Hidden Literacies

The Need to See Phillis the Amanuensis

But it is Phillis Wheatley’s potential work as an amanuensis, I argue, that we so desperately need to see. For if we see her work as a scribe, we can imagine her in the room with Susanna, inscribing her words on the page. We might wonder how the bed and desk were arranged, whether Phillis was facing or had her back to the dictating Susanna. Perhaps Phillis copied the above quote directly from Calef’s letter into this one, or perhaps Susanna read it aloud.  Perhaps Wheatley silently, without a single comment, in one smooth flow, copied Susanna’s every word; perhaps they had to stop and start several times over, for Susanna to cough or to rest; perhaps Wheatley suggested to her what to write; perhaps she prompted her or perhaps she suggested entire sentences—paragraphs even—to which Susanna consented.  Perhaps Wheatley resented the fact that Susanna did not name her, ask for Occom to pray for her, or speak of her directly at all; or, maybe Susanna assumed that Wheatley was also writing Occom herself and left the updating about Phillis to Phillis. Perhaps Wheatley did not care at all, either because she was writing Occom around this time; because she knew Occom could recognize her handwriting, her success in her poetry moving so quickly to publication, and her very real involvement in the letter—without Susanna having to say so; or because of some other reason we can’t even fathom.  Because the fact of the matter is that we may never know the answer to these or many more questions. We can never fully get back to this or any other scene of composition to know who exactly contributed what, what any given contribution meant to the person who contributed it, and what any given contribution was intended to mean. But what we can see now, more clearly, is Phillis Wheatley’s likely labor as an amanuensis.
            And recognizing the potential of Phillis Wheatley’s collaborative work as an amanuensis—one of the kinds of collaboration that, as book historians have it, characterize the production of every single printed text, what Jerome McGann calls “the collaborative or social nature of literary production”14—allows us to look at collaborative labor that went into or might have gone into Poems differently.  Maybe we could see suggestions from Mary, Susanna, or the other white Bostonian women who heard, copied, and circulated her poetry as feedback to Wheatley; the changes to her manuscript pages as a form of copy-editing or of a printer’s work to prepare the manuscript for print publication; or the steps that Susanna or Calef took to facilitate publication of Poems as the work of a book agent that many writers use. In other words, maybe if we can see and recognize Wheatley’s likely collaborative labor that produced this letter, we can also see and recognize the collaborative labor that may have produced Poems as the kind of collaboration that is similar to the collaboration that goes into all texts and, simultaneously, dissimilar because of the racialized power dynamic particular to it.  But, crucially, we should not think of it as a kind of collaboration that would somehow de-authenticate Wheatley, her poetry, or her poetic abilities. Maybe we can stop holding early African American writers—many of whom dictated to amanuenses for a variety of reasons, and all of whom necessarily engaged in quotidian collaborative practices inherent to all textual production but specifically fraught because of the racialized context—to the impossibly pure standard of “the Author,” the single and lone genius who produces original, great art in utter, autonomous solitude—a fantasy the field of literary studies threw out long ago. Maybe we can see them—all of them, whether they use an amanuensis or not, work with a white editor or not, publish with an anti-slavery society or not, distribute their books through trade house channels or not—as individuals working strategically within necessarily collaborative, necessarily racially complex, writing and publication processes. We could see how they produced texts within the context of—and in spite of—the violence of chattel slavery, white supremacy, and intense racism. Instead of seeing less of what they have done, I think, in seeing collaboration, we will see so much more—more of what they have done and more of the complicated conditions under which they did it. Indeed, this will allow us to see so much more about early African American literature, I argue, and it will allow us to see Phillis Wheatley, Poet, and Phillis Wheatley, Amanuensis.

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