Henry Louis Gates Jr.

According to the Web site of the National Endowment for the Arts, “The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities recognizes an individual who has made significant scholarly contributions to the humanities and who has the ability to communicate the knowledge and wisdom of the humanities in a broadly appealing way.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. (b. 1950), currently the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, delivered the lecture in 2002. Gates opened by pointing out the irony of his topic at an event named for Thomas Jefferson, who was a slaveholder and critic of Phillis Wheatley. Jefferson asserted, “Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Dr. Gates began his lecture by establishing his ethos: “I stand here as a fellow countryman of Thomas Jefferson, in several senses: as a citizen, like all of you, of the republic of letters; as an American who believes deeply in the soaring promise of the Declaration of Independence…and hence, in a broad sense, a fellow Virginian… . For all of us, white and black, alike, Jefferson remains an essential ancestor.” In the following excerpt from the end of the lecture, Gates examines the criticism Jefferson leveled at Wheatley as a poet and the response of more recent African American intellectuals and artists who were also skeptical of Wheatley’s contribution to American literature.

[W]hat’s important, for our purposes, is that even black authors accepted the premise that a group, a “race,” had to demonstrate its equality through the creation of literature. When the historian David Levering Lewis aptly calls the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s “art as civil rights,” it is Jefferson who stands as the subtext for this formulation. Or listen to these words from James Weldon Johnson, written in 1922:

In their efforts to prove Jefferson wrong, in other words, black writers created a body of literature, one with a prime political motive: to demonstrate black equality. Surely this is one of the oddest origins of a bellestric tradition in the history of world literature. Indeed, when Wole Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, a press release on behalf of the Nigerian government declared that—because of this prize—no longer could the world see Africans as distinctly inferior. The specter of Thomas Jefferson haunts even there, in Africa in 1986, as does the shadow of Phillis Wheatley.

Now, given all of the praise and attention that Wheatley received, given her unprecedented popularity and fame, one might be forgiven for thinking that Wheatley’s career took off with the publication of her poems in 1773, and that she lived happily ever after. She did not: she died in 1784 in abject poverty, preceded in death by her three children, surrounded by filth, and abandoned, apparently, by her husband, John Peters, a fast-talking small businessman who affected the airs and dress of a gentleman and who would later sell off Phillis’s proposed second volume of poetry—the one to have been dedicated to Franklin—which has never been recovered. Am I the only scholar who dreams of finding this lost manuscript?

And what happens to her literary legacy after she dies? Interwoven through Phillis Wheatley’s intriguing and troubling afterlife is a larger parable about the politics of authenticity. For, as I’ve said, those rituals of validation scarcely died with Phillis Wheatley; on the contrary, they would become a central theme in the abolitionist era, where the publication of the slave narratives by and large also depended on letters of authentication that testified to the veracity and capacities of the ex-slave author who had written this work “by himself” or “by herself.”

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One might be forgiven, too, for imagining that Phillis Wheatley would be among the most venerated names among black Americans today, as celebrated as Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, or Dr. King. It was probably true that, as one writer claimed several years ago, “historically throughout black America, more YMCAs, schools, dormitories and libraries have been named for Phillis Wheatley than for any other black woman.” And, indeed, I can testify to the presence before 1955 of Phillis Wheatley Elementary School in Ridgeley, West Virginia, a couple of hours up the Potomac, near Piedmont, where I grew up—though it took until college for me to learn just who Miss Wheatley was.

That Phillis Wheatley is not a household word within the black community is owing largely to one poem that she wrote, an eight-line poem entitled “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The poem was written in 1768, just seven years after Phillis was purchased by Susanna Wheatley. Phillis was about fourteen years old.

The eight-line poem reads as follows:

This, it can be safely said, has been the most reviled poem in African American literature. To speak in such glowing terms about the “mercy” manifested by the slave trade was not exactly going to endear Miss Wheatley to black power advocates in the 1960s. No Angela Davis¹ she! But as scholars such as Robinson, Julian Mason, and John Shields point out, her political detractors ignore the fact that Wheatley elsewhere in her poems complained bitterly about the human costs of the slave trade, as in this example from her famous poem, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth.”

And there is Wheatley’s letter to the Reverend Sampson Occom, “a converted Mohegan Indian Christian Minister” who was the eighteenth century’s most distinguished graduate from Moor’s Charity Indian School of Lebanon, Connecticut, which would relocate in 1770 to Hanover, New Hampshire, where it would be renamed after the Earl of Dartmouth (and its student body broadened, against many protests, to include white students). Wheatley’s letter about the evils of slavery was printed in the Massachusetts Spy on March 24, 1774; it reads in part:

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Despite sentiments such as these, the fact that Wheatley’s short poem has been so widely anthologized in this century has made her something of a pariah in black political and critical circles, especially in the militant 1960s, where critics had a field day mocking her life and her works (most of which they had not read)… .

Amiri Baraka, father of the Black Arts movement, in his seminal collection of essays entitled Home (1966), says that Wheatley’s “pleasant imitations of 18th century English poetry are far, and finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits.” For him, of course, these chants represent the authentic spirit of black creativity.

Stephen Henderson, writing in The Militant Black Writer (1969), argues that “it is no wonder that many black people have…rejected Phillis Wheatley,” because her work reflects “the old self-hatred that one hears in the Dozens and in the blues. It is, frankly,” he concludes, “the nigger component of the Black Experience.” Dudley Randall wrote in that same year that “whatever references she made to her African heritage were derogatory, reflecting her status as a favored house slave and a curiosity.”

Addison Gayle, a major black aesthetic critic, wrote in The Way of the World (1975) that Wheatley was the first black writer “to accept the images and symbols of degradation passed down from the South’s most intellectual lights and the first to speak from a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to their oppressors.” Wheatley, in sum, “had surrendered the right to self-definition to others.”

And the assaults continued, the critical arrows arriving in waves. This once most revered figure in black letters would, in the sixties, become the most reviled figure. Angelene Jamison argued in 1974 that Wheatley and her poetry were “too white,” a sentiment that Ezekiel Mphalele echoed two years later when he indicted her for having “a white mind,” and said he felt “too embarrassed even to mention her in passing” in a study of black literature. Similarly, Eleanor Smith maintained that Wheatley was “taught by whites to think,” thus she had “a white mind” and “white orientations.” Here we’re given Phillis Wheatley as Uncle Tom’s mother.

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And examples could be multiplied. But it’s clear enough what we’re witnessing. The Jeffersonian critique has been recuperated and recycled by successive generations of black writers and critics. Precisely the sort of mastery of the literary craft and themes that led to her vindication before the Boston town-hall tribunal,² was now summoned as proof that she was, culturally, an impostor. Phillis Wheatley, having been painstakingly authenticated in her own time, now stands as a symbol of falsity, artificiality, of spiritless and rote convention. As new cultural vanguards sought to police and patrol the boundaries of black art, Wheatley’s glorious carriage would become a tumbril.

Meet Phillis Wheatley, race traitor… .

And this has not merely turned out to be a sixties phenomenon. Those haunting questions of identity linger with us still, much to the devastation of inner-city youth. I read with dismay the results of a poll published a few years ago. The charge of “acting white” was applied to speaking standard English, getting straight A’s, or even visiting the Smithsonian! Think about it: we have moved from a situation where Phillis Wheatley’s acts of literacy could be used to demonstrate our people’s inherent humanity and their inalienable right to freedom, to a situation where acts of literacy are stigmatized somehow as acts of racial betrayal. Phillis Wheatley, so proud to the end of her hard-won attainments, would weep. So would Douglass; so would DuBois. In reviving the ideology of “authenticity”—especially in a Hip-Hop world where too many of our children think it’s easier to become Michael Jordan than Vernon Jordan—we have ourselves reforged the manacles of an earlier, admittedly racist era.

And, even now, so the imperative remains: to cast aside the mine-and-thine rhetoric of cultural ownership. For cultures can no more be owned than people can. As W.E.B. DuBois put it so poignantly:

This is the vision that we must embrace, as full and equal citizens of the republic of letters, a republic whose citizenry must always embrace both Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson.

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Frederick Douglass recognized this clearly; in a speech delivered in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Douglass argued that his contemporaries in the Confederacy selectively cited Jefferson’s proslavery writings when convenient, ignoring the rest. For Douglass, black Americans were the true patriots, because they fully embraced Jeffersonian democracy; they were the most Jeffersonian Americans of all, allowing us to witness a new way to appreciate the miracle that is America. Here was Jefferson, whom Douglass called “the sage of the Old Dominion,” cast as the patron saint of the black freedom struggle.

If Frederick Douglass could recuperate and champion Thomas Jefferson, during the Civil War of all times, is it possible for us to do the same for a modest young poet named Phillis Wheatley? What’s required is only that we recognize that there are no “white minds” or “black minds”: there are only minds, and yes, they are, as that slogan has it, a terrible thing to waste. What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft? I can already hear the skeptics: that’s all well and good, they’ll say, but how is it possible to read Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America”? But, of course, there are few things that cannot be redeemed by those of charitable inclination. And just a few days after a recent Fourth of July, I received a fax, sent from a public fax machine in Madison, Connecticut, from a man named Walter Grigo.

Mr. Grigo—a freelance writer—had evidently become fascinated with anagrams, and wished to alert me to quite a stunning anagram indeed. “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” this eight-line poem, was, in its entirety, an anagram, he pointed out. If you simply rearranged the letters, you got the following plea:

It’s indeed the case that every letter in Wheatley’s poem can be rearranged to produce an entirely new work, one with the reverse meaning of the apologetic and infamous original. “Could it be that Phillis Wheatley was this devious?” Mr. Grigo asked me. And it’s fun to think that the most scorned poem in the tradition, all this time, was a secret, coded love letter to freedom, hiding before our very eyes. I don’t claim that this stratagem was the result of design, but we’re free to find significance, intended or no, where we uncover it. And so we’re reminded of our task, as readers: to learn to read Wheatley anew, unblinkered by the anxieties of her time and ours. The challenge isn’t to read white, or read black; it is to read. If Phillis Wheatley stood for anything, it was the creed that culture was, could be, the equal possession of all humanity. It was a lesson she was swift to teach, and that we have been slow to learn. But the learning has begun. Almost two and a half centuries after a schooner brought this African child to our shores, we can finally say: Welcome home, Phillis; welcome home.

(2002)