Dear Old South Church in Boston,
On Sunday, Mother's Day, we will celebrate one of our mothers: Phillis Wheatley. Though she lived only to her 31st year, she changed the course of history, earning the title the Mother of African American literature.
Some facts:
Born in Africa, probably Gambia or Senegal (c. 1753) a small, slim girl whose name we do not know was torn from her parents' arms in her 7th or 8th year, taken captive, endured the wretched Middle Passage, and was sold into slavery. Arriving in Boston on The Phillis she was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston. Among the many and poignant ironies of her life, this small, sickly child was named for the ship that delivered her into slavery.
While the Wheatleys were active members of the New Brick Church on Hanover Street, in 1771, at the age of 18, Phillis chose to join and was baptized into Old South Church. I am happy to report that Old South Church welcomed more enslaved members in the 1600s and 1700s than any other Boston church due to the church's openness to God's wide world. Read about it here.
Indeed, while Puritans often get a really bad rap, they were leaders in the abolitionist movement.
1773 was a fateful year for Phillis Wheatley. Her book of poems was published in London. However, in another terrible and poignant irony, copies of her books arrived in Boston aboard The Dartmouth, one of the three ships entangled in the Boston Tea Party. Thus, while her white contemporaries were fighting for freedom from the British crown, the first book published by an enslaved African was held hostage on The Dartmouth.
It was also in 1773 that the Wheatley family freed Phillis from slavery. While this was a great thing, it occurred during a time of tremendous social, political, and military turmoil: the Siege of Boston and the run up to the Revolutionary War. In midst of such tempestuous times, Phillis Wheatley and her books were all but forgotten.
It was also during this time, emancipated but unable to provide for herself, that Phillis married John Peters. There are reports that Phillis gave birth to three children, none of whom survived infancy. God help her.
Phillis died penniless and alone in 1784. The location of her grave is unknown.
While much of Phillis Wheatleys poetry was written for white people and conformed, more or less, to standards that would not offend a slave-owning world, we are occasionly treated to her unfiltered voice. Writing in 1774 to the Reverend Samuel Occum, an American Indian clergyman, she is unguarded, eloquent, biblically savvy, and angry:
In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle,
which we call Love of Freedom;
it is impatient of Oppression,
and pants for Deliverance;
and by the Leave of our Modern Egyptians
I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.
God grant Deliverance in his own way and Time,
and get him honor upon those whose Avarice
impels them to countenance and help forward
the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures.
This I desire not for their Hurt,
but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct
whose Word and Actions are so diametrically opposite.
How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition
for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree-
I humbly think it does not require the
Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.
While we cannot know when Phillis Wheatley was born, she was assigned a birthday of May 12th. By happy coincidence, it was also on May 12th (1669) that Old South Church was gathered. Old South Church and Phillis Wheatley share a birthday.
For some years now Old South Church has thought it fit to remember Phillis Wheatley on the Sunday nearest her birthday, on Mother's Day. We shall do so again this year.