isn't for everybody, that
self that lives deep down inside, into her interiority, wherein
she might speak in her in quiet tones to herself
or to a friend, or to a lover. I'm speaking
of the self that knows to listen to her body
and to love it. It is a self that knows
how to love another, even in the midst of the
uncertainty of every day and in particular revolutionary era living.
(33:54):
Wheatley's letters and the resulting pleasures publicize the interiority that
makes real what matters to her as a face full believer,
a writer, a poet, a friend, and a wife. Despite
the prevalence of Whekly's pleasures, it seems that what pleases
her doesn't yet know how to fit the expectations of
twenty first century readers. Wheatly's pleasures don't know how to
(34:15):
please our contemporary desire for the fixity of intersectionality, resistance,
or the certainty of subjectivity. They can't anticipate the anxieties
that compel us to keep watch over her intersecting subjectivities
or to long for her resistance. Wheatly is just pleased
to share what she likes with whom she loves, be friends,
or does business. What she does expect are those letters
(34:37):
from a friend that call her to the very matter
of her living and loving and with her friend Obertanna
Wee can be the servant of Christ who is neither
slave nor free, but loved by her God and her friend,
and she is not alone.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
What does it mean to be exceptional? What happens in
someone's life for them to be considered exceptional? What are
all the boxes that need to be checked? What are
the key moments? Who are the people who recognize and
see said potential? Phillips Wheatley had every possible odd against her.
(35:10):
Some might call her an anomaly, others would call her
an example. I like the word exceptional because despite the odds,
and despite the time period she lived in, what stands
out to me about her is not just her work,
but her tenacity and sharing it. The sheer amount of
(35:32):
time she dedicated to writing letters to her friends, acquaintances,
and even to those who doubted her intelligence. These were
people who didn't even believe she was capable of writing
or putting words together, yet they received letters from Phillips Wheatley.
Where did that drive come from? When was that seed
(35:54):
of greatness planted in her? Perhaps it began in West
Africa well before the Middle Passage, and somehow, despite everything
along with her. It survived, and the coming episodes will
continue to explore Phyllis Wheatley's life and work, her unique
(36:15):
way of expressing herself, and the lessons she taught us.
To quote Alice Dunbar Nelson, we do not teach literature.
A literature teaches us through our poetry and letters. Phyllis
Wheatley taught us how to be exactly who we are,
because once the seed of greatness is planted, it is
(36:36):
yours and as a twenty first century somebody. There are
many aspects of the eighteenth century and Phyllis's life we
can focus on, but in the next few weeks we'll
look beyond the words on the page to discover her joy,
her ability to stay hopeful, to express her love, and
(37:01):
to show gratitude towards those around her, including other artists
like herself. It is that joy that stands out to me.
The letter is exchanged between Phyllis Wheatley and Uber Tanner,
two friends who supported and prayed for each other, offer
a rare insight into the lives of two black women
(37:24):
in the eighteenth century. In my conversations with doctor Tara Bidem,
I was reminded that we are not confined to our resilience.
There are moments meant explicitly, intentionally, naturally, just for joy.
(37:44):
When I speak with my sisters or friends, I'm not
talking from a place of protecting, defending, or fighting all
the time. I'm simply enjoying their presence and the conversation.
I hope you enjoy as much as I do these
next few episodes. Black But is a Black Effects original
(38:23):
series in partnership with iHeart Media.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Is written and.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Created by myself, Jack Queess Thomas and executive produced alongside
Dolly s. Bishop. Chanelle Collins is the director of Production,
Head of Talent Nicole Spence, writer producer Jason Torres, Our
researcher and producer is Jabari Davis, and the mix and
sound design is by the humble Duane Crawford. Gratitude is
(38:50):
an action, so I have to give praise to those
who took the time out to write a review. Please
keep sharing and we will promise to bring more writers
and greater episodes to you. Also, if you're looking to
become a writer or in search of a supportive writing community,
(39:10):
join me for a free creative writing session on my
website Black writers Room dot com. B LK writer's Room
dot com or hit me up directly for more details
at Underscore t h A T S P E A
c E. That's Peace.
My name is Jacqueese Thomas, and you're listening to Black Lit,
a podcast about black literature and the stories behind the storytellers.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm not sure that the world knows Phylis Wheeley, although
I think there are more people who know her now
than who knew her twenty years ago. And for those
who know Phyllis Wheatley, they know that she was a poet.
They know her as an anomaly. They know her as
this person who was so intellectually astute that because she
was able to write poetry, write quality poetry, she was
(00:39):
able to earn her krenom. She wasn't a lone wolf
writing at the end of the eighteenth century. For me,
Phyllis Wheatley is representative of a community of Black Americans
who were living and navigating the socio political spaces in
the early Americas. For me, she's a good example of
(01:00):
the ways that people of africants dissent or coping, living,
in some cases thriving.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Her life began in West Africa, but most of what
we know of her story begins in Boston. But her
words could not be confined to one city, one country,
or even one era. They crossed oceans on ships not
meant to carry her voice, landed in hands that never
(01:27):
expected to hold them. They wrote in a time that
demanded her silence, Yet her words found a way to speak.
They were not just records of survival, but evidence of
something more. In lines of verse and letters sent across distance,
there was laughter, There was hope, There was friendship, and
(01:54):
there was a joy that bloomed in the spaces between
expectation and possibility. Centuries have passed, but her words still sing,
still bring out, still carry her name, Phyllis Wheatley. Various
(02:15):
scholars throughout the centuries have gravitated towards her work. Each
person I interviewed during this exploration of Phyllis Wheatley had
a different calling card, a curiosity to understand black life
in early America, and a different reason behind there why.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
I'm doctor Tara Baynham.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
I'm an associate professor of English and African American Studies
at the University of Iowa. I don't quite remember the
very first time I encountered for this sweetly, but I
do remember the first time that she is most memorable,
and I was in an undergraduate English class at Spaman College,
taught by doctor Geneva Baxter and I and the rest
(02:59):
of the class were engaged in a conversation.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I'm pretty sure that was.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
About Phillis Wheeley's most anthologized poem, on being Brought from
Africa to.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
America, and that we were in a debate about it.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
And I think the debate is always pretty consistent, you know,
it's weekly for slavery, as weekly against slavery, as weekly
black enough or not. And I just remember kind of
being curious about the debate, not knowing a whole lot
about Phillips wheeleye.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
And it wasn't until.
Speaker 4 (03:36):
Maybe a couple of years later or so that I
end up kind of returned to Phillis Wheeley in a
different set of poems and a different set of reading
in graduate school that I was like, oh that, you know,
I think that.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
There might be more.
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Wheeley's story begins in West Africa, and I become most
interested in her as a writer who is writing letters
to friends and acquaintances.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Smith I am a professor of English at the University
of Alabama, and I'm associating for academic affairs for the
Honors College also at Alabama. My number one goal is
to make visible the cultural contributions of people of African
descent in this space that we now call the United States.
Particularly the contribution is before the eighteenth century.
Speaker 5 (04:24):
John Holmes, Assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
I've always wanted to be a teacher, and I've always
known that I wanted to tell the stories of my
ancestors to kind of capture how profound they were.
Speaker 6 (04:39):
But we cannot put.
Speaker 5 (04:40):
Into our brains the kinds of worlds that they had
to interact with, which would definitely impact the kinds of
choices that they thought would be helpful for themselves, for
their progenity, and of course for us. Right, So they're
making choices about situations that they know they won't necessarily
get to, you know, be involved in. If I'm making
an argument for abolitionism, am I making that argument for me?
(05:03):
Or am I making that argument for my children? And
so I see that a great deal in Weebley's poetry,
not in this sense for her children she had children,
but they were, you know, die very young, but in
the sense that she was looking out at a future
that was bleak for people who looked like her, that
was unfortunately having to exist in North America, and I
(05:24):
wanted to tell that story. I wanted to capture how
these individuals were creating ideologies that would be quite useful
for who we are today in the twenty first century.
Speaker 6 (05:34):
And I believe earlier America is a great site for that.
I'm Cornelia Sidi, and I'm a poet, playwright, songwriter, co
founder of Copycolum and at the moment, a endowed chair
at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And I became aware
of Weekly probably in high school. There are probably the
idea that she was the first African American. I always
(05:57):
trip over that, because, of course, there was no such
thing as African America back then. She was a slave.
She was the first slave to publish a book of poetry,
a full length book of poetry, instead of just one
or two poets or poems or broadsides. And that fact
sometimes clogs the achievement of her work. And it's a
brilliant book, her only book. There is an incredible book.
And the more you read it and the more you
(06:18):
start thinking about it, the more you start thinking about
the circumstances that make the book and make her And
I'm sorry that people don't really study the book more
because it is really an incredible document about a lot
of things, about the idea of slavery, about the idea
of the voice of an African American, the location of
the speaker of the poem, the audience that she's talking to. Right,
(06:42):
So it's really rich. I know, it's not really easily
consumed by a contemporary eye and ear, but it's worth
the time and effort to linger and unravel it.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
My name is Bridget Fielder, and I'm an associate professor
at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the College of
Letters and Science. When I teach a class in African
American children's literature, I start with her, and I start
with her poem. To SKIPI a more head the young
African painter on seeing his works, a poem by the
(07:18):
most prominent Black poet before we get to the twenty
first century. You know, when we think about women poets,
she's one who is more prominent than other black women
writers in general. She has a clear poem right there,
written to a black child, as somebody who was younger
than her at the time of this book's publication. According
to scholars who have researched it skip more heads life.
(07:40):
It seems like he would have been a kind of
young teenager at the time. And there are a lot
of things in Wheatley's work that are that there are
a lot of themes that one could speak to today
in a lot of things in her life that we
might usefully include her in conversations about. So if one
wants to think about mourning, we could think about the
(08:03):
elegy and her elegies. Or if one wants to think
about the American Revolution, it helps to think about other
kinds of people who lived through the revolution, then the
people who just like orchestrated it. And so there are
lots of literary reasons and historical reasons to attend to Wheatley.
(08:25):
But for thinking about that longer thread of black women's voices,
one of the most interesting things.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
For me.
Speaker 7 (08:35):
Is thinking about her as an enslaved child who had
so much potential and possibility, not as an exceptional person necessarily,
even if we want to think about her as a prodigy,
(08:56):
but as a representative example of the potential and possibility
of all of those enslaved children.
Speaker 6 (09:04):
Come to this country a slave, And how should you
sing June Jordan. How do you say this in Senegalese?
My mother is gone, my dream. My father calls my name,
but I cannot fill his arms. The ship is a
crazy beast. These irons cut my legs in the air
(09:28):
reeks of shit and piss. I am sick and thinning
from hunger. What happens to me in this strange place?
What is the tongue of this hostile tribe? New birds,
cold air, narrow streets, hard and uneven to walk, slop
(09:54):
and thirst on the tongue. If you screen your name
and no one listens, if you yell where you come
from and people stare through you, are you a girl
or a ghost? What did Phillis tell the wheat Lace
that first day? With them close? They say broth, They
(10:18):
sing soak and water to soothe whatever she babbles.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Doctor Cassie reads an excerpt from her book Race and
Respectability in the Early Black Atlantic. She writes in a
way that puts Wheatley's humanity front and center to remind
people that she is not an object of study, but
a thinking and feeling human being.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Phyllis will you Peters enters a discussion about respectability as
a seven year old girl maybe eighth facing the slave market,
perceived as the leads least desirable. A human cargo that
comes into a Boston harbor on the slave ship Phillis
in seventeen sixty one. The ship's captain, despite the explicit
(11:10):
orders of his employer to purchase prime boys and men,
nonetheless snags this black girl and adds her to the stop.
The advertisement that announces the sale of this child speaks
to her lack of value. In the words of the advertisement,
to be sold a parcel of likely negroes imported from
Africa cheap for cash or short credit, inquired of John
(11:34):
Avery at his house next door to the White Horse,
or at a store adjoining to said a Grey's distellhouse
at the South End near the South Market. Also, if
any persons have any Negro man strong and hardy, though
not of the best moral character, which are proper subjects
for transportation, may have in exchange for small negroes. The
(11:58):
ad is disrespectful of multiple levels. Most obvious is the
inhumanity of peddling human beings as chattel. Beyond that is
the specific disregard for those black men sought for purchase.
The desirability located in a presumed absence of morality, which
also makes them fit only for transportation out of the colony.
(12:19):
There is even less regard for those black children weakly,
presumably among them whose youth and gender drive their devaluation.
They are bartered for able bodied men of ill repute.
The lack of regard for those enslaved men and children,
the disrespect forms a warped economic logic, whereby they are
positioned as exchange commodities of equal devalue to some prospective buyer.
(12:45):
At seven years old, Wheatley would not have grasped the
import of being exchanged for men of questionable character. At
at a young age, she would not have understood the
economic stakes attached to public perceptions of her Black female.
Speaker 6 (13:01):
She barely survives. She gets sick on the passage over.
She's kind of naked. Someone gives her a carpet to
put on her when the weakness came walking through, and
they buy her. But that sevenate eight year old knows
what all That seven eight year olds know every place
in the world. They know their parents, they know their
family name, they know their own name. They know their neighbors,
they know the neighborhood, they know the food. They know,
(13:23):
I mean, they know all this stuff. And occasionally in
the book it pops up wheatly, you know, did talk
about being in Africa. There was this one poem that
she wrote where she talks about thinking about her parents, right,
my parents thinking right, because when you're a slave, you're
kidnapped and that's it. You know, when you leave Africa,
you don't come back and they never see you again.
(13:43):
They don't know whether you lived or die. You don't
know if you're survived. I don't know where you are.
You don't know if you ended up in the ocean,
you know, I mean, if this all that stuff. And
there's like four lines where she's actually talking about that,
and you have to see that. So she's conscious of that.
She just doesn't say it right because there's no place
to say it really right. But it does pop up.
So there's always different layers of phyllis that is sprinkled
(14:06):
in the book. It's sprinkled in But he also have
to realize that a lot of times in the poems
she's talking to an alliance and she's also challenging the audience.
And you also have to realize on some level this
that besides the poetry. This is just the fact of her,
the fact of her, the physical fact of her in
the room, in the air. Being a poet is a
(14:28):
radical statement because up until this point, I mean, yes,
Jupiter Hammond, and there's some other sprinkling of some other
African American poets there, but Phyllis is really that person
where basically there she is right the physical space that
she takes in like Frederick Douglas when he's doing his speeches,
right the physical space of the orator saying something is
(14:50):
something that's a new shock to that culture because it
never happened before up until that moment. And she's not
an orator like Frederick Douglass is. She's a poet. But
she's also seeing things. And the fact that I'm saying
that you're seeing me, seeing me saying this stuff, talking
in your language, talking in what you consider the highest
form of your language. It's an argument or a way
(15:14):
of declaring to you that I'm real and I'm human.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
And just as importantly, we must let go of the
idea that black people have ever needed permission to create.
Creativity was never given, never waited for, never depended on approval.
It existed in whispers and in shouts, in secrets and
in full view, in moments of freedom and in spaces
(15:41):
of confinement, Black expression has always found a way, not
because it was allowed, but because it could not be contained.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
I think that what feels most important is we've got
to dismantle the expectation that black people have ever needed
permission to do creative work. We've never needed permission and
we've never expected it kind of in real time, and
yet we assume that in decades past or centuries past,
(16:14):
black people were like, we don't have permission, We're not
going to do it, and I don't like that we
do that.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And instead, what I want us to.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
Do is kind of go back in time and to
be reminded that whether we're talking about for those we
Lee in the seventeen seventies, or Caesar Landen in the
seventeen sixties, or Venture Smith in the seventeen nineties, to
create these black women and black men, they did so
despite whatever limitations we might have decided we're imposed upon them,
(16:48):
or whatever real limitations were.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
And Weakley is absolutely an example of that.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
You are listening to lit most of us view this
time period incorrectly. It wasn't great for black people, but
it also wasn't always what many of us would imagine.
Beyond the pain and the oppression, there was resistance, There
(17:19):
was community, There were moments of love, of joy, and creativity.
People did not exist solely in suffering, but in the
fullness of life, navigating a world that sought to define
them while they continued to define themselves.
Speaker 4 (17:38):
So I think one misconception is that black people couldn't
read or write because it was against the law. You know,
what I think is interesting about that particular misconception is
that reading and writing are hard to prove. So I
(17:59):
think with others laws, there's actual proof of something. You know,
like murder can only be charged if there's a body
drug possession. You need the drugs. Speeding you need the
vehicle that is moving too fast. But like if reading
is suddenly illegal and someone is like, prove to me
(18:22):
that you can read, how did they do that? How
do they compel you to read? So we've decided or
understand as like twenty first century people that because literacy,
reading and writing in particular, where we're made illegal at
different points, that black people were one compliant, which is
(18:45):
interesting when thinking about the effect of laws on people,
because I'm still not entirely convinced that there are laws
that stop human behavior effectively, Like if we figured out
how to get rid of murder, and we figured out
how to get rid of speeding, we figured out how
to prevent the use of illegal narcotics by way of laws.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
To my knowledge, the answer is no. You let me
know if I'm wrong. But somehow we come.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
To believe that because there were these laws against literacy,
that black people one were compliant and maybe the most
compliant people in all of history, and two that it
was somehow enforceable. And also, I would suggest lucky number
three is that laws only come into being because people
(19:30):
are doing the thing. So before there were cars, there
was probably not speeding laws. You know, a worse can
only go so fast. Misconception number one is that black
people couldn't read and write because it was against the law.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Jillis Wheatley, in addition poetry, she wrote letters, and one
of her favorite interlocutors was another black woman named Uber Tanner.
So Uber could read, we have to assume she could
write because she was writing back, even though none of
those letters. We haven't found any of those letters. But anyway,
all of that to say there was a community of
(20:08):
black people who could read and potentially do both in
that time period. We just can't know how extensive it was,
and I wouldn't necessarily make an argument that it was widespread. However,
one thing to keep in mind is that the Puritans,
whatever you want to think about the Puritans, they did
value literacy, particularly the skill of reading, so that the
(20:32):
members of the household could read the bike. I know
that the Wheatlys said that part of what motivated them
to teach Billis Wheatley was that they saw that she
had a natural aptitude and a natural curiosity. But it
was also the case that teaching the members of your
household how to read was a relatively common practice.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
I think misconception number two is that slavery is kind
of relegated to the southern United States. It is plantation based,
very large scale. Cotton is the driver. Maybe if you
know a little bit tobacco as.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
A driver, maybe if you know a little bit more,
you remember sugar.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
And I think that while that is all well and true,
there's also a very very present and important kind of
northern slavery that influences the shape of slavery as a
system slave trading. You know, if you wanted to be
the wealthiest slave trader in the eighteenth century, you should
(21:29):
be based in Rhode Island, not in the South, even
though one could debate that South Carolina might be a
good place to be too. But I think that what's
important is that there's this network of economies that make
slavery and slave trading important to colonies and the colonies
(21:50):
that later become the states as well, and I think
in all of those places, the goal is to figure
out how to kind of limit black people's movement, to
control black people's behavior, and I think that there are
many different ways to do that. There's laws, there's violence,
(22:11):
there's various forms of surveillance, and all of that influences
black people and the development of black.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Culture as well.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
So, you know, I think I'm hesitant to say, for example,
that Phyllis Whey's slavery is different in such a way
that kind of would have us think that there's a
good version of enslavement versus a bad version of enslavement.
I'm not prepared to do that, but I do think
that Phyllis Whey is based in a city, so the
(22:43):
look of her experience is going to be different than
someone who is enslaved in rural Massachusetts or in rural
South Carolina.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
But I think that that also seems to be kind
of tricky. Is like the impulse and compulsion to create
a hierarchy within. So I think those are the big
assumptions that I'm always working to fight against.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Wheatley wasn't just a poet. She lived in a world
shaped by power, hierarchy, and constraint, but she was also
a thinker, a friend, a woman who experienced love, and
perhaps most overlooked, a person who knew joy. Black Joy
is an essential part of this story, but not in
(23:29):
opposition to the realities of her time, but alongside them.
We see it clearly in Wakly's writings and in her connections.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
My path to thinking about joy in Wheatley's writing and
in eighteenth century black writing, actually starts with one of
her poems, thoughts on the works of Providence, And I
think what gives me pause and thoughts on the works
of Providence, So a moment in the poem where she says,
(24:04):
as reason powers by day our God disclosed, so we
may trace him in the night repose say, what is
sleep and dreams? How passing strange when action ceases and
ideas range licentious and unbounded over the plains, where fancies
queen and giddy triumph rains. Here in soft strains the
dreaming lover side to a kind, fair or raven jealousy.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
I said, who is the dreaming love? What? What is that?
What is this twenty year old talking about? Who is
who is in bed?
Speaker 4 (24:40):
And then I read some more in this poem and
there ends up being this conversation between love and reason,
and reason is understood to be a companion of love,
and there seems to be some sort of beef between
these two kind of humanized nouns, and it too is
(25:04):
also like chock full of something that hey, at the time,
you know, when I first encountered this poem in graduate school,
like I don't know necessarily to call it joy, but
it's like, what what is phyllis are.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
They talking about?
Speaker 4 (25:21):
And I think there's another poem where Aurora's in Tithan's bed,
and I was like, this is something is happening here
that is certainly very different than on being brought from
Africa to America. And I think both the mention of
Aurora and Tithan's bed and the dreaming lover sighing. I
(25:44):
was kind of like, this is I might need to
read more closely check my own sort of expectations about
what Phyllis Wheeley is doing.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
What this reveals is that Wheatly, like any other human being,
was thinking about pleasure, love, and even desire. She was
not just a symbol of resistance or a figure of history.
She was a woman who dreamed, who wandered, who let
(26:16):
her mind linger on the feelings that make us all human.
Her words held more than just struggle. They carried the
intimacy of longing, the curiosity of youth, and the quiet
joys found in the spaces between survival and self discovery.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Francis Smiths Foster, who's a literary scholar who's worked with
Sweetly a bit as well, points to this language, and
you know, I think it is the language of sexuality,
the language of pleasure, and I think it sort of
begins to plant the seed in me that like, no,
this isn't just I shouldn't just be reading for resistance.
(26:58):
I shouldn't just be reading for or the Middle Passage.
I shouldn't just be reading for the line where Wheatley says,
I hate slavery because she's doing she's doing something else.
You know, that ends up being kind of my my
way into thinking about joy and Wheatley's life. And you know,
(27:19):
I think I moved from the poems into the letters
and think about her friendship with uber Tanner and the
way that that relationship is is talked about in the
extent letters that exist, and like I think that there
are in the in the kind of mention of the
every day, I think it becomes clear to me that
(27:41):
it Weekly enjoys her relationship with her friend and is
not hesitant to describe.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
That joy and joy and joy and joy and joy.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
The records of her friendship with uber Tanner offer another
window into what black joy may have looked like for us.
Her joy was what she shared in these letters and
small moments of these connections, in words that traveled across
distance but never lost their warmth. It was a joy
(28:11):
that existed alongside struggle, not in spite of a reminder
that even in a world built to contain her, Phillis
sweetly found space for a full human experience.
Speaker 5 (28:25):
They had joy, which is the ultimate of form of
resistance because oh, you shouldn't be happy.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Why are you happy?
Speaker 5 (28:31):
You know, it's not the smile that one presents when
they're out, but it's a real joy.
Speaker 6 (28:36):
It's an intimate joy.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
And then sometimes it's even as Terror's book taught us,
which has been very helpful for my work on the
seventeenth century, really helpful is just reminding us that sometimes
these individual acts.
Speaker 6 (28:49):
We love to look for the collective.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
How are they advocating for all the black people?
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Right?
Speaker 5 (28:54):
But sometimes you're not going to find that right. So
what does it mean to look at these individual acts
freedom of all, these individual acts of joy as moments
that are important and they do not need to be
buttressed within the realm of how it's responding to white people.
I mean, you can, you know, but it can be
joy for the joy of that individual that you're writing
(29:16):
about and describing the world that they saw. So I
think it as another dimension, if you will.
Speaker 4 (29:22):
I love the letters between Phillip Wheeley and Obertanner, and
kind of Phillip Wheley's letters in general, she writes more
people than uber Tanner, but think uber Tanner's letters are
about eight or so that still exists, and these are
letters between two black women, two black women in the
seventeen seventies, which is also a war time. I guess
(29:45):
that's the other part that we don't necessarily think about
in relation to Wheatley always, is that, like, Wheatley is
writing and publishing.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
As a war is emerging, and it's not you know,
it's not just any war.
Speaker 4 (29:59):
It's the the revolutionary wards, the war that makes the
United States of America a country and too itself. And so,
you know, I think that there was so much about
my own set of assumptions that I had to sit
with debunk ask myself, why why am I so surprised
that there are two black women writing letters at this time?
(30:21):
Why am I so surprised too, that the letters are
not just trading stories of resilience or trading stories of resistance,
or trading stories of like, gosh, darn it, I'm enslaved again.
Why am I surprised that they actually have more to
say than that? And what does that tell me about
(30:42):
my own education? That I kind of am surprised that
even in the eighteenth century, black people are more complex
than I've been taught to think.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Wheatley's life makes us ask deeper questions. What did our
private moments look like when the world wasn't watching, when
she wasn't writing for patrons or corresponding with friends. Who
was wheatley to herself? Does she find stillness in the
(31:13):
early hours, reflecting on her own words? Did she laugh
in quiet spaces? Did she dream in secret? Does she
hold memories close like treasures? Her public legacy is evident,
but her private world is where the mystery lives, where
intimacy takes shape, where the fullness of her humanity resides.
(31:39):
Doctor Tara Biinum reads from her book Reading Pleasures Everyday
Black Living in Early America. Bynum wrote this book because
of her obsession with eighteenth century black literature and to
debunk assumptions that black people only recently found the concept
of joy.
Speaker 4 (31:59):
Increasingly, I have been troubled by that assumption, and I
understand why there's a kind of commitment to discussions of
resilience and suffering, because we don't want anyone to assume
that slavery was enjoyable or that black people wanted to
be enslaved, And that is certainly not the argument that
(32:20):
I'm making. Instead, what I see this book doing is
expanding the ways that we are willing to talk about
kind of black experiences across time in an effort to
help us remember that we've always understood ourselves to be creative.
We've always understood ourselves to be part of the story,
(32:44):
and it's for other reasons that we learn otherwise. I
still wonder sometimes what Phyllishey thought about as she brushed
her teeth. At the time of this writing. There is
no extent information about we, at least tooth cleaning practices.
The historians have assured me the toothbrushes were not available
in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
I don't wonder.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
Because I actually care about Wheatley's teeth or a dental hygiene.
I care instead about the ways in which she experienced
herself when no one was looking for a servant or
asking for poetry. I suspect I wonder how weally took
care of herself, or those various selves full of religious
and moral subjects. When I speak of self, I mean
her body when it wasn't engraved on a frontis piece.
(33:29):
I also mean the self that isn't for everybody, that
self that lives deep down inside, into her interiority, wherein
she might speak in her in quiet tones to herself
or to a friend, or to a lover. I'm speaking
of the self that knows to listen to her body
and to love it. It is a self that knows
how to love another, even in the midst of the
uncertainty of every day and in particular revolutionary era living.
(33:54):
Wheatley's letters and the resulting pleasures publicize the interiority that
makes real what matters to her as a face full believer,
a writer, a poet, a friend, and a wife. Despite
the prevalence of Whekly's pleasures, it seems that what pleases
her doesn't yet know how to fit the expectations of
twenty first century readers. Wheatly's pleasures don't know how to
(34:15):
please our contemporary desire for the fixity of intersectionality, resistance,
or the certainty of subjectivity. They can't anticipate the anxieties
that compel us to keep watch over her intersecting subjectivities
or to long for her resistance. Wheatly is just pleased
to share what she likes with whom she loves, be friends,
or does business. What she does expect are those letters
(34:37):
from a friend that call her to the very matter
of her living and loving and with her friend Obertanna
Wee can be the servant of Christ who is neither
slave nor free, but loved by her God and her friend,
and she is not alone.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
What does it mean to be exceptional? What happens in
someone's life for them to be considered exceptional? What are
all the boxes that need to be checked? What are
the key moments? Who are the people who recognize and
see said potential? Phillips Wheatley had every possible odd against her.
(35:10):
Some might call her an anomaly, others would call her
an example. I like the word exceptional because despite the odds,
and despite the time period she lived in, what stands
out to me about her is not just her work,
but her tenacity and sharing it. The sheer amount of
(35:32):
time she dedicated to writing letters to her friends, acquaintances,
and even to those who doubted her intelligence. These were
people who didn't even believe she was capable of writing
or putting words together, yet they received letters from Phillips Wheatley.
Where did that drive come from? When was that seed
(35:54):
of greatness planted in her? Perhaps it began in West
Africa well before the Middle Passage, and somehow, despite everything
along with her. It survived, and the coming episodes will
continue to explore Phyllis Wheatley's life and work, her unique
(36:15):
way of expressing herself, and the lessons she taught us.
To quote Alice Dunbar Nelson, we do not teach literature.
A literature teaches us through our poetry and letters. Phyllis
Wheatley taught us how to be exactly who we are,
because once the seed of greatness is planted, it is
(36:36):
yours and as a twenty first century somebody. There are
many aspects of the eighteenth century and Phyllis's life we
can focus on, but in the next few weeks we'll
look beyond the words on the page to discover her joy,
her ability to stay hopeful, to express her love, and
(37:01):
to show gratitude towards those around her, including other artists
like herself. It is that joy that stands out to me.
The letter is exchanged between Phyllis Wheatley and Uber Tanner,
two friends who supported and prayed for each other, offer
a rare insight into the lives of two black women
(37:24):
in the eighteenth century. In my conversations with doctor Tara Bidem,
I was reminded that we are not confined to our resilience.
There are moments meant explicitly, intentionally, naturally, just for joy.
(37:44):
When I speak with my sisters or friends, I'm not
talking from a place of protecting, defending, or fighting all
the time. I'm simply enjoying their presence and the conversation.
I hope you enjoy as much as I do these
next few episodes. Black But is a Black Effects original
(38:23):
series in partnership with iHeart Media.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Is written and.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Created by myself, Jack Queess Thomas and executive produced alongside
Dolly s. Bishop. Chanelle Collins is the director of Production,
Head of Talent Nicole Spence, writer producer Jason Torres, Our
researcher and producer is Jabari Davis, and the mix and
sound design is by the humble Duane Crawford. Gratitude is
(38:50):
an action, so I have to give praise to those
who took the time out to write a review. Please
keep sharing and we will promise to bring more writers
and greater episodes to you. Also, if you're looking to
become a writer or in search of a supportive writing community,
(39:10):
join me for a free creative writing session on my
website Black writers Room dot com. B LK writer's Room
dot com or hit me up directly for more details
at Underscore t h A T S P E A
c E. That's Peace.
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