Hidden Literacies

The Literacy of Phillis Wheatley

     It might seem counterintuitive to claim that any literacy of Phillis Wheatley is hidden. She is, after all, the eighteenth-century world’s most famous Black woman who became literate despite her enslaved status. In many respects, we are familiar with this story. Stolen from her family in west Africa and forced through the transatlantic slave trade, Phillis Wheatley arrived as a girl in the Boston slave market in 1761.1  Because she was beginning to lose her teeth, slave traders guessed that she was around seven years old. But as scholar Christina Sharpe reminds us, Phillis Wheatley was “never really a girl; at least not ‘girl’ in any way that operates as a meaningful signifier in Euro-Western cultures; no such persons recognizable as ‘girl’ being inspected, sold, and purchased at auction in the ‘New World.’”2  John Wheatley, a local merchant, bought this child and named her Phillis after the slave ship on which she had been imprisoned during the Middle Passage. He gave her to his wife, Susanna, who allowed Phillis to be educated alongside and by her teenage twins, Mary and Nathaniel. In Sharpe’s words: “The Wheatleys made an experiment of her.”3  Wheatley prodigiously acquired many types of literacies: she learned English and Latin, read the Bible and classical texts, and composed verse of heroic couplets and many letters to a wide variety of New Englanders. Most visibly, she wrote and published Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in the fall of 1773.
            Many white readers doubted not only that Africans could learn to read or write but also that Wheatley herself could have developed the literacy skills to publish such highly stylized poetic forms, in a second language, so quickly. They assumed she must have had an inordinate amount of help. They assumed someone collaborated with her on her works. Wheatley anticipated this. After London publishers initially turned down her manuscript because they could not believe it was written by a “Negro,” Wheatley, likely herself, drew up or had drawn up the famous “Attestation” that prefaces her book of poetry.4  Signed in October 1772 by eighteen of Boston’s most influential public men, the “Attestation” reads in part:  “As it has been repeatedly suggested to the Publisher, by Persons, who have seen the Manuscript, that Numbers would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of PHILLIS, he has procured the following Attestation, from the most respectable Characters in Boston, that none might have the least Ground for disputing their Original. // WE whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this town.”5  Further, on July 3, 1773, an unattributed note to the “Printer” of the London Chronicle reads:  “Sir, You have no doubt heard of Phillis the extraordinary negro girl here, who has by her own application, unassisted by others, cultivated her natural talents for poetry in such as manner as to write several pieces which (all circumstances considered) have great merit” (emphasis added).6  Or, in another way to put it, as an advertisement in The London Chronicle and The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser states:  Wheatley’s book “displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced.”7  Phillis Wheatley, the attestation, the note, and the ad insist, really wrote the poems and really wrote them alone.
 

This page has paths:

This page references: