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  “It doesn’t mean you’re not still part of the family,” Mrs. Wheatley said in a soft voice. “This is your home. But as we watched the people of Boston struggle for freedom, I began to understand how precious it is. I don’t know why it took so long to realize that tyranny and slavery weren’t so very different. As we’ve watched the colonies struggle toward freedom from oppression, I recognized that you must also long for freedom from slavery.”

  It was as Phillis had once written to Lord Dartmouth:

  Should you my lord, while you peruse my song,

  Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,

  Whence flow these wishes for the common good,

  By feeling hearts alone best understood,

  I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

  Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

  What pangs excruciating must molest,

  What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

  Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

  That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

  Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

  Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

  Her journey from Africa to America had been a painful one, but she could see God’s hand in all of it. In her new country she’d found freedom. The freedom of the griot that came from telling stories, freedom from slavery, and the greatest freedom of all—freedom in Christ.

  Phillis couldn’t speak. She put her arms around the now frail woman and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Notes on Phillis Wheatley

  Through the years, readers have longed to know what Phillis Wheatley’s life was like before she was kidnapped into slavery. Sadly, Phillis only mentioned Africa three times in her writings and letters, including the memory of her mother pouring out water before the sun and of being snatched from her father’s arms. Because she never said what her name had been in Africa, I chose the word janxa to use as her name. The word simply means “girl” in Wolof, which was probably her native tongue. It would not have been her name, but because naming is so important in her culture, the story could not have been told without giving her a name.

  We do not know about Phillis’s siblings or the exact village she came from, but she did write that she came from Gambia, which would mean from the region we now call Senegambia.

  We do know the exact slave ship she boarded, the owner of that ship, and its captain. We’re not certain who came with her—some speculate that Obour sailed with her to Boston; others think she met Obour in Newport. But Obour Tanner was real and, after Phillis grew up, Obour acted as a literary agent of sorts to Phillis.

  We don’t know anything about the Wheatleys’ cook or housekeeper, so Sadie and Lucy are both fictional characters. The poem I had Phillis write for Lucy’s son was an actual elegy written by Phillis, though probably not for someone in their household.

  Phillis’s life in Boston, from the auction block to her untimely death at the age of about thirty, is well documented.

  I tell her story to the day she realizes her dream of freedom. There’s more to the story, however. It’s ground covered in other books. After Susanna Wheatley died, Phillis lived for a time with Mary and her husband, while the new nation was in chaos, fighting for its own freedom. When John Wheatley died, he failed to remember Phillis in his will. Perhaps Susanna and John Wheatley believed that along with Phillis’s fame would come wealth, or perhaps they just followed the custom of the day, settling the inheritance on the oldest son. Whatever the reason, everything went to Nathaniel, who ended up making his home in England.

  Phillis continued to support herself with her writing, but in this struggling new nation, it was not easy for a poet to make a living. She eventually married a free man, John Peters, and had three children, all of whom died as babies. Phillis’s health troubled her to the end. She died young, but we know that, as she wrote in so many of her elegies, she believed death to be the ultimate triumph.

  Over the years there has been much controversy about Phillis Wheatley. In her day, she had to prove over and over that a slave could write sophisticated, classically inspired poetry. In the mid to late twentieth century, many criticized her poetry for being “too white.” Critics wondered why she abandoned all the experiences of a childhood in Africa and as a slave to create religious verse with European sensibilities.

  Scholars today are rediscovering Phillis Wheatley. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in the 2002 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Library of Congress, “And even now, so the imperative remains: to cast aside the mine-and-thine rhetoric of cultural ownership. For cultures can be no more owned than people can…. And so we’re reminded of our task: to learn to read Wheatley anew, unblinkered by the anxieties of her time and ours…. The challenge isn’t to read white, or read black; it is to read.”1

  NOTE

  1 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), 85, 89.

  Glossary

  Allah: the Muslim deity

  baobab: an African tree known for its thick trunk

  chattel: property; a slave with no right to freedom

  couscous: pasta made from millet

  griot: a storyteller in Africa, usually one who travels from one village to another

  kora: a stringed African instrument

  Maamanding: Mother

  maize: corn

  manumission: officially freeing a slave

  mbubba: an African dress consisting of cloth wrapped around the body

  tama: a form of African drum

  tubaab: white people

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  Young Harriet Tubman grew up in the early 1800’s as a slave in Maryland. The story of her childhood is the story of God’s faithfulness as He prepares her to eventually lead more than 300 people out of slavery through the Underground Railroad.

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-3638-2

  In 1761 Phillis Wheatley was captured in Gambia and brought to America as a slave. She became the first African American to publish a book, and her writings would eventully win her freedom. But more importantly, her poetry still proclaims Christ.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7639-5

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-4073-0

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