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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. 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 poet Phyllis Wheatley, who was the first African American, the first enslaved person, and only the third colonial-era woman to publish a book of poetry.

Wheatley was born in Africa, and at just seven or eight years old was sold to a Boston family around 1761. Susanna Wheatley was looking for a companion and ultimately a servant. Phyllis's intellect was immediately apparent. She soon began to read and write and write and write. She published her first work at 13 years old. She would go on to become a literary phenomenon. CUNY History Professor David Waldstreicher is the author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.

Waldstreicher describes his book as a joint exercise in history and literary criticism. He uses Wheatley's own poems as well as the backdrop of the looming American Revolution to tell her story. I began our conversation by asking him about his process of piecing together a story of an enslaved woman in the mid-18th century. David, how did you go about researching Phyllis Wheatley's story? Where did you start?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, it's very easy to start because there's not very much in terms of the usual biographical material. There are the poems and there are a dozen and a half letters, and there's one scholarly biography by Vince Carretta. There's some other evidence things people said about her. For that reason, there really haven't been very many attempts at a full biography. One of my starting points was that more attention needed to be given to what she had read and the people she knew, especially the neoclassical literature that I thought that she was riffing on more than most other scholars had thought.

The book really took shape as a narrative when I started to read the Boston newspapers. I laid my eyes on every page from 1761 when she gets there to the end of her life. That's 23 years. As I went along, I started to notice a lot of instances where there was just more context that could be brought to bear on what she was thinking and doing and who she was doing it with or in response to. That's what really made it start to take shape as a narrative and enabled me to think of the poems as actions in an unfolding story that could be treated chronologically as well as in the more thematic way that they'd usually been talked about.

Alison Stewart: What is an example of a poem or a part of a poem where Phyllis Wheatley provides something akin to a bit of memoir?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, the first one, the first poem she publishes which is about a shipwreck and is published in a newspaper in Newport, Rhode Island in 1767. When she's just 14 years old, is prefaced by a remark that she a negro servant girl overheard the story of these merchants who had almost lost their boat and their lives off Cape Cod in a storm and that she heard it waiting table. Then the poem itself asks these questions about how these merchants felt and makes all these comparisons to the role of shipwrecks and of storms in classical literature invokes [unintelligible 00:04:06], the east winds, and then moves on to a more Christian register.

It starts by asking these questions about what they felt. I became convinced that this struck her, this experience of shipwreck, which was a subject of a lot of literature in the 18th century for obvious reasons because it was a worry and a concern and a great economic, as well as personal risk to take ocean voyages. That she's able to address her experience of having crossed the ocean as a young person in a way that must have been very scary. She's able to identify with these merchants and to even use that to give them advice about their salvation and how they should think about their experience.

She takes a lot of authority. She's not talking about her experience on a slave ship directly, but knowing the literature and knowing the popular genres, she's able to make this analogy that's suggestive and that actually strangely already is making her the center of the story. Because even though the poem's not about her, it riffs on the idea that she's this unusual person doing the speaking and is prefaced by this, wow, isn't this cool that this little slave girl wrote this poem. This is worth paying attention to.

Many of the things she does, she doesn't talk about herself directly, but the issue of her talking and her writing is indirectly present. That builds over a couple of years to a situation where she can start to talk directly about what it means that she's doing what she's doing and the implications.

Alison Stewart: David, you spend some time using history to provide us context clues as to how Phyllis Wheatley's existence, what it would've been like for her to move through the world in Boston, and even in London at this time. Specifically, what's important to understand about Boston during the time that Phyllis Wheatley lived there?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, one thing is that there are more Africans there than we usually think when we think about the North or we think about Boston in this period. It became clear to me that even some experts have underestimated the numbers. There's a return of more ships coming from Africa after the seven years war. There's evidence, especially from the numbers of mortalities which are listed this many white people died this month, this many Black people, it's pretty clear that it's more than 10% Black in Boston at this time.

There aren't really good demographic numbers, so it's always been estimated and sometimes more based on censuses that are really statewide rather than specific that aren't necessarily key to that decade that's most important to her development. Not only are there a lot of Black people, but there are a lot of young Black people and some of whom may have been shipmates, but who assimilate surprisingly quickly. Are spoken about in the evidence we have in newspapers for their sale or recapture if they run away as quite skilled. They're doing everything.

They're doing all kinds of jobs. We've talked about Phyllis Wheatley as this kind of hothouse flower who gets an unusual education, but really she's assimilating, making herself useful, and trying to get more, something closer to freedom in the process like a lot of her peers. She does it in a particular way that's extremely unusual, but the process maybe isn't that unusual. That becomes increasingly obvious during the imperial controversy when the presence of Africans and their children in crowds as a potential fifth column people who might become useful to the occupying British soldiers and authorities.

By the time we get to the Boston Massacre, there's a series of incidents when Bostonians and New Englanders talk about people like Phyllis Wheatley as people who might make a difference in the imperial controversy. That helps open up the possibility that these political controversies might have implications for slavery because it starts to be thrown in their faces. Wheatley is there during all of this. It's not just that the ideology of the American Revolution tended toward liberty, tended toward anti-slavery, especially in places where there weren't that many slaves.

It's not just that, it's that actually the presence of these people pushing made it an issue, made people make the connections and say that, you're going to talk about your liberty, you're going to talk about freedom, and you're a bunch of slaveholders. It was being thrown in the faces of the Bostonians. Wheatley is seeing that she's reading these newspapers, and then she starts riffing on these things then that makes all the difference in terms of what's possible.

It's the combination of there being other people like her and there being enough of a presence that it becomes an issue even when the Patriots want to tamp it down and suggests, "No, really it's the British who foisted slavery upon us, and we're really going to do something about it, but let's not talk about it now. They're a more important thing to talk about right now." She and others start to push against that way that it's embarrassing and that maybe it hasn't the anti-slavery implications but we shouldn't talk about that now.

She pushes against it because she is very attentive to all the rhetoric of the Patriot movement and she plays both sides as it were. As with other Blacks in Boston, the patriots and loyalists have to wonder whose side they're going to be on even as they don't want to admit that that's even going to be an issue.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Waldstreicher. He is the author of The Odyssey Of Phillis Wheatley, a poet's journey through American slavery and independence. It's our choice for Full Bio. David, would you read the first three paragraphs of chapter one titled, The Beginning, The Table, The Tale?

Professor David Waldstreicher: "Everyone around Boston knew about the storm at the end of August 1767. They knew what could happen in gales “on the back of Cape Cod.” Still, even after years in the coastal trade the Nantucket merchants Hussey and Coffin had rarely felt such winds. By the grace of God, their schooner and their whale oil had made it safely to Boston wharf, and they had returned to the fine house of their fellow trader John Wheatley. The girl came with bowls with bread. She did not sit at the table, but she listened.

The Wheatleys already knew about her ear. The girl had some sort of gift. John's wife Susanna and their daughter 18-year-old Mary, who had a twin brother but no living sisters, had taught her to read English. It wasn't hard. Soon after they purchased her off the slave ship Phillis in 1761, they had noticed her “endeavoring to make letters upon the wall with a piece of chalk or charcoal.” Four years later, the 12-year-old penned an impressive letter to a Mohegan missionary who had stayed in their home.

She had also written elegies about the deaths of respected men, and verse appeals to lapsed Christians that the Wheatleys showed to their friends and neighbors."

Alison Stewart: David, born around 1753-ish by 1761 or thereabouts a seven or eight-year-old girl was kidnapped on this boat likely The Phillis and you describe that boat as being owned by an "experienced slave trader". Given his trade routes, what can we deduce about Phillis Wheatley's origin?

Professor David Waldstreicher: It's very difficult to say with certainty what her origins and her experience were but we are lucky that we have these letters from Timothy Fitch, the owner of the vessel to Peter Gwinn who was the ship captain over a series of years when they were plying the West African coastal routes. It's very clear that she could have been purchased at any number of West African ports from Senegambia and possibly down to the Gold Coast or even further because Gwinn went to these various places.

It's also even possible that she was picked up elsewhere and even in the Caribbean because Gwinn’s ship went there as well. What we do know about the slave trade during this time was that even though it wasn't what Fitch wanted on some of his voyages, it's very clear that Fitch and Gwinn, like others and especially the ships that ended up in North America had a disproportionate number of women and children, even if they didn't carry as high a price, and that these voyages went on for quite some time so Phillis could have been bought or kidnapped close to the coast, or she could have come from further inland.

I think the most important thing is that her experience may not have been one day being kidnapped and then ending up on this ship and then waiting in various ports until the ship was full. Then the six or eight-week voyage of the Middle Passage. It may have been much more varied, she may have been kidnapped, sold, kept in various places that that journey from wherever she was originally from all the way to Boston could have lasted six months, nine months, a year even longer. That she may have had a very what we would think of as a cosmopolitan experience of actually knowing a lot more about the way this world of war and slavery worked.

Even though she was very young, she may have known more about this world of war and enslavement as I argue than we might think. That that may have informed her strategies of how to get along when she got to Boston.

Alison Stewart: Who were the Wheatleys? How did they make their money? What was their status in Boston?

Professor David Waldstreicher: There are two things that are said about John Wheatley. One is that he had a big house and that he was a merchant and that he owned a ship called The London Packet. He was invested in wailing enterprises with some of those Nantucket merchants like the ones that Phillis wrote the poem about who came to dinner that night in 1767. The other is that he was a tailor also. I think that that points to a lot of textiles going through his shop, probably importing textiles from London and elsewhere.

Like a lot of merchants in Boston, he has expansive trade connections, and he's doing rather well. The Wheatleys are older by the 1760s, they're in their 50s and 60s still engaged in business but starting to train the surviving son, Nathaniel, in the business which he's going to take over. We don't know a lot about them. We actually know more about Phillis and have more testimony and letters from Phillis than all the other Wheatleys combined. It's because they all died in the 1770s before Phillis did. Actually, there's a very little paper trail.

The other thing that's distinctive about them is that they are very active in evangelical and reforming circles. The Mohegan missionary who I mentioned that Samson Occom, who Phillis wrote a letter to when she was 12, had stayed in their home. He was kind of a sensation. George Whitfield, a great evangelist took him under his wing and Whitfield had stayed in their house and then Occom stays in their house. They're involved in the starting of the school for natives to train missionaries in New England that eventually becomes Dartmouth College.

They send some of their relatives to study there. They're straddling this world of trade and religious revival in New England, and specifically in Boston. One might say that their attitude towards slavery is trying to have it both ways. Okay, this is the way of the world, this is the way of trade, but can we make it better? Can we make it an engine of heathens being saved, and of us doing well, and also at the same time having a substitute daughter for our little girls who have died, and who are no longer here to help us in the house as we age?

That's how I'm thinking about who they are and what their motives are for giving Phillis an unusual education, which wasn't typical of the education they seem to have given their other slaves.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue our conversation about poet Phillis Wheatley with Professor David Waldstreicher. Up next, we'll hear about the elegies Wheatley wrote that put her in the public eye and why the Wheatleys were on board. That's after the break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. 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. She made a name for herself writing elegies, reflections for the dead two of which propelled her to fame. When she was 13 she wrote a funeral poem for an 11-year-old boy, Christopher Seider killed in a riot protesting British taxes and loyalists.

He is sometimes referred to as the first casualty of the American Revolution. Wheatley's elegy began,

In heavens eternal court, it was decreed

How the first martyr for the cause should bleed

To clear the country of the hated brood

He whet his courage for the common good

Long hid before, a vile infernal here

Prevents Achilles in his mid-career

Where’er this fury darts his poisonous breath

All are endanger’d to the Shafts of death.

She soon followed with another for George Whitfield, one of the most famous clergymen of the 18th century. Her poem was so powerful that Waldstreicher writes, "Phillis Wheatley outdid her fellow mourners in a commemorative elegy she produced with the same speed she had shown in getting her Christopher Seider poem into print. With the backing of the Wheatleys, whose enthusiasm she ratified by composing this accomplished and lengthy work, the poem immediately made Phillis famous as the young enslaved girl who could out elegize anyone.

Which led me to ask Waldstreicher why the Wheatleys would allow their servant an enslaved girl to learn to read and write in the first place.

Professor David Waldstreicher: Well, it's actually not illegal yet. It becomes illegal after in the South later on. It varies and it's certainly not encouraged and it's seen as an unusual thing to do. The main reason to do it, the main reason some people are doing it is the Protestant's idea that you need to read the Bible in order to really be saved and to convert other people. That you have to teach them how to read to do that. That said, it's also a very useful skill to some of the masterclass, especially in a place like Boston.

For example, James Somerset, who was the enslaved man of the customs collector, Charles Stewart, who eventually runs away in England, which leads to this famous case, Somerset v. Stewart, where Lord Mansfield declares that there's no law of slavery in England so you can't even kidnap. When they go to England Charles Stewart and James Somerset, Somerset runs away, and Charles Stewart recaptures him, and he's pissed off, and he wants to sell him, put him on a ship to Jamaica and be sold and the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's rules, 'No, you can't do that.

That's against the law to see someone and transport them." Slavery's not illegal here, but it's not exactly legal either. All those colonial laws don't trump a habeas corpus here in England. The thing about the thing that's relevant here about that case is that when Stewart was a customs official in Boston and in Philadelphia, and originally in Virginia, Somerset was his right-hand man and was carrying letters and clearly was able to read and travel in Stewart's name and do a lot of useful stuff for which literacy would've been.

We don't have any letters from Stewart, but there's every reason to believe that part of what made him so useful and valuable was the fact that he could read. So that it's not just the Christian slaves and the Christian motives that are leading to especially these urban and town-based Africans like Somerset and Wheatley being literate.

Alison Stewart: Aside from just being of assistance to Susanna Wheatley, the idea is that Phillis was more valuable, literate?

Professor David Waldstreicher: Yes, and especially valuable maybe not as much in a sense of value of a potential resale, as valuable as evidence of the Wheatley's benevolence to the poor Africans and natives of the Americas and of their charitable intentions and their commitment to a kind of art. These LGs and these poems that she wrote, which were part of a Christianizing project. They're responding to her brilliance and genius, but they're also enveloping it into a world in which homes are vehicles of personal feeling and testimony and personal connections, but also of Christianizing process.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing the book: 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. How many languages did Phillis Wheatley speak? What were her literary influences?

Professor David Waldstreicher: John Wheatley, when her book's being published, he says that she's studying Latin and has made some progress in it. There's so many popular translations of the classics that she didn't really need to read Greek or Latin in order to be thoroughly embedded in that classical literature. The same goes for religious literature.

She's biblical in all kinds of ways, but she hasn't studied Hebrew or Latin. I really think that it's whatever her native language was and English.

In terms of her influences, it's really quite striking full range of literature in English and in translation that includes most influentially Pope and Milton and Homer and Harris is one that she likes Virgil, but also a lot of 17th and 18th century English poetry, all of which was riffing on, obviously not Pope yet, because a lot of these writers were Pope's contemporaries or before. One of the reasons it's been hard to read Phillis Wheatley sometimes and appreciate exactly what she's doing is because we don't read a lot of these texts anymore.

We don't have the familiarity that folks did back then as well as the styles changing but she's extremely, extremely well-read. I came to think of her as not only a sponge. Maybe someone who didn't even sleep because in such a short period of time, she has such a range of references that I kept not only the ones that a couple of generations of literary scholars have tracked down, but I started finding them almost by accident myself when I started to try to read more and more of the stuff that it seemed to me that she had read.

It usually gets shorthanded as, oh, she copied Alexander Pope who copied Homer but it's a lot more subtle and complicated and interesting than that.

Alison Stewart: You spend a good deal of time dissecting and giving us context for the elegies that Phillis wrote for people who had passed that, I don't know what to say, it was her breakthrough, but it was where she broke through, I guess, is okay to say. First of all, why was she writing these elegies?

Professor David Waldstreicher: There are a couple of reasons. One is that this is a way of making connections with people who passed through the Wheatley's household, and of making others aware of her talents. She does this again and again, seizes on opportunities provided by the death of people that she knew or knew about, or relatives of the people she knew about to say something and to demonstrate her skill. The great thing about elegies is that she could do both at the same time.

It's like, it's not about me. It's about the dead person and the people who are mourning for that person and their relationship to God and to the grieving process. It's a great way to demonstra-- and a traditional way in New England of doing something audacious and really artistic and religious while not seeming not to be asking for much or calling attention to oneself. It's popular genre. It's a religious genre. It's also a very open-ended one, and it's one that especially enabled one to write about. Even if they're mostly about men and children, if she's writing about a man she's writing to the grieving widow.

There's women all over these elegies. They are actually the primary audience for them, even if they're not the majority of subjects. It enables her to do a particularly feminine thing as well.

Alison Stewart: I want to read the title of one, and I hope I can make it all the way through. I might need your help. An elegiac poem, on the death of that celebrated divine, and eminent servant of Jesus Christ, the Late Reverend, and pious George Whitefield, chaplain to the Right Honorable the Countess of Huntington, who made his exit from this transitory state, to dwell in the celestial realms of bliss on Lord's-day, 30th of September, 1770, when he was seized with a fit of the asthma, at Newbury-Port, near Boston in New-England.

In which is a condolatory address to his truly noble benefactress the worthy and pious Lady Huntingdon and the orphan-children in Georgia, who, with many thousands are left, by the death of this great man, to lament the loss of a father, friend, and benefactor. By Phillis, a servant girl, of 17 years of age, belonging to Mr. J. Wheatley, of Boston and has been, but nine years in this country from Africa. Wow. You wrote she could outdo anyone in these elegies. How so?

Professor David Waldstreicher: She really masters the possibilities that they have for praising these figures like George Whitfield and this is the perfect example because that's the one that really makes her famous on both sides of the Atlantic. It's published multiple times as a broadside, as a pamphlet, as the long book-like title suggests. She makes it an occasion to talk about a lot of things about Whitfield's transatlantic ministry, including highlighting how important it was for Americans who are otherwise she says explicitly being neglected.

Whitfield understands that we're fighting for our liberty, and he was supporting us, which he was doing actually was saying critical things about administration policy, right at the end of his life then, but also his ministry particularly to natives and to Africans, and he says that they call out to you. Then in different versions of the poem, it's clear that she implies, she puts words in his mouth saying that he's saying that you'll be converted and you'll be free too. In one version it seems like he's saying that you'll be free in the afterlife.

It doesn't matter your worldly condition in this world, slavery doesn't matter. You will all be equal in the great beyond in heaven, but there's another version in which it seems like she's saying, you'll be upraised and be like priests and kings maybe in this world The versions in her book eventually and the earlier versions, there's some variation there. I think she was thinking about how this might be read as potentially radical or too much, but it reflects Whitfield's own ambivalence because 30 years before Whitfield, when he had been founding that orphanage that's mentioned in the title in Georgia, he was criticizing people in Georgia.

Georgia was founded without slavery, but then they decided it wasn't viable and they were going to have slaves anyway, and eventually Whitfield founds this orphanage like funds his orphanage by having this plantation, which was given to him, and saying, "Oh, it's okay if the plantation staffed by slaves because really it's all about this orphanage, which is supporting the evangelical project." He makes his peace, he criticizes the people who want slavery in Georgia and southern slaveholders generally at the time of the great revivals around 1739, 40, 41.

Then he makes his peace with slavery, but then 30 years later, she has him saying, she says, "You know what? He's more sympathetic to us. Maybe he's really thinking that slavery's going to end and this Christianizing process is going to be part of that. She's intervening in this big issue about where Evangelicalism is going to go and what Whitfield's mission might mean for Africans. Whether it's going to just make slavery better and thus be another excuse for it, or whether in fact, it's going to have some real anti-slavery power.

She's doing that in the poem and that way in which she's touching those hot-button issues incredibly doesn't keep the poem from being read or understood. It actually makes it a big deal that she wrote it, and that people say, "What does this mean that she could write this is?" Look how powerful Whitfield's ministry was. Look how powerful his wife was that his life was, that he even gets testimony from this enslaved genius. What does this say and what is she saying?

That's the poem that so, and Countess Huntington, his patron, ends up being the person her book is dedicated to and who sponsors her to go to London to get her book published. She's setting all that up. She's setting up a trans-Atlantic career for herself that once her book is published is going to lead to her freedom.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue our conversation about Phillis Wheatley tomorrow with a look at her political writings.

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