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Tracing An Unlikely Odyssey

While American colonists did destroy British tea in Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea party in 1773, luckily, they did not destroy another cargo of inestimable value on the same ship: copies of the volume of poetry by enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley.

Biographer David Waldstreicher tells Wheatley’s remarkable story in his new book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence.

Waldstreicher, a distinguished professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will talk at the Essex Library on Thursday, Nov. 9 at 7 p.m. in conversation with Essex resident Sam Tanenhaus, himself a biographer and a retired editor of The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Phillis Wheatley’s was indeed a most unlikely odyssey. She started life somewhere in West Africa. Kidnapped between the ages of six and eight, she survived the harrowing Middle Passage to Boston on a slave ship.

Naked except for a piece of carpet wrapped around her body, she was bought by merchant John Wheatley as a servant for his wife Susanna. Phillis Wheatley never revealed what her African birth name was. The Wheatleys called her Phillis after the ship she arrived on.

That could have been the end of a story about an enslaved child but it was not. Wheatley learned to read, not only English but Latin and Greek. As a young teen she was already writing notable poetry. In 1773, her only book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in England.

Phillis Wheatley herself travelled to London with Nathaniel Wheatley, the son of Susanna and John Wheatley in part because Susanna thought she would have a better chance of having her book published there. Waldstreicher points out that Phillis Wheatley showed remarkable skill in employing strategies to interest influential literary patrons in England and thus to gain recognition for her work.

Phillis Wheatley was freed in 1773 upon her return from England. She married a freed black man who suffered financial setbacks; her two children died. She herself died of pneumonia at 31.

Waldstreicher wanted not only to tell the story of Wheatley’s life, but to place her in the context of colonial America and to underline something less appreciated: how slavery was an ongoing issue in the American Revolution.

He researched the West African traditions that would have formed her earliest years. She gives but one mention of her own past, a reference to her father, but Waldstreicher argues the culture from which she came is an unspoken platform on which her work was constructed.

He also wanted to know what Wheatley knew about the colonial world in which she lived, so he read the Boston newspapers that she would have seen, over 20 years of newspapers, some 50,000 pages in all.

In addition, he was interested in the other material that had formed Wheatley’s education. “I had to know what she knew, the Greek and Roman classics,” he says.

At a library book sale, he found an audio tape of Ian McKellan-narrated translation of The Odyssey. He listened to it with an increasing realization that the story related to Wheatley’s era as much as to Homer’s.

“Oh wow, there was war, slavery, oceanic voyages, things she would have experienced in her world,” he said of The Odyssey. He realized her classical references were a way Wheatley could comment on colonial America. Waldstreicher also points out that one of Wheatley’s best-known poems, “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” which to some people appears to be a defense of slavery, is in fact an oblique criticism.

He has read the poem to his classes in two interpretative styles, first in the gentle tones of the traditional interpretation of how good it was to be taken from Africa to learn of another world, and the second, in a much more challenging and sarcastic tone, the tone he thinks conveys the real message of the poem.

“She was a true genius; a better writer than she was given credit for, a bigger fish. I want to reintegrate her into American history,” he says.

The talk will take place at the Essex Library, 33 West Avenue, Essex. Registration is requested but not required and can be done by calling 860-767-1560 or e-mailing staff at essexlib@gmail.com.