A Slave Poet's $253,000 Letter

WASHINGTON -- Phillis Wheatley first set foot in this country as a child of the auction block.

Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped in 1761 and transported to Boston by way of a slave ship. After arriving she was sold to John Wheatley. Last month, under extremely different circumstances, she returned to the block again.

This time the item up for sale was a letter written and signed by Wheatley on Feb. 14, 1776. It was sold by Swann Auction Galleries to a private collector. In an irony of Van Gogh proportions, a letter written by a woman who died broke at age 31 sold for $253,000, reportedly the most ever for a black woman's correspondence.

Why so much interest in a letter scribbled by a humble slave? Wheatley wasn't just any captive, and she never merely scribbled. Too sickly to work as a child, she was educated by her owners and studied the Bible, and Greek and Latin. She was writing poems by 1767 and, in 1773, published a book of them.

"Poems on Various Subjects" briefly made Wheatley a celebrity, although she never made much money. She did win her freedom, though, and was accorded a modicum of respect when most women who looked like her labored under the worst of conditions. Although George Washington and Voltaire were among her admirers, others dismissed her as a novelty or a fraud. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote that her verse was "beneath the dignity of criticism."

Wheatley's work continues to garner mixed reviews. While many women writers in particular express respect for her, she is often recognized as much for her historical importance as for her talent. Her reputation sometimes suffers because of poems in which she almost seems to apologize for slavery. In "On Being Brought From Africa to America," she writes

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too

Of course, Wheatley seems more interested here in embracing Christianity than in defending slavery. In a letter to Rev. Samson Occum, written when Wheatley was about 21, she took to task anyone who would dare to use faith in God to justify mistreating others. "In every human Breast," she wrote, "God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance."

Other early black American poets, such as Jupiter Hammon and George Moses Horton, also expressed themselves in fervently spiritual terms. The effect of religious training on their logic and language was substantial and commonplace. As scholar Manning Marable has pointed out, "The Bible, more than any other single book, was essential in the construction of African-American national consciousness and identity."

June Jordan, the late African-American poet, expressed a more jaundiced view of Wheatley's literary origins.

"What did she read? What did she memorize? What did the Wheatleys give to this African child? Of course, it was white, all of it: white," Jordan contended. "It was written, all of it, by white men taking their pleasure, their walks, their pipes, their pens and their paper, rather seriously, while somebody else cleaned the house, washed the clothes, cooked the food, watched the children: probably not slaves, but possibly a servant, or, commonly, a wife.

"It was written ... while somebody else did the other things that have to be done. And that was the literature absorbed by the slave, Phillis Wheatley. That was the writing, the thoughts, the nostalgia, the lust, the conceits, the ambitions, the mannerisms, the games, the illusions, the discoveries, the filth and the flowers that filled up the mind of the African child."

The letter sold last month is one of eight "the African child" is known to have written to Obour Tanner, a slave and a close friend. Scholars are aware of 20 Wheatley letters, but they say this one is especially important because it discusses the American Revolution. Wartime commentary is nothing unusual in our high-tech age, when nearly anyone with Internet access can share her thoughts about the ongoing mess in Iraq. Unlike us, however, Wheatley wasn't watching on TV; she had a bird's-eye view. Even so, she seemed hesitant in the letter to predict the outcome.

"Even I a mere spectator am in anxious suspense concerning the fortune of this unnatural civil Contest," she wrote to Tanner. Wheatley was modestly giving her two cents, but it turned out to be worth a whole lot more.