The Trials of Phillis Wheatley Read Online Free

that she and her master and mistress claimed that she had written by herself.
    We have no transcript of the exchanges that occurred between Miss Wheatley and her eighteen examiners. But we can imagine that some of their questions would have been prompted on the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poems. “Who was Apollo?” “What happened when Phaeton rode his father’s chariot?” “How did Zeus give birth to Athena?” “Name the Nine Muses.” Was she perhaps asked for an extemporaneous demonstration of her talent? What we do know is that she passed with flying colors. After interrogating the poet, the tribunal of eighteen agreed to sign the following attestation:
    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. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.
    That attestation was deemed absolutely essential to the publication of Wheatley’s book, and even with the attestation no American publisher was willing to take on her manuscript. Susanna Wheatley turned to English friends for help. The publishing climate in England was more receptive to black authors. The Countess of Huntingdon though a slaveholder herself (she had inherited slaves in Georgia) had already, in 1772, shepherded into print one of the earliest slave narratives, by James Gronniosaw. Vincent Carretta, a leading scholar of eighteenth-century black transatlantic literature
and an expert on Wheatley, has observed that the British market for black literature may have been indirectly created by a court ruling, in 1772, that made it illegal for slaves who had come to England to be forcibly returned to the colonies. Although the ruling stopped short of outlawing slavery in England, it encouraged an atmosphere of sympathy toward blacks.
    Through the captain of the commercial ship that John Wheatley used for trade with England, Susanna engaged a London publisher, Archibald Bell, to bring out the manuscript. The countess agreed to let Wheatley dedicate the book to her. An engraving of Wheatley appeared as the book’s frontpiece, at the countess’s request.
    And so, against the greatest odds, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral became the first book of poetry published by a person of African descent in the English language, marking the beginning of an African-American literary tradition. Various black
authors had published individual poems, but even these instances were rare. Jupiter Hammon, a slave from Long Island, had published the first of several poems in 1760. Edward Long caused a minor sensation when he discovered in 1774 that Francis Williams, a Jamaican who is said to have studied at the University of Cambridge, had apparently in 1759 written an ode in Latin.
    Five advertisements for the book in the London Morning Post and Advertiser in August all point to the statement from the esteemed Bostonians as proof that Phillis is the volume’s “real Author.” What’s more, everyone knew that the publication of Wheatley’s book was an historical event, greeted by something akin to the shock of cloning a sheep. As her printer, Archibald Bell bluntly put it in the same newspaper on September 13, 1773: “The book here proposed for publication displays perhaps one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted genius, that the world ever produced.” For, he continues,
“the Author is a native of Africa, and left not the dark part of the habitable system, till she was eight years old.”
    Given the context of the Enlightenment conversation on race and reason, it should come as no surprise that the book was widely reviewed and