Despite sentiments such as these, the fact that Wheatley's short poem has been so widely anthologized in this century has made her something of a pariah in black political and critical circles, especially in the militant 1960s, where critics had a field day mocking her life and her works (most of which they had not read).
Until the emergence of Frederick Douglass, Wheatley was commonly used as an icon of black intellectual perfectibility by the abolitionist movement. Even in the late 1840s and 50s works such as Wilson Armistead's
A Tribute for the Negro
(1848) and Martin R. Delany's
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered
(1852) were fulsome in their praise of Wheatley and her poetry. We can trace the anti-Wheatley tendency
at least to 1887, when Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the fathers of black nationalism, wrote about her contemptuously, and the tone was set for the century to come. James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1922, complained that “one looks in vain for some outburst or even complaint against the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land,” finding instead a “smug contentment at her escape therefrom.”
But what really laid her low was ultimately a cultural critique of her workâless what she said than the way she said it.
Wallace Thurman, writing in 1928, calls her “a third-rate imitation” of Alexander Pope: “Phillis in her day was a museum figure who would have caused more of a sensation if some contemporary Barnum had exploited her.”
Vernon Loggins, in his masterful history of Negro literature, published in 1930, echoes Jefferson when he says that Wheatley's poetry reflects “her instinct for hearing the music of words” rather than understanding their
meaning, “an instinct,” he concludes, “which is racial.” She lacks the capacity to reflect, to think. For Loggins, as E. Lynn Matson puts it, Wheatley is “a clever imitator, nothing more.”
By the mid-sixties, criticism of Wheatley rose to a high pitch of disdain. Amiri Baraka, a founder of the Black Arts Movement, wrote in 1962 that Wheatley's “pleasant imitations of eighteenth-century English poetry are far and, finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their
hollers
,
chants
,
arwhoolies
, and
ballits
.” For him, of course, these chants represent the authentic spirit of black creativity. Seymour Gross, writing in 1966 in “Images of the Negro in American Literature,” argued that “this Negro poetess so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome. . . . She is pious, grateful, retiring, and civil.” As William Robinson reports, other critics called Wheatley “an early Boston Aunt Jemima,” “a colonial handkerchief head,” and “utterly irrelevant to the identification and liberation of the black man.” She
was finally, “oblivious to the lot of her fellow blacks.”
Stephen Henderson, writing in
The Militant Black Writer
, (1969), argues that “it is no wonder that many black people have rejected Phillis Wheatley,” because her work reflects “the old self-hatred that one hears in the Dozens and in the blues. It is, frankly,” he concludes, “the nigger component of the Black Experience.” Dudley Randall wrote in that same year that “whatever references she made to her African heritage were derogatory, reflecting her status as a favored house slave and a curiosity.” In 1971 Nathan Higgins wrote that Wheatley's voice was that of “a feeble Alexander Pope rather than that of an African prince.”
Addison Gayle, Jr., a major black aesthetic critic, wrote in
The Way of the World
(1975) that Wheatley was the first black writer “to accept the images and symbols of degradation passed down from the South's most intellectual lights and the first to speak
from a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to [her] oppressors.” Wheatley, in sum, “had surrendered the right to self-definition to others.”
And the assaults continued, the critical arrows arriving in waves. This once most-revered figure in black letters would, in the sixties, become the most reviled figure. Angelene Jamison argued in 1974 that Wheatley and her poetry were “too white,” a sentiment that Ezekiel Mphalele echoed two years later when he indicted her for having “a white mind,” and said he felt “too embarrassed even to mention her in passing” in a study of black literature. Similarly, Eleanor Smith maintained that Wheatley was “taught by whites to think,” thus she had “a white mind” and “white orientations.” Here we're given Phillis Wheatley as Uncle Tom's mother.
As the scholar Russell Reising notes, this trend from the Black Arts Movement of the sixties has unduly informed criticism of Wheatley through the eighties:
Angelene Jamison takes a pedagogical and political tack similar to Smith's when she argues that Wheatley's poetry “embraces white attitudes and values, and it characterizes Phillis as a typical Euro-American poetess.” She was detached from her people and her poetry could never be used as an expression of black thought (409). While Jamison grants that Wheatley should not be ignored because of her accommodationist stance, she asserts that “teaching Phillis Wheatley from a black perspective shows that she was simply an eighteenth-century poet who supported, praised, and imitated those who enslaved her and her people” (416). Other critics echo these sentiments when they suggest that Wheatley “leaves the reader of her poems only slightly aware of her being a Negro and a slave” (Mason xxv), that her poems “serve as one measure of how far removed from the reality of her blackness Phillis had become” (Collins 149), and that
“the Wheatleys had adopted her, but she had adopted their terrific New England conscience” (Redding 9). While progressively more modulated, similar sentiments inform Wheatley criticism of the 1980s. Alice Walker, for example, expresses a blend of compassion for and amazement at the “sickly little black girl,” but nonetheless regards her poetry as “stiff, struggling, ambivalent,” and “bewildered” (237). In 1986, June Jordan, while sensing the political and ontological ambivalence experienced by Wheatley and while grasping the explicit resistance to tyranny in a number of Wheatley's poems, still assumes that much of what happens in Wheatley's verse can be attributed to “regular kinds of iniquitous nonsense found in white literature, the literature that Phillis Wheatley assimilated, with no choice in the matter” (255). Kenneth Silverman's cultural history of the American Revolution assumes this same trajectory, agreeing that Wheatley's
work is a simple paean to white, cultural hegemony (217).
Although the critical reception to Wheatley and her poetry by contemporary African-American critics has been largely negative, there has, of course, always been a counter-narrative, but in a distinctly minor key. As Kenneth W. Warren notes, in 1892, Anna Julia Cooper praised Wheatley in her collection of essays
A Voice from the South
; in the 1920s her works appeared in anthologies of African-American poetry; W. E. B. Du Bois complimented her in an essay published in 1941; and in 1973, Margaret Walker's famous bicentennial celebration of Wheatley's poems at Jackson State College was attended by leading African-American writers and scholars. Nonetheless, the overwhelming tendency in Wheatley criticism has been to upbraid her for “not being black enough.”
And unfortunately, the examples of recent criticism that Reising supplies could be multiplied.
It's clear enough what we're witnessing. The Jeffersonian critique has been recuperated and recycled by successive generations of black writers and critics. Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century, Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics in the twentieth. Precisely the sort of mastery of the literary craft and themes that led to her vindication before the Boston town-hall tribunal was now summoned as proof that she was, culturally, an impostor. Phillis Wheatley, having been pain-stakingly authenticated in her own time, now stands as a symbol of falsity, artificiality, of spiritless and rote convention. As new cultural vanguards sought to police and patrol the boundaries of black art, Wheatley's glorious carriage would become a tumbril.
Phillis Wheatley, who had once been cast as the great paragon of Negro achievement, was now given a new role: race traitor.
I am not the only scholar who has wished the teenage poet had found a more veiled way
to express her gratitude to Susanna Wheatley for saving her from a worse form of slavery and for expressing her genuine joy at her full embrace of Christianity. But it's striking that Jefferson and Amiri Baraka, two figures in American letters who would agree on little else, could agree on the terms of their indictment of Phillis Wheatley.
For Wheatley's critics, her sacrifices, her courage, her humiliations, her trials would never be enough. And so we have come full circle: the sort of racist suspicions and anxieties that attended Wheatley's writing are now directed at forms of black expression that seem to fail of a new sort of authenticity, as determined by a yardstick of cultural affirmation. Today the question has become “Who is black enough?” The critics of the Black Arts Movement and after were convening their own interrogation squad, and they were a rather more hostile group than met that day in 1772. We can almost imagine Wheatley being frog-marched through another hall in
the nineteen-sixties or seventies, surrounded by dashiki-clad, flowering figures of “the Revolution”: “What is Ogun's relation to Esu?” “Who are the sixteen principal deities in the Yoruba pantheon of Gods?” “Santeria derived from which African culture?” And finally: “Where you gonna be when the revolution comes,
sista
?”
And this has not merely turned out to be a sixties phenomenon. Those haunting questions of identity linger with us still, much to the devastation of inner-city youth. I read with dismay the results of a poll published a few years ago. The charge of “acting white” was applied to speaking standard English, getting straight A's, or even visiting the Smithsonian! Think about it: we have moved from a situation where Phillis Wheatley's acts of literacy could be used to demonstrate our people's inherent humanity and their inalienable right to freedom, to a situation where acts of literacy are stigmatized somehow as acts of racial betrayal. Phillis Wheatley, so proud to
the end of her hard-won attainments, would weep. So would Douglass; so would Du Bois. In reviving the ideology of “authenticity”âespecially in a Hip Hop world where too many of our children think it's easier to become Michael Jordan than Vernon Jordanâwe have ourselves reforged the manacles of an earlier, admittedly racist era.
And, even now, so the imperative remains: to cast aside the mine-and-thine rhetoric of cultural ownership. For cultures can no more be owned than people can. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it so poignantly:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no
scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.
This is the vision that we must embrace, as full and equal citizens of the republic of letters, a republic whose citizenry must always embrace both Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson.
Frederick Douglass recognized this clearly; in a speech delivered in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, Douglass argued that his contemporaries in the Confederacy selectively cited Jefferson's pro-slavery writings when convenient, ignoring the rest. For Douglass, black Americans were the true patriots, because they fully embraced Jeffersonian democracy; they were the most Jeffersonian Americans of all, allowing us to witness a new way to appreciate the miracle that is America. Here was Jefferson, whom Douglass called “the sage of the Old Dominion,” cast as the patron saint of the black freedom struggle.
If Frederick Douglass could recuperate and champion Thomas Jefferson, during the Civil War of all times, is it possible for us to do the same for a modest young poet named Phillis Wheatley? What's required is only that we recognize that there are no “white minds” or “black minds”: there are only minds, and yes, they are, as that slogan has it, a terrible thing to waste. What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft? I can already hear the skeptics: that's all well and good, they'll say, but how is it possible to read Wheatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America?” But, of course, there are few things that cannot be redeemed by those of charitable inclination. And just a few days after a recent Fourth of July, I received a fax from a man named Walter Grigo, sent from a public fax machine in Madison, Connecticut.
Mr. Grigoâa freelance writerâhad evidently become fascinated with anagrams, and
wished to alert me to quite a stunning anagram indeed. “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” this eight-line poem, was, in its entirety, an anagram, he pointed out. If you simply rearranged the letters, you got the following plea:
Hail, Brethren in Christ! Have ye
Forgotten God's word? Scriptures teach
Us that bondage is wrong. His own greedy
Kin sold Joseph into slavery. “Is there
No balm in Gilead?” God made us all.
Aren't African men born to be free? So
Am I. Ye commit so brute a crime
On us. But we can change thy attitude.
America, manumit our race. I thank the
Lord.
It is indeed the case that every letter in Wheatley's poem can be rearranged to produce an entirely new work, one with the reverse meaning of the apologetic and infamous
original. Grigo adds that the title of the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” can be rearranged to read “Bitter, Go I, Ebon Human Cargo, From Africa.” Moreover, he continues, the five italicized wordsâPagan, Savior, Christians, Negroes, Cainâare an anagram of “grasp a great vision: no races in chains.” “Could it be that Phillis Wheatley was this devious?” Mr. Grigo asked me. And it is fun to think that the most scorned poem in the tradition, all this time, was a secret, coded love letter to freedom, hiding before our very eyes. I don't claim that this stratagem was the result of design, but we're free to find significance, intended or not, where we uncover it.