U-MD’s Vincent Carretta on Phillis Wheatley Peters, Slavery, & Poetry

The Learning Curve Vincent Carretta

[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast this week I am one of your co-hosts, Albert Cheng. With me is Alisha . What’s up, Alisha? Been a hot minute.

[00:00:35] Alisha Searcy: It has been. It’s been a couple of weeks. How are you? Where are you doing?

[00:00:39] Albert Cheng: Doing well. Doing well actually, my family just was in California celebrating my parents, both of my parents’ 70th birthdays. Oh, nice. Um, yeah, so that explains the hiatus. Not that I don’t, I don’t know that listeners care, but –

[00:00:52] Alisha Searcy: Well, I’m sure they do, and that is amazing. Happy birthday too. Both your parents 70 is quite a blessing, so

[00:00:58] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hard to believe.

[00:01:01] Well, you know, on that note, I mean, look, we got a great show.

[00:01:04] Alisha Searcy: We do.

[00:01:04] Albert Cheng: Coming up. I mean, Phillis Wheatley Peters, I mean, wow, I, this is one person from history that I wish I knew a whole lot more of. I mean, she is a genius, accomplished, amazing story. So I’m really looking forward to our interview with Vincent Carretta, who’s an expert on her life. I know, Alisha, you got a news story that you wanna share, and this week I, I actually just wanna take the time instead of giving a news story to just give a shout out to my parents in light of our, the topic of our podcast this week, to just kind of thank them.

[00:01:38] And, you know, I had a chance to really reflect as we kind of put together this know happy 70th birthday scrapbook. The ways they really invested in my, my education. And one of the things that I mentioned in my notes, my dad and my mom was, you know, my gratitude for the ways they like to give me little puzzles to do, whether it’s like, you know, math problems or logic puzzles.

[00:02:01] And I think they really embodied a certain kind of intellectual curiosity to really. Wonder about the world and to strive to know and understand what the world is like and you know, science and human nature and that kind of thing. And so I just wanna take time to thank them for that. In light of Phillis Wheatley Peters, who also had parents.

[00:02:24] Really invested in, in her education. Of course, I, I really hope I’m not coming across as trying to equate myself with Phillis Wheatley Peters. I mean, she’s, I know she’s done more than I’m ever gonna be able to do, but I think maybe the broader note is, you know, parents that are listening, people working in education policy.

[00:02:42] Yeah, let’s strive to make sure and do the best we can to ensure that every kid, you know, has, you know, even if it’s not their biological parents. ’cause we, we know there’s, there’s just kinda sad situations out there, but some adult that invests in them and pushes them to be curious, to wanna learn more, to, you know, the pursuit of truth.

[00:03:00] Right. It’s kind of inspire that. So anyway, that, that’s all I wanted to say. My opening remarks this week. But anyway, I know, I know you got some news and I don’t know if you had other thoughts you wanted to share on, on what I was saying.

[00:03:12] Alisha Searcy: I do Albert, and I think that’s so beautiful and powerful to use this time to give a tribute to your parents and their influence on your life, your educational journey, and as you said, sparking that curiosity.

[00:03:26] Ironically, one of the things that I’m really excited about for this interview today, talking about Phillis Wheatley Peters, Ms. Donovan, my fourth grade science teacher. Was directing the Black History Program at Highland Oaks Elementary School. I had never been on stage before. Okay. He asked me to play Phillis Wheatley.

[00:03:49] Wow. So when you talk about the influence of educators, the influence of adults who spark an interest and the passion, I then went on to pursue theater in middle school at a performing arts magnet high school, a performing arts high school. I had to audition to get in, and then one of my degrees is in theater.

[00:04:12] Oh, awesome. I, how come I didn’t know that about you? How about that? There’s always something new to learn. Yeah. And so you talk about a full circle moment and the influence of educators and adults and being able to talk about Phillis Wheatley Peters today is pretty powerful. And it just speaks to education.

[00:04:29] It’s power, it’s presence in our lives and what it can do for a young person, right? And what can happen when we take it seriously. So kudos to your parents for what they’ve done for you. The legacy that they’ve created. Now look at you. You know? So I think that’s, well, thank you. That’s very generous and kind of you to say.

[00:04:48] Sure. And so I do have a story that I wanna mention very briefly because I wanna get to our interview for today. I. This story comes from a, B, C News, and it’s about how governor’s walls from Minnesota and Kelly from Kansas are leaving the National Governor’s Association citing the lack of bipartisan initiatives.

[00:05:12] And so, you know, the NGA has been around for a very long time. It, as I said in the title, it’s a bipartisan group where governors from across the country come together to really focus on local, state, and federal issues. You know, it’s been a mouthpiece whether, you know, regardless of who was president at the time, it’s been an important mouthpiece for the people that these governors represent, you know, across their respective states.

[00:05:38] And so I think it’s unfortunate. Also telling that you have two governors who are deciding to leave. I’m gonna guess that this is probably not the first time in history, but it’s probably very rare that you’ll see governors leaving this bipartisan organization. Yeah. And so I won’t spend a lot of time, but I will say this, I would like to see us get back to a time, to a place where we value bipartisanship.

[00:06:05] And it seems to me, just looking at some of the quotes in the article, it quotes Governor Moore from Maryland who’s saying both of these people are his friends. It looks like he’s going to be the chair of the association soon, and wishes that they would stay, you know, understands how they feel because they wish that this association would be more vocal and voice their opposition with some of the things that this current administration is doing at the federal level.

[00:06:31] Mm-hmm. Perhaps their acts of leaving their acts of protests will bring more attention to the fact that we need to move closer to the middle, that we need to have more conversations about bipartisanship. There’s a real value in bringing Democrats and Republicans together. Yeah. Who have a shared agenda.

[00:06:52] Shared values. Shared interests, to truly wanna get things done for the people they represent. Mm-hmm. Uh, and so when you see folks leaving an organization that has been so good at being bipartisan, I hope that people will pay attention. I don’t know if it’s gonna, you know, make a big ripple, but I hope the right people will take note and say, you know what?

[00:07:12] Maybe we should do things differently. Maybe the association should be more vocal and as important perhaps. Whether it’s the state, local, or federal level, there’s something to be said about bipartisanship. So I say on one hand, kudos to these governors for having the courage to stand up. But I also say to some of the governors, like Governor Moore and others who said, well, you should stay and try to make things better.

[00:07:36] There’s an argument to be made there. Mm-hmm. So it’ll be interesting to watch Albert what happens here, but I hope at the end of the day, we can all agree that bipartisanship is a good thing and it helps this country move forward.

[00:07:48] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, actually as you’re speaking, Alisha, I remember, I don’t know if you remember the show we did with Chris Sun Nuno, the former governor of New Hampshire.

[00:07:56] I, I, I recall him saying something about how, I dunno if he’s talking about the NGA specifically, but he mentioned. The importance of being connected to other governors. Yes. To learn from the things they’ve tried, you know, as the old descriptor of the, you know, the 50 laboratories of democracy, um, here in the us right.

[00:08:14] Like the opportunities for governors to connect, to come together, learn from one another, push some good ideas. Yeah. That’s, that’s all very valuable. And here’s the hope in that, that kind of social fabric and connectedness, you know, stays there. Exactly. Fascinating story, but hey, we got an even more fascinating person to talk about, uh, Phillis Heaters.

[00:08:36] So stick around. We’re gonna have Vincent Carretta join the show in a little bit.

[00:08:51] Alisha Searcy: Vincent Carretta is emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than 10 books, including Phillis Wheatley Peters Biography of a Genius in Bondage, the Writings of Phillis Wheatley Peters Iwao, the African Biography of a Self-Made Man, Aldo Okoro, the Interesting Narrative and other writings and other 18th century trans-Atlantic authors of African descent.

[00:09:19] Professor Carretta’s Research has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the WEB Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, Yale Center for British Art and British Studies, the Massachusetts Historical Society.

[00:09:41] And the University of London, among others, he earned a BA and an MA at the State University of New York at Bingington and a PhD at the University of Iowa. Welcome to the show, professor. Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here. Excellent. Well, let’s jump in. You are an absolutely accomplished scholar and the biographer of the 18th century African American poet, Phillis Wheatley Peters.

[00:10:07] She’s considered the first African American to publish a book of poetry in English. Would you talk to us very briefly about her pioneering life and literary importance of Phillis Wheatley Peters?

[00:10:20] Vincent Carretta: Sure. Her life was actually pretty amazing. She lived only for about 31 years, and yet she accomplished so much.

[00:10:29] She was born around 1753 in West Africa, when I’m sure exactly where, in West Africa, and she was taken across the Atlantic in the middle passage enslaved, and arrived in Boston. 1761. So she was about seven or eight years old. We have accounts that she was missing her front teeth. So that’s consistent with that age, and it’s the age that she always claimed to have for the rest of her life.

[00:11:02] And of course, she arrived. She knew no English, but within four years she was attempting to write poetry in English. We have. I discovered the manuscript of a very short poem that she wrote it her first Elegy, her first poem on the death of some people, some prominent people in Boston. But within two years, in December of 1767, she published her first poem, and so she was about only about 14 years old, and that was published in a Rhode Island newspaper.

[00:11:35] She kept publishing poetry, though not. Publishing in the sense of she was writing poems that were distributed in manuscript that were published in manuscript, especially Mar a circle of women friends of her owner, Susanna Wheatley. She had been purchased by Susanna and John Wheatley when she arrived in 1761.

[00:12:01] The Wheatleys purchased her. John purchased her as as a gift for his wife, Susanna. In 1770, she really gained transatlantic fame by publishing an analogy on the death of the renowned Methodist minister, George Whitfield, who died in Massachusetts shortly after speaking at Phillis’s Church in Boston. And she dedicated the poem and sent the poem to the counters of Huntington, who was Whitfield’s patron.

[00:12:37] And this was a rather astounding thing to do. She was maybe 17 years old. Here she is an enslaved girl in the Americas writing to the counts of Huntington, one of the most influential and powerful women in the British Empire. She was also very wealthy and she was a patron of a circle of. Preaching ministers, evangelical ministers that she sent across the Atlantic to try to convert people to Methodism, and particularly her brand of Methodism throughout her life.

[00:13:14] And by 1772, Phillis had published enough or written, sorry, enough poems. That she felt confident and the Wheatleys felt confident in proposing that a Boston publisher publish a collection of her poems. Now, they weren’t able, either, weren’t able or decided not to use a Boston publisher because then they turned to London, and with the support of the counters of Huntington, they found a publisher in London for.

[00:13:50] A collection of her poems, 38 poems, and this was in 1773. And to help promote the sale of her book, and especially to advertise it even before it was published, they sent Phillis to London in seven, the summer of 1773 to give a kind of pre-publication. Authors tour and do interviews to publicize the forthcoming book.

[00:14:24] The book did appear in London in September of 1773. Phillis was on her way back to Boston when the book appeared, so she didn’t get to see it when it first appeared, but she did get copies in 1774. When it was available in Boston, shortly after she returned to Boston, her mistress, her owner, Susanna Wheatley died, which is an important event for Phillis because she refers to Susanna as the equivalent of the parent.

[00:15:02] She tells one of her correspondence. She was freed within weeks of her return to Boston. And talk more about how that came about or how it seemed to have come about 1778. She married John Peters. Now Peters had been an enslaved person. He was free by the time they married. He had created the name John Peters for himself.

[00:15:31] His enslaved name had been Peter. So he renamed himself once he became free. We don’t know the exact circumstances of how he became free, but by 1779, Phillis had written enough new poems. She proposed a second volume of poems, which would include 33 poems and 13 letters. So she was expanding her literary claim to fame, adding to her poetry as an epistolary artist, and this book was to be dedicated to Benjamin Franklin.

[00:16:10] Now, the book never appeared. They were not able to get a Boston publisher. Of course this 1779 was during the American Revolution, so the London market was closed to them, and it was not the best time to be trying to sell a book given the economic circumstances in America. By mid 1780 to 1783, she and John Peters were living, moved to Middleton.

[00:16:39] Massachusetts, a small town, sort of northwest of Boston, and that’s because John Peters had been invited by his former Enslavers, now a widow to return to the home and the farm, which he had been enslaved to take over the house, take over the farm. In exchange for caring for the widow, his former owner and her daughter during their lives.

[00:17:15] So he became a landowner suddenly, and Phillis, of course, became the wife of a landowner. Unfortunately, this was a kind of short term relationship because there was soon a falling out. The widow accused John Peters of a breach of contract eventually. He had to, and Phillis had to return to Boston in 1783, late 1783.

[00:17:41] He was fairly soon arrested for debt and massachusetts. This time, any businessman was on the verge of debt because people ran on credit. The businesses were heavily dependent upon credit, and so he was birth almost certainly in. Jail for debt when Phillis died the beginning of December, 1784. As far as her significance, as you mentioned, she was the first person of African descent in America to publish a book.

[00:18:15] She was only the second woman in America to have a book published. In both cases, they were published in London and of the millions of enslaved Africans. Who had been taken to the British colonies and their descendants by the end of the 18th century. Phillis Wheatley Peters was one of fewer than 20 whose words entered print, and she was one of, well, she was the only one I can think of.

[00:18:45] The only author, American author of African descent whose, whose portrait we have who, whose picture we have, the front of peace to her collected poems. Various subjects, religious Immoral, which had been published in London 1773. And of course, she has been recognized as the foremother of African American literature, and increasingly she’s recognized as a major figure in American literature, British literature, and oral literature.

[00:19:20] Alisha Searcy: Wow. I’m just, you know, it’s amazing and, you know, just incredible. You can’t even describe her life and, and what she experienced and all she was able to accomplish given the times that they were in. And so I want you to go back if you can. I appreciate you covering the span of her life. I wanna go back for a moment.

[00:19:41] In your book, you say The terror, the little girl must have felt when she looked out for the last time from the deck of the Phillis, which was the name of the slave ship, was probably mixed with relief and wonder. You say she had been kidnapped from her family in Africa and forced to spend up to two months crossing the Atlantic End quote.

[00:20:03] Then can you talk about briefly what scholars know about Phillis’s early life in West Africa, and we know the unimaginable things that happened to enslaved people during the middle passage, but what that might’ve been like for her on her way to Boston in 1761?

[00:20:23] Vincent Carretta: Unfortunately, we know basically nothing about her life in Africa. We don’t know for sure where in Africa and West Africa she originated how far inland in Africa. She may have been born and raised. The only account of her in Africa is from her unreliable first biographer Marta Matilda Odell in the early 19th century, and she simply says that Phillis’s mother would pour water as a libation to the sun in the morning.

[00:21:02] And I know some modern critics have gone very imaginatively into recreating or reimagining an African life that she had and little passage she never mentions. She never talks about the middle passage in any records that have survived. Now this could well be because of trauma that she would not want, that these were suppressed memories, understandably suppressed memories.

[00:21:32] Because of what we know about the middle passage. We can also make some pretty educated assumptions about her experience Now as a young child, as a little girl on the middle passage. She would’ve probably been allowed a lot of time on the deck rather than having to be under the decks. If she were an adult male, for example, or a young male, she would’ve kept under the decks because she would’ve been a threat to the crew.

[00:22:10] There were many more enslaved people on board the boat than there were crew members of course, and so she probably had more freedom of movement than most. Her early biographer says when she arrived in Boston, she was wearing essentially a kind of rag around her. The odds are extremely great that she arrived.

[00:22:35] She was wearing nothing when she arrived because small children were not clothed typically. And so what would she have seen on Dick? Well, one thing she would’ve seen is the results of the mortality rate on the Phillis, the ship, the vessel that brought her across the Atlantic. The Phillis had a mortality rate of almost 25%.

[00:23:01] We know how many people were taken on board. We know how many people survived. So 25% is almost double the average mortality rate, which is still pretty astounding. 12% of people died during the middle passage and the dead were thrown overboard. So Phillis, as given the freedom on the deck, would’ve seen a lot of people.

[00:23:30] Bodies thrown overboard. We also have 18th century reports of sharks following slave vessels because of the number of bodies that were thrown overboard. So she might have also experienced that. So though we don’t have an account from her, it had to be quite a hellish experience. And as I say, that would account, I think for why she never mentions it.

[00:23:58] Alisha Searcy: Hmm. Horrific and unimaginable. So across the 18th century, new England was an epicenter of the transatlantic slave trade. And you say quote, Boston slave traders sold people at taverns and other places of business. End quote. Can you talk about the North’s role in the triangle, slave trade and slavery in the 18th century Massachusetts?

[00:24:21] Vincent Carretta: Well, the triangular slave trade refers to from the Americas. Slave traders would send goods to West Africa, particularly rum and other kinds of goods to West Africa to purchase enslaved people. That was the second part of the triangle, Africa. And then they would be sent to the Americas. Now the vast, vast majority will be sent to the Caribbean and to South America.

[00:24:54] Relatively few were sent to North America and even fewer, uh, much lower percentages sent to New England or rather than the colonies north of Maryland. And Rhode Island in New England was a major factor in this slave trade because that’s where the business end of the slave trade, not so much where, where enslaved people ended up, but where the people who were running the slave trade or Senate and most of the enslaved people.

[00:25:32] Brought to Boston, or, or a high percentage at least, were brought there for domestic service as opposed to plantation work. You know, if they had been sent to the south, the deep south, it was plantation work, and so she was sent to an area where people would expect to buy people who work in the house or to be trained as skilled labor say. Now, of course there were some agricultural workers, but the North didn’t have these large industrial kind of plantations that you found in the south. Now, to be brought to domestic situations for a female was risky, dangerous, in ways that you didn’t have dangers of the plantation. But you had the dangers of being in such proximity to male house members, the owner or older male children.

[00:26:38] And so you are on the risk of sexual abuse, for example. You also were under constant surveillance if you were working, living in the house. Phillis, of course, was too young for. You know, most much risk of a sexual assault, presumably we have no, no record of her experience and such, but that was largely the condition of people who were especially enslaved women who were brought to Boston.

[00:27:13] But keep in mind that Phillis was what was called a refuse slave. In other words, she had no labor value. At seven or eight years old, she had a psychological value, I think, for the Wheatleys, especially Susanna Wheatley, because she was almost exactly the same age as a daughter who had died nine years earlier.

[00:27:39] And so I, in, I’ve speculated that she becomes something of a foster daughter to Susanna. And certainly Phillis, after Susanna dies, wrote to a correspondent and referred to Susanna Ley, a parent. She’s lost a parent.

[00:27:59] Alisha Searcy: Interesting. Thank you for making that very important distinction about her experience in terms of what her presence was for and, and how she was given to the family essentially.

[00:28:11] So you write quote that Phillis Wheatley Peters arrived in Boston during the transatlantic. Great awakening with stressed conversion through spiritual rebirth and acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior. Can you tell us about her enslavement by Boston Merchant John Wheatley and his wife, Susanna? You’ve mentioned this a little bit already, talk about her formative religious training in her early education.

[00:28:37] Vincent Carretta: This is, uh, really important in, in the development of Phillis Wheatley, both as a person and as an author. Susanna Wheatley, as I mentioned, and Phillis had this kind of foster parent child relationship, and Susanna Wheatley was an active evangelical, our congregationalist.

[00:29:03] She had transatlantic ties. She was in communication with accountants of Huntington, which became important, but also as an evangelical. She believed that it was one of her duties to expose or introduce everyone that you could to Christianity. So Phillis was introduced to Christianity as soon as possible.

[00:29:31] As I mentioned earlier, she tried writing her first poem after only four years in America, and that poem, of course, was an elegy and it is infused with, even though it’s very short, it’s infused with Christianity. And so Susanna and John Wheatley quickly recognized that. Phillis was a child prodigy, that she was very precocious and they exposed her to literacy was important to Susanna for religious reasons, because as needed angelical, she felt that even enslaved people should be given literacy.

[00:30:15] This is particularly true in the North. This was not the case in the south. Of America, but in the North that to have access to the Bible, of course you had to be literate. At least you had to learn to be able to read, and so they, as soon as possible, taught her to read. Now we don’t know who exactly in the family taught her to read.

[00:30:41] It may have been Mary, the 18-year-old, one of the 18-year-old twins in the Wheatley family. Mary Wheatley. Or could have been Susanna herself, but Phillis got quite a deep education in the Bible. She quickly just revealed her literary talents, her literary interests. Now, Susanna and John Wheatley had or not, well, not completely selfless in promoting Phillis’s education once they recognized.

[00:31:17] Her potential because it reflected well on them. It reflected well on Susanna’s own piety that she had this young girl who become such a powerful convert herself. Mm-hmm. And of course, it reflected well on both John and Susanna Wheatley as kind of ideal slave owners. Wow,

[00:31:43] Alisha Searcy: that’s very fascinating. So my last question before I turn it over to Albert is you talk about Phillis’s ability to read and write.

[00:31:52] We know that she was soon reading Greek and Latin text, including Homer Horace, Virgil, and the works of English poets, Alexander Pope and John Milton. Can you discuss the influence of these great poets on her timeless poetry?

[00:32:08] Vincent Carretta: Well, the Greek and Latin text she was reading in translation. Okay? We have no evidence that she could read Greek and Latin in the original languages, but there’s lots of evidence in the poetry of the influence of the classical text.

[00:32:29] For example, as I mentioned, her earliest poem attempted a poem was an Elegy. She also wrote hymns. In the classical sense, and throughout her poetry, there are lots of classical illusions, references to classical gods, Greek and Roman deities in her introductory poem to her. Published poems on various subjects.

[00:32:59] The introductory poem is to mys. That’s how both Horace and Virgil introduced some of their collections of poems, so she’s clearly linking herself to them. Homer, she read in Alexander Pope’s translations. Homer and in that introductory poem that I just mentioned to my, she talks about Homer. She describes Homer as a great sire of verse.

[00:33:32] In other words, the great, the founder of poetry and also sire as a father figure. If we have more time, we can talk about how many times she refers to father figures in, in her writings. She refers to Milton as Euro is barred in a poem that she published in 1774 and throughout her poems, especially the influence of pop scene, even in verse form, she did experiment with various verse forms, but the one that overwhelmingly she chooses is the heroic couplet. And it’s the form that Pope had perfected, and it’s the form that he used in his translations of Homer’s Odyssey id. There are also clear verbal echoes of Pope in Paris, pops by Phillis.

[00:34:31] Albert Cheng: There’s been a real treat to hear from you about Phillis Wheatley Peter’s life. And then now we’re gonna get into her poetry, and that’s what we wanna do for the next set of questions here.

[00:34:40] Let’s talk about her first published poem on Messer’s, Hussie and Coffin. This appeared in the Newport Mercury in December of 1767, and she was only 14 years old at the time. So could you say a bit about that poem, but also just more generally, what was the nature of her early poetry? The, the major themes and, and the reception to it.

[00:35:03] Vincent Carretta: Well, we have versions of nine poems that she published before September 7 73, and we have versions of other poems that she never published before 1773. Now, the one that she did publish first is as the one on. And often who had survived a storm and shipwreck in 1767, just a few months earlier, she overheard them talking about it at a dinner at the Wheatley home, and so she composed a poem.

[00:35:43] Now the poem is, shows clear signs of being an early poem. The verses tend to be end stopped. In other words, the lines. Not to flow over, not to beja. The poem has a lot of classical allusions, almost as if the classical gobs were a plausible alternative to Christianity. So the poem sort of shifts from, okay, these classical guards can’t help you, can’t help you.

[00:36:19] To, oh, the answer is in Christianity that even if you had died, you would’ve the opportunity perhaps, of eternal life after Christianity. Our other early poems are interesting because she’s demonstrating her virtuosity as a poet, not only experimenting with different forms, but also what I find especially interesting.

[00:36:47] Are her early efforts of political poems. Again, she’s a teenager and she’s, she started to write political poems, poems on political subjects, almost all of which were never published, and we have a number of cases where we have several versions of problems. By her, the same poem, which means that we get to see how she was developing as an artist because we get to see how she was revising poems and keep in mind that we did throughout the 18th century.

[00:37:24] This is very rare for. To discover any poet, white or black whose poems we can watch in development, an individual poem. We also get to see her working on this, appropriating the position of authority, because even in that first published poem. What she’s doing is she’s speaking at the one who has the authority of Christianity.

[00:37:52] She’s already starting to be an evangelist herself, telling Hussey and coffin what the truth is, capital T, what Christianity is, what Christianity offers to them. So she’s assuming appropriating authority to become an evangelical preacher, and, and she, of course, women could not be officially preachers at this time, but in effect, that’s what she’s doing here.

[00:38:26] And she’s also in these early poems, experimenting with something that she does. Very often in increasingly sophisticated ways in later poems, and that is ventriloquism assuming the voice of someone else throughout her poems. One thing we need to keep in mind is Phillis is even from the earliest poem, she’s a rhetorician.

[00:38:52] We make a mistake if we try to read or assume that we’re supposed to read her poems as simply autobiographical. She’s adopting various voices throughout her canon.

[00:39:06] Albert Cheng: Fascinating. I, I mean, we probably just need a whole nother show to unpack, you know, specific poems. Um, we could go on, uh, for a long time here, but alas, uh, that’s probably another show.

[00:39:17] But I mean, you mentioned her dabbling in political matters. Talk a bit about, you know, the theme of emancipation and, and abolitionism in her poetry and writing. I mean, and also I guess. Probably it’s important to also mention that in the summer of 1773, she, when she arrived in London for the publication of her poems, upon her return, she was emancipated, if I’m not mistaken. So could you talk a bit about the context, her life context there as well?

[00:39:43] Vincent Carretta: Let me go to 1772, which is why seven. One of the reasons 1773 is so important. In June of 1772, ward Mansfield, chief Justice of the King’s Bench. In England ruled that no enslaved person brought to England from the Americas could legally be forced back to the Americas as a slave.

[00:40:08] Now, Phillis arrived in London in 1773, a year almost to the day. Of the Mansfield ruling and the Mansfield ruling had been widely advertised in colonial newspapers in 1772, and in fact, a lot of these references to it in the newspapers warned Enslavers. Not to bring their slaves to England because they couldn’t legally force them to return.

[00:40:43] And Phillis we know was very familiar with New England newspapers. I mean, her first poem was published in one, but she had subsequently also published in newspapers. So she arrives there. She is visited by a number of prominent people, politicians, literary figures, artists who are in part, you know, curious.

[00:41:08] She’s kind of a spectacle. Who is this person who is at this point, maybe 20 years old, and she’s the most famous person of African descent in the British Empire at this point. She has. The power to refuse to return to America as a slave. And I’ve speculated that what happens is she agrees to return to America only if her owners give their word that she will be freed if she does.

[00:41:45] So I remember she has gone to London with Nathaniel Wheatley. The son of Susanna and John Wheatley. So he is the one that would have to give his promise that she would be free if she returned. And she says in the letter written within a couple of weeks of her return writing to a friend in America, she says that she was freed at the desire of her friend in England and one of those friends.

[00:42:20] She tells us was Grandville Sharp, who was the person who brought the case before Mansfield the year before? Hmm. So she knew all about, you know, the fact that she could free herself by staying in England, but she gambled, she rolled the dice and return to America. Now in 1773 when you know, she publishes her poems, she’s still enslaved.

[00:42:47] So her comments on politics, her published comments on politics she, understandably, is reserved about, so we have to try to read between the lines if we wanna see her as politically subversive. But as soon as a week after Susanna Wheatley dies, Susanna Wheatley died in March of 1774. A week later, newspapers throughout the colonies published an excerpt of a letter from Phillis to Samson Ham, who was a Native American minister, in which Phillis directly sells slavery as an institution, and she refers to the enslavers people who enslaved others as modern Egyptians, which you can’t coin someone anything worse than that in a Christian context.

[00:43:51] Albert Cheng: Let’s keep talking about some of her, her poetry. I mean, there’s so much to unpack and, and we just don’t have the luxury to talk about all of it. But let’s go to 70, 73. Again, stay there. You know, her book poems on various subjects, religious and Moral, so that was published in London, brought fame in England, and uh, north American colonies, and that included praise and recognition from prominent figures.

[00:44:11] So we’re talking George Washington. And then later, a fellow African American poet, Jupiter Hammond. To give us a brief overview of the collection of those poems, what were the major themes there? What are some intriguing nuggets that you’re familiar with with that poetry?

[00:44:28] Vincent Carretta: Well, again, a lot of the poems are allergies.

[00:44:32] One of the things she’s doing is showing her, again, her virtuosity. With one of the most popular genres of poetry in the 18th century, the Elegy, A lot of the poems involve Treat the Odyssey, the explanation of evil, the existence of evil in a Christian universe. How do we account for that? One of the things that she does.

[00:45:00] In her published book that she hadn’t done before, that she’s writing on istic subjects on more literary subjects, poems on imagination, for example, and on the creative faculty, the artist’s ability to kind of mimic the creator, the big C creator.

[00:45:21] Albert Cheng: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:22] Vincent Carretta: By creating writing poetry. I can say something more about the reception of a pub.

[00:45:29] It wasn’t just on in England and North America, it was also in Europe. Voltaire praises as a poet, for example, and others who by this point people are coming to visit her Again, she’s a curiosity, but she’s also a celebrity at this point, so people are coming from abroad to visit her. Travelers in America.

[00:45:56] Her book was reviewed by seven magazines in London, different magazines in London. Uh, a range of reviews, but a number of those included reproducing particular poems. And usually these were the poems, not the allergies, but what I’m calling the ballistic poems or literary poems. He was also treated not only by Jupiter Hammond, but by Ignatius Sancho, a probably the best known author of African descent in England at this time, and he refers to as her as a genius in bondage.

[00:46:38] He was writing in 1778 about her. He didn’t know that she had been freed, and he gives her the highest possible praise and condemns her. Owners, and not just her owners, but American slave owners in general. The most notorious reception she received, of course, was by Thomas Jefferson, who saw her as a threat to his whole slavery and ideology.

[00:47:07] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. He owned a copy of our book, it’s in the Library of Congress, and, and he actually has some notations of some of the reviews. Some of the references to her in American newspapers. So he, he took us a great interest in her, but his notorious comment on her was that religion could make a, a Phillis Waitley, but it could not make a poet.

[00:47:33] So he denies her as a poet. And so she did get a lot, uh, called a reception. People concentrate on different poems in her collection. So she was at the top of her game and the top of her celebrity, 1973. You know, I called her honest ous, her Year of Wonders. It’s the year that she publishes the first book by a person of African American descent, and the year that she free.

[00:48:06] Albert Cheng: It’s only a few short years later where her life ends with tragedy. So in 1778, she marries John Peters and then became a maid and died of pneumonia in 1784 at the young age of 31. So, I mean, you mentioned a little bit about the closing chapter of her life. Could you get into a bit more detail? What, what was going on then and, and how did, in some sense, I guess she, she reached the apex, or I don’t know if you would say, she reached her life Apex in 70 73 and then it kind of changed in this last chapter.

[00:48:37] Vincent Carretta: Well, I’d say she, she reached the apex of her literary Mm mm in 1773 as far as her publications in 1778, after she married John Peters. John Pieces was like so many people in his. They a practitioner of many trades. He was a businessman, but at the point when they married, he subsequently dabbled in a number of things, including being a lawyer, being a physician, specializing in venereal disease, and he was a man on the make.

[00:49:20] He was ambitious. But my sense of Phillis was that she was ambitious as well, and I mean that in both cases, in the positive sense of being ambitious. And so they were a, there was sort of an understandable pair. He was also described by our contemporary as handsome, well built, which I don’t think diminished his attractiveness to Phillis.

[00:49:49] For those, you know, people who say, well, Phillis must have married him because, you know, the stability, because he, she married him soon after John Wheatley died, so she was totally on her own. Mm-hmm. Banner of life. But that’s not my idea of who Phillis was. But we don’t know the, the notion that she became a maid and died of pneumonia comes again from Odell.

[00:50:16] Unreliable biographer. She probably died from a pulmonary disease for previous, repeatedly in previous years. She complains of an asthmatic condition, and we don’t know exactly what that was. I mean, you know, could have led to pneumonia, I suppose. But the closing chapter of her life, John Peters, is the secret I think here.

[00:50:44] The key to understanding the closing chapter of her life, John Peters, is the reason that I published a new edition, an updated edition of my biography of her in 2023, which is because Cornelia Dayton had discovered things about John Peters that I missed, and she published this information in 2021. John Peters, as I said earlier, had been enslaved.

[00:51:15] He became free. We don’t know how exactly he renamed himself. He was eventually invited by the widow Wilkins, who was one of his former enslavers to take control to own. Her house and land in exchange for taking care of her and her daughter. That agreement soon fell apart. There was a lot of resistance from the townspeople.

[00:51:47] When John Peters moved in with Phillis, he immediately rearranged the furniture, changed the house. The townspeople were very offended by this guy who came in, this black man who came into this overwhelmingly white middle town and was, as they saw taking on heirs. He expected Phillis to be treated like the wife of a gentleman, landowner and gentleman.

[00:52:17] And this added to resentment, it meant that in some ways, if 1773 was a high point of her literary, the apex of her literary career, 1780 was briefly the apex of her social career because now she had complete leisure to write. And there is evidence that they had at least one child. Now, no one has found any birth baptismal or burial records of any children of them, but there is a record of.

[00:52:58] And this is a record that Cornelia Dayton found that a nurse was hired for a significant amount of time, which was consistent with the idea that they had a child, which changes the way we read the very last, well, I think it changes the way we can read The very last poem that Billis published, Billis is still trying to.

[00:53:24] Publish that second volume even while John was probably in jail and just, you know, shortly be just a couple of months before Phillis herself died, she advertised hoping to get a publisher or get subscribers to support the publication of the second volume. It never happened. The volume is lost in 1791.

[00:53:52] John Peters tried to publish it, so apparently he had recovered the volume. He couldn’t find the publisher, and it seems to have disappeared. We have only fragments, several poems that were to be in that volume now exist in manuscript.

[00:54:10] Albert Cheng: Then I’ll wanna give you the last word for this show by giving the opportunity to read either a, a passage from your biography, I think would sum up Phillis Wheelie Peters’ Life and Legacy. Or perhaps you would like to read an excerpt from one of her poems.

[00:54:26] Vincent Carretta: Since you started the first paragraph of of my biography, I thought maybe I’d read the first paragraph. Sure. Okay. The terror the little girl must have felt when she looked out for the last time from the deck of the slave ship. Phillis was probably mixed with reef relief and wonder she’d been taken from her family in Africa and forced to spend up to two months crossing the Atlantic.

[00:54:54] She now faced land again at last, although it had rained the night before. That sunny July day revealed to her the most bustling metropolis she had ever seen. Boston, Massachusetts was home to a little over 15,000 people. Barely 800 of them were of African descent, and only about 20 of the latter were not enslaved.

[00:55:20] Years have passed. Before the child aboard, the Phillis would gain her freedom and joined that small number, but first she had to be brought up shore and sold. She had become a commodity in the 18th century global market. A small size of missing front teeth. Told potential buyers that she was only about seven years old.

[00:55:43] She was what was called a refuse slave because her age rendered her a little market value. But to the Boston Merchant, John Wheatley, she was a gift. He wanted to give his wife, Susanna. The child was stripped of her African identity and renamed after the man who now owns her and the slave ship that had brought her from Africa to America.

[00:56:06] The little girl who had been enslaved in Africa continued on her improbable journey to become the founding mother of African-American literature. Phillis Wheatley Peters.

[00:56:19] Albert Cheng: Wow. Vin, thank you so much for spending your time with us to tell about her life, and this has been such a fascinating interview.

[00:56:25] Thank you so much.

[00:56:26] Alisha Searcy: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing and helping us to understand more about Phillis Whitley Peters, her history, her works, and contributions to this country, and just her trailblazing. Thank you very much.

[00:56:39] Vincent Carretta: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

[00:56:55] Albert Cheng: Now, how about that, Alisha? That was fun.

[00:56:58] Alisha Searcy: That was incredible. I didn’t know very much about Phillis Wheatley. Peters in the fourth grade, but I sure know a lot more about her now.

[00:57:06] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah. No, I’ve,

[00:57:07] Alisha Searcy: uh, what an amazing woman.

[00:57:09] Albert Cheng: Yeah, I, I’ve heard about her from time to time. You know, I’ve, I’ve attended a couple talks.

[00:57:13] I’ve mentioned her name, but this was a real treat. I’d feel really full, shall we say. That’s a really good way to describe it. Agreed. Well, we’re gonna wrap up this episode first with the tweet of the week. This one comes from Education Next quote. The problem with most school reform efforts is not the sheer number of changes, but the cultural discordance.

[00:57:34] The whiplash fad, chasing and stopping and starting. That is a reference to an article written by Rick Hess can always count on him to be very clear and, and have. Excellent rhetoric. Yes, that tweet says it all. But, hey, look, I mean, more importantly, I really wanna flag this article, Alisha, I don’t know if you had a chance to look at it, but you know, the article is actually entitled Time to Pay Attention to Louisiana and the Southern Surge.

[00:57:58] And we’ve talked about some of the successes that some of the, our, our Southern actually for you and I neighbors, right, you know, Arkansas. Georgia exactly. Here Georgia have had in education. And Rick’s weighing in on why he thinks that that success might have materialized. So check out that article.

[00:58:13] Alisha Searcy: Great. And I love that it’s talking about the good things in the South.

[00:58:17] Albert Cheng: That’s right. Speed of good things in the south. Let’s tease next week’s show. We’ve got our very own. Hey, Alisha Searcy. Hey, you’re gonna be the guest. Yeah. So Alisha, we’re looking forward to your show. I mean, we know your senior fellow at Pioneer Institute and I think now.

[00:58:34] Would it be okay to announce kind of your, your new title now? Yes. Yeah. Well, not just senior fellow at Pioneer Institute, but founder of the Center for Strong Public Schools. And so Lecia, I’m looking forward to sitting down with you and learning about your work there. So I hope you listeners are as well, should be a real treat.

[00:58:54] Yes, I would agree. Not that I’m biased or anything. That’s right. All right. Well till then be well everybody and see you next week. Take care. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.