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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Maybe you'll share part of your evening with us as well. It is time to discuss our April Get Lit with All Of It book club selection tonight at 6:00 PM, either in person or via live stream, for a live conversation with bestselling author Mona Simpson about her latest novel Commitment. It's what we've been reading all month.

We have a special musical guest, singer, songwriter, and frontman of the beloved New York City indie rock band The Walkmen, Hamilton Leithauser will be in the house or in the library and playing a couple of songs as well. Tickets are free, but you need to secure yours now before they sell out. Head to wnyc.org/getlit. You can join us tonight at the New York Public Library at 40th Street and Fifth Avenue.

That's happening later on, but right now, let's get this hour started with another of our book series, part two of this month's full bio about the poet Phillis Wheatley.

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Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our monthly series when we have a continuing conversation about a deeply researched biography to get a full understanding of the subject. For National Poetry Month, we are going to learn more about the 18th-century writer Phillis Wheatley, who was the first African-American, the first enslaved person, and only the third colonial-era woman to publish a book of poetry. Our guest is CUNY history, Professor David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journey Through American Slavery and Independence.

Wheatley was born in Africa around 1753 and was sold to a Boston family in 1761. Susanna Wheatley was looking for a companion and ultimately someone to care for her and her husband, John, as they aged. It soonly became clear that Phillis, name for the slave ship that transported her, was a brilliant writer.

Yesterday we discussed how Phillis got her start writing extraordinary published elegies that brought her unexpected fame. So much so, Phillis and the Wheatleys saw an opportunity to capitalize on the fascination of the enslaved girl who was repeatedly referred to as a genius in the press. They looked to find someone to publish a book of her poetry first in Boston, but then with success in England where she met local aristocrats among others, including Mr. Benjamin Franklin. Let's get into our full bio conversation with David Waldstreicher.

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Alison Stewart: Phillis Wheatley was in Boston at an incredible time, the ramp-up to the American Revolution. She was there at the time of the Boston Tea Party. She wrote a poem called To the King's Most Excellent Majesty on his repealing the American Stamp Act. When did she seem to want to weigh in on current events?

Professor David Waldstreicher: You could say that it begins with The King's Most Excellent Majesty poem, which is strikingly early, really. Probably in 1767 and definitely by 1768. Really, in the same year that poem, the shipwreck poem to the merchants, when her first poem is being published, that actually is the same season, the same year that she starts writing poems that are addressed to secular officials and that have a political cast to them.

She understands that there is this world of political discussion that overlaps with the religious one but isn't the same. She doesn't see a contradiction between being a political poet and a religious one. In fact, the two might actually feed each other.

I think that she hasn't gotten quite enough credit for just how early and consistently she was pushing the envelope in terms of politics and doing so in ways that really couldn't be pinned down. Though, ultimately, she does find it useful and maybe necessary to be taking the patriot side, for the most part, though, she does hedge her bets significantly because she doesn't know how things are going to end up.

She's still hedging her bets, really, all the way, I argue, in 1774, '75 in the sense of keeping lines of communication open with loyalists and with the occupying troops and their officers and writing poems that praise some of them and that hold open the possibility that there'll be some reconciliation because she doesn't know how it's going to affect her and to affect the other Africans in slavery.

Alison Stewart: What do people think about this young enslaved girl/woman publishing these poems, these political poems, these religious poems, having a point of view, one poem taking on the voice of a minister? Seems bold to me. [laughs]

Professor David Waldstreicher: It's extremely bold and she's extremely careful. The ones that are more political, she's writing them. They get shown around. She's not publishing them as quickly as the other ones. She's very careful because it's not clear what she can get away with. I try to suggest that, as I'm telling the story, just how careful and subtle she's having to be, but it's still hard to get our head around just how bold she's being.

I think that her poem, for example, the famous one, On Being Brought from Africa to America, which is only eight lines long and which has traditionally been read as being thankful for being saved from being a savage and not Christian in Africa and so it's good that I was enslaved and brought to America, I think that it can be read very differently that she's actually satirizing that view, that religious view as--

Alison Stewart: You know what? Let me stop you right there. I'm going to read that poem because I was going to ask you about it next. This is On Being Brought from Africa to America by Phillis Wheatley.

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

"Their colour is a diabolic die."

Remember, Christians, Negros, Black as Cain,

May be refined and join thy angelic train.

Alison Stewart: Now, there's our italics in this, on certain parts of it, and you argue that she's being-- Is irony the right word or sarcastic or accusatory? What do you think?

Professor David Waldstreicher: All three. There are really two parts to it. In that first part where she says, "Mercy brought me for my pagan land, taught my benighted soul to understand there's a God. There's a savior too. Once I redemption neither sought nor knew," she is presenting this idea that's being used to justify slavery.

She knows very well that some Methodists and others are already criticizing this, the way that pro-slavery people are using this idea of saving the Africans by kidnapping them and bringing them to America and trying to forestall this religious critique of the slave trade and slavery that Quakers and some Methodists and others are already engaging in.

It's like a quote where she's saying, "Well, okay, some people are saying this," and then she breaks it and says, "Some view our sable race with scornful eye," and then there's that,

"their colour is a diabolic die," is a quote. She's basically saying that's what some of you white people say, that we are diabolic, that we're devil worshipers. Then she does this. When I used to teach this, I would read it in a different voice and say, "Well, how does it sound if you read it like this?" "Remember, Christians, Negros, Black as Cain, may be refined and join the angelic train."

If you read it that way, she is satirizing this view that of Black as Cain, diabolic. She's satirizing the racism that people are playing with and really not just both relying on and developing in responses the criticisms of slavery. She's even maybe riffing on this idea of sugar, one of the products that Africans were working so hard to produce in the Caribbean, the southern parts of the British Empire, the refinement of sugar.

She is suggesting that there are other ways to think about the way race is working. This idea that the color difference that this sable race thing is being used to excuse treating pagans differently and that there are other ways to think about what's going on, that people like her are being refined. Ha, ha, ha, ha. It's not just sugar that we're refining, we're also refining people.

You can't have it both ways. If you're going to refine us, then you have to admit that we can join the angelic train, and that has implications. You can't just justify slavery through this. If you're going to do this, you have to admit that we can be equal and that we can do anything you can do. She says in 1768, but she doesn't publish it until her book, until she's in London. I think this suggests, to get back to the question of how can she get away with this if her work is so subversive, I think she's writing in a way where she can be read in different ways by different people, and so that she has plausible deniability and that people who don't want to see it don't have to see it, but it's still out there.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence. My guest is David Waldstreicher. It's our choice for Full Bio. Whose idea was it for Phillis Wheatley to write a proposal around 1771, '72, when she's about 18 or 19 years old, to write a proposal for a book?

Professor David Waldstreicher: We don't know. What's most striking is that the Wheatleys are on board with it, and that they try several times before they actually decide to do it in London. They try to do it in Boston. There are printers who are willing to entertain it and to try to get subscriptions, but for various reasons, some of them economic, some of them having to do with the particular situations of those printers and how it's changing rapidly with all the political controversy, and the fact that publishing books is not usually a profit-making thing at this time in Boston or anywhere, it doesn't work out until London.

We can't say that it was really the Wheatley family pushing it, especially given how important it becomes to her and how eventually she says in letters that the Wheatleys have agreed to free her when she returns from London. She says to several people, "Help me sell the book because it's going to be all I have to depend upon."

The book is supposed to hopefully make some money and be a kind of a-- I don't know, nest egg would be the right metaphor. Her stock and trade, as it were. It's supposed to make her reputation and gain her, not just the shillings, but also the patronage to do more. That's the way these things worked.

For men in England and for ministers, publishing something impressive might lead to a job or a better job. For her, it's going to be more like some kind of position, some kind of place where she has in effect a patronage that she had with the Wheatleys and the Wheatley family, which she knows isn't going to last forever because by the time she's publishing the book, and even probably by the time of 1771, '72, it's pretty clear the Wheatleys aren't going to live that much longer. There's testimony that both of them had had bouts of illness, and she's living under threat of sale.

When households got broken up, states got broken up, Africans were sold and not usually freed, and so there's a clock that's ticking. That's, I think, is one of the factors in her strategy and in her decisions, and why it's important to get the book published and maybe to make the most of the fame that she was getting after the Whitefield poem.

Alison Stewart: The Wheatleys and Phillis decide that England is going to be their best route for her to be published. Who were they going to England to woo? Who did they need to or want to convince to support the publishing of her book of poetry?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, first, there's Countess Huntingdon, and they send the captain of the London Packet, the boat they own, which regularly goes back and forth from Boston to London. They send Captain Robert Calef, who Wheatley actually write writes about as a classical hero in the poem Ocean, the poem that she writes on the way back from England aboard the London Packet.

They send him with a bunch of poems to contact a printer who then goes to Countess Huntingdon. The printer and Calef write letters where they make it clear that-- Huntingdon's really impressed and says, "Wow, these are great. I feel my soul to knit with her," which is a very Methodist thing of saying.

Huntingdon, she was she really was a patron of Whitefield and other evangelicals, but also especially of some of the first Black Atlantic writers, the authors of the first slave narratives and things like that. She's part of this. She's really a famous person in these evangelical networks and friends with Lord Dartmouth, who was a high government official, as well as also famous for being a pious Methodist.

The idea here is if you get these literal aristocrats, these lords and ladies, Huntingdon and Dartmouth, to sign on to this project, literally, to put their name on it, then that leads to possibilities that don't really exist in the same way. That's why you have this attestation in the book where all the Boston people say-- basically, the equivalent of the lords and ladies of Boston, though they're not actual aristocrats, but the governor, leading ministers, people like that sign and say, "We attest that Philis Wheatley has actually written these poems."

They have to do that because nobody in London-- Huntingdon says, "Am I being conned here? How do I know she really wrote them?" Eventually, she goes over with this piece of paper that says she really wrote them. Then when she's there, she goes around to see a whole bunch of important people, including one of the first people she goes to see is this major patron of the art, who then she imitates in the first poem that's going to appear in the book. His name is escaping me right now because it's so hard to remember. I'd never heard of him until I was halfway through my research. He died shortly afterwards. He doesn't get seen as much. She does say she did--

Alison Stewart: Is it Lyttelton?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes, Lord Lyttelton.

Alison Stewart: That's it.

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes, George Lyttelton. Thank you. Lyttelton had patronized poets. He was a friend of Alexander Pope's, and he's 70 years old, but he had patronized so many important poets and writers that they nicknamed him Maecenas, which was the name of the Patron of Virgil and Horace and a lot of these other Roman poets. That was his nickname because he was so famous for being this literary talent spotter and a poet and a historian himself.

Who's her patron, who's her Maecenas who she's writing to in this poem directly? It's all these people who might make it possible for her to have the really only path for a literary career in the 18th century, which is to have this lasting patronage, which will translate into some kind of a livelihood and ability to have the leisure to keep writing.

Alison Stewart: I found it interesting that Benjamin Franklin approached her-- He was very cagey-

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -in the way that he approached Phillis Wheatley. Why wouldn't he want to be seen as either supporting or detracting from Phillis Wheatley? How is he indicative of her challenges?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Oh, that's great. This was one of the origins of this book project also because I wrote a book about Franklin and slavery called Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery in The American Revolution. I had a couple of paragraphs in there about his encounter with her. This is when she's over in London.

We've come to think of Franklin as anti-slavery because he clearly was at the very end of his life, but I was arguing that it's much more complicated. He has a much more complicated relationship to slavery. As the colony's fourth most important representative in London, the point man for the colonists, really, and literally the representative diplomat of several of the colonies in 1771, '72, as he had been for years, he's doing damage control.

The slavery issue's being thrown in their face. Tories are saying that they're hypocrites, and the Somerset decision has already made this distinction between the law of slavery in England and that inferior colonial law. Whatever his personal beliefs by this time, and he still owned slaves himself, he's most concerned with if she is celebrated, and she's being shown the Tower of London by Granville Sharp while she's over there, the abolitionist.

The potential is for Wheatley to really embarrass the Americans, and as more than one of the initial reviews of her book actually shortly did.

On the other hand, if he criticizes her, that would play into the hands of the critics. He doesn't want to encourage her because of the way she might be used, but he doesn't want to discourage her because that would look bad too.

He says to one of his cousins who the Wheatleys had asked to ask him to help her out while she's over there. He says, "Oh, I went to see her. I went to see her as you asked but it seemed like her young master," Nathaniel Wheatley, who she's traveling with, "he didn't even come out to see me. I took a quick exit and I've heard no more about her and that's it."

I think that Franklin's a diplomat and Franklin's very careful and cagey and very effective in the way he deals with people and the way he deals with publicity, especially. I think that he's being very careful trying to have it both ways. He's not being anti-slavery but he's not being pro-slavery. He's mainly concerned with being pro-American and realizing that she's a potential hot potato.

I shouldn't stop talking about this without noting that she parlays that into later on, proposing to dedicate her second book in 1779 to him when he's ministered to France. That's misled some scholars and biographers to suggest that, "Oh, he was a supporter of her because he was so abolitionist." No, she's using the fact that he couldn't distance himself from her publicly to say as she says in one letter home, "I met him, he came to see me. Look, that shows how much respect I was getting." Daring him basically to say, "Oh, no, I don't think you're great," which she knows he won't do.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue our full bio conversation about Phillis Wheatley by learning how she gained control of her image and even her work and what the publishing of her book of poems meant for her freedom after a quick break.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our poetry month edition of Full Bio with CUNY history Professor David Waldstreicher. He is the author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence. Wheatley was the first African American and the first enslaved person to publish a book of poetry. After the Wheatleys unsuccessfully tried to get her published in Boston, they turned to England where the Countess of Huntingdon's, Selina Hastings became her benefactor.

The book was published in 1773, and it was titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Its success and Phillis Wheatley's existence proved to be a very public moral dilemma for American patriots who wanted to fight for freedom from Britain but refrained from believing in freedom for people like Phillis Wheatley, who was still enslaved when her book came out.

Let's continue with David Waldstreicher, the author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

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Alison Stewart: Wheatley's book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. In many ways, she was very good at public relations and very good at business. She really orchestrated some of her own success. What's an example of a good business move that Phillis Wheatley made?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, one is that she signed many copies of the frontispiece of the book while they were being printed before they were bound because they weren't completely finished.

When she went back on the next sailing of the London Packet, she was in London for six weeks, and the books didn't come with her. They weren't ready but she says to someone in Connecticut who she asks to help market them a few months later, "Please make sure that none of the printers in Connecticut reprint my book because then I won't get any money from it. If that does happen, everyone will know the genuine copies because I've signed them. I've autographed them." It may not have been--

Alison Stewart: So smart.

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes. Basically, she's making them more authentic and valuable by signing them. At least half of the copies that are in archives today and which now go for a lot of money and are put on display have that signature from that first printing, that that first 300 copies. That's a good example of her savvy about the book market.

Alison Stewart: The image that we know of her from the cover of that book was done by, is it, Scipio? Is that how I'm saying that correctly? Scipio Moorhead?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What is the subtext of this image? I'm looking at it now. It's on the cover of your book as well. She's sitting there with a bonnet, quill in her hand, she's looking upward, her hand to her cheek like she's thinking, and it says, "Phillis Wheatley: Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston."

Professor David Waldstreicher: It's an engraving that was in the frontispiece of the book that was based on a painting that either already existed or more likely was done for the occasion on Countess Huntingdon's suggestion, I guess because it would make it more believable. Maybe because she also wanted to see what she looked like because she didn't know at the time when she suggested that she would actually go over there. They never did actually meet because Huntingdon wasn't in London, she was at her estate in Wales when she got there.

The image of the dress and the gesture actually looks a lot like both some of the portraits of Alexander Pope and of Countess Huntingdon herself, who didn't write that much but was a great reader and patron of literature. The idea here is that the looking up is you're inspired by God to produce this thing that you're writing and that you also do it in relation to these other books.

It's so important that there's one of these little books in the image. That little book, it could be a Bible, but I think it's more likely a book of poems or hymns or a book like the one that she herself produced. It's saying that any woman, African, can be like this person if you are inspired and participate in this literary culture.

I'm glad you mentioned also the "Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston," which is a common euphemism to say servant, and which in an English context or in an American context, a New England context, does not necessarily mean slave. It can mean indentured servant. I think it's not too much to say that it wants to say that it's not that bad. It's really a kind of servitude which is going to be okay rather than that hereditary racial slavery that is so problematic and deadly and oppressive.

Alison Stewart: That's a big part of the book, that Phillis Wheatley really poses a problem for people in Boston and people in what will be the United States, the Patriots, who want their freedom, yet they enslave people. That she really becomes a symbol of the hypocrisy of it all. Correct?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes. This is a bit of, I have to admit, might seem counterintuitive or a flipping of the additional interpretation where Wheatley's often been seen as exceptional. She can't possibly represent slavery because she had an experience that hardly any other slave would seem to have had. What can she possibly tell us about slavery in the era of the revolution or about the relationship of the revolution to slavery? Except insofar as it suggests that maybe some people were starting to treat slaves better and believe that it was wrong.

She actually becomes a lightning rod for this vexed question of the relationship between slavery and the revolution. I think even broader than that, the question that we find it hard to realize that people were asking which was, what is this American version of slavery? Is it enough to just listen to the people who defend it, who say, "Well, there's always been slavery and this is just our version of it," and, "There's slavery in the Bible so God must have said it's okay and the Greeks and Romans had slavery, and look, the Africans enslave each other, so what's wrong with buying their slaves?"

Post-slavery people said, "We've been hoodwinked. Even those of us who want to condemn it for all the right reasons, we've been hoodwinked into believing that nobody was questioning it back then," but they were, especially in her lifetime, beginning in the 1750s and '60s. The reason they were questioning it, it partly has to do with the rise of religious ideas, and maybe it also has to do with general ideas of freedom.

The number one reason is because it got worse, is because the slave trade, especially in Anglo-America, got bigger, and it was so obvious that it was a death trap and it was racialized, and it wasn't getting better. All the ways that it had been justified, including that we're going to Christianize them, had been proven to be wrong, and that was becoming obvious to more and more people.

That's what Wheatley can see. She can see that slavery is not the same. Yes, you could say slavery has existed everywhere in human history, but that doesn't mean it's the same. That doesn't mean it's always racial and hereditary. That doesn't mean it always looks like it does, like the death traps in Jamaica.

If Boston looks more like Rome where accomplished slaves get emancipated and can earn their freedom, well, then let's push the envelope on that. Those are the questions about slavery that she is dealing with, and then getting mixed up in this question when it becomes highly politicized about whether Bostonians in particular but Americans in general, are hypocrites because they talk about their own liberty while they oppress their slaves more than anybody else in the world is oppressed, or whether they are sincere and actually if you let them they would end slavery as some of them start to say.

In some of my other work as well, and in light of the recent controversies about slavery and the Revolution, the 1619 Project became a lightning rod for. My line has become, and I say it explicitly in the book, is that Wheatley helps us see that not only was slavery an issue in the American Revolution, but that things were going in both directions. Slavery was being newly justified, racialized, and growing at the same time that it was also being attacked.

Things are going in both pro-slavery and anti-slavery directions and that turns out to be the most important thing, and that's how we end up with this country that's half slave and half free in terms of North and South and geography.

All in all, slavery actually grows, and that's the more important fact, but there is also this anti-slavery movement that Wheatley is part of and plays an important role in. That should not be forgotten too. She is looking at both these things happening at once, the rise of anti-slavery and the growth of slavery. She's dealing with that contradictory reality that we are coming around to realizing was a much more public and important conversation than sometimes either conventional wisdom on the American Revolution or the conventional wisdom on slavery and anti-slavery might lead us to think.

Alison Stewart: On tomorrow's Full Bio, we'll learn how Phillis Wheatley was emancipated, how George Washington became her penpal, and why she died young and impoverished.

 

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