The Poet They Had to Examine — Phillis Wheatley

A room in Boston, 1772. Eighteen men are seated — the governor among them, John Hancock among them, some of the most respected names in the colony. A young woman stands before them. She is perhaps nineteen. She has been brought here because she claims to have written a book of poems, and the men of Boston cannot bring themselves to believe it.

They will question her until they are satisfied.

It is 1772.

She does not just write. She publishes. From her first poem at fourteen to the full manuscript before these eighteen men at nineteen, she has been writing in the language of her enslavers with a precision her enslavers cannot match. The poems exist. The only question the room is asking is whether she exists as their author.

She does not just publish. She proves. She answers their questions. She demonstrates her command of Latin and Greek and classical allusion and the meters of English verse. She answers until the men are satisfied. They sign an attestation printed in the front matter of the book — eighteen names certifying what she already knew. No Boston printer will issue it regardless. London prints it in 1773 because Boston will not.

She does not just prove. She outlasts. Manumitted after returning from London, she marries, loses three children, loses her husband to debt and hardship, loses the second manuscript that might have followed the first. She dies at thirty-one in poverty, in a room near the Boston docks. Her infant daughter dies the same day.

Her Spark of Liberty was the right to be believed.

The absolute conviction that a person who writes a poem wrote the poem, that the work is the proof and the proof should be enough, and that a republic founded on the idea that all men are created equal should not require a nineteen-year-old girl to stand in a room and defend her own mind to eighteen men before they will consent to print her name.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

In Boston, in the years before and after the Revolution, a young woman kidnapped from West Africa wrote poems good enough that the colony’s most powerful men had to sit down and certify she had written them. They signed. London published. She died at thirty-one with her infant daughter on the same December day in a cold room near the docks. The poems survived everything.

Her name was Phillis Wheatley.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

www.NowWeKnowEm.com

#NowWeKnowEm #SparksOfLiberty #TurningPointPress #QuietHands #AfricanAmericanHistory #ColonialPoetry #Boston