Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons (26 page)

I think of him often, and what he said to me that day when I and the country were so young and unformed and hopeful. And he was right.

We Americans sometimes must make sacrifices. And break new ground for those who follow.

After the British troops left Boston in March of 1776, Phillis returned, to find devastation. The Wheatley mansion was hit by cannonballs that had been sent across the bay by American soldiers on Cobble Hill in Charlestown. She lived alone, no one knows where, until April of 1778, when she married John Peters.

Just a month earlier, her master, John Wheatley, died. He bequeathed the bulk of his estate to Nathaniel. Phillis was not mentioned in his will.

Although Peters has been described as "a respectable colored man who kept a grocery store in Court Street, very handsome and well-mannered, wearing a wig, carrying a cane, and acting the gentleman," soon after they were married he failed in business.

Phillis kept on with her writing. But she had no real moral support for her work. Mary Wheatley died in 1778, at age thirty-five. Phillis's Tory friends had deserted Boston once the Americans regained it. All the Wheatley relatives were doing their best to get along in the war, dealing with inflation and shortages.

By 1778, half the men who signed the paper attesting to the fact that Phillis wrote her poems were dead. Others were scattered and doing their best to survive.

Some people say that John Peters failed in business because he would not stoop to do jobs that he considered beneath him. Having failed, he was thrown into prison to relieve himself of debt.

Yet others say that he became a lawyer and took up the cause of Negroes in court. Indeed, Josiah Quincy, a renowned lawyer in Boston at the time, remarked that he recalled seeing Peters in Boston courts of law.

Both these reports about the man could be true. Perhaps Peters "read law," as was done in those days, and tried his hand at it.

At any rate, the marriage flourished in the beginning. Reports say that John and Phillis lived on Queen Street, a fashionable part of town. And even had servants.

In 1779 Phillis found herself "in circumstances," the eighteenth-century term for carrying a child. As she was preparing to give birth, she was also preparing proposals for her second volume of poetry, which she hoped to dedicate to Benjamin Franklin.

She was doing what Mrs. Wheatley had previously done for her, putting proposals for subscribers in the newspapers. She planned to publish thirty-three poems and thirteen letters in this book. The price was to be "twelve pounds, neatly bound and lettered, and nine pounds if sewed in blue paper."

Her first book had sold for two shillings and sixpence. The new price was set by John Peters, but it was not out of line, considering the inflation of the day.

The proposals for Phillis's book ran for six weeks in Boston newspapers. Nevertheless, once again Bostonians rejected her work. It may not have been prejudice this time, but simply that people were, too busy with the war to care about something as frivolous as poetry.

In her letters to friends, Phillis never complained about her husband or his inability to support her. Actually, there is speculation, by some, that the marriage failed because Phillis was raised to be a spoiled poetess and could not cope with the realities of everyday life. This may be true. The Wheatleys certainly did not prepare her with any real-life skills. They may have helped her, raised her out of poverty, given her every opportunity, coddled her, and eventually freed her, but I cannot help feeling they regarded her as a plaything, a possession to show off to their friends.

Which is exactly what I have Aunt Cumsee and Obour telling her in my narrative.

Obour also felt, and wrote, that "poor Phillis let herself down by Marrying." For some reason their correspondence dropped off. In 1779 Phillis wrote to Obour, hoping to revive their communication. But that is the last letter she wrote to her friend.

Obour died in 1835. Upon her death she gave her letters from Phillis to the wife of Reverend William H. Beecher, who in turn gave them to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Sometime after 1780, Phillis and John moved out of Boston to the small town of Wilmington, Massachusetts. No reason is given. Here Phillis did not flourish. It was a small remote village, not cosmopolitan like Boston. Research tells us that she suffered much, sometimes from want and sometimes from just plain hard work.

Phillis was the mother of three children when she moved back to Boston to live under the care of Mrs. Elizabeth Wallcutt, a niece of her old mistress. Phillis earned her keep by teaching at a school run by Mrs. Wallcutt. But after six weeks, John Peters came by to take them away.

In the spring of 1783, Nathaniel Wheatley died in London, leaving a wife and three daughters. He was wealthy and happily married. He left Phillis nothing in his will.

Somewhere in these years, Phillis lost two children. In this time she also made thirteen attempts to solicit subscribers in Boston's papers for her second book of poetry.

She never succeeded.

While Peters languished in debtor's prison, she lived for a while in a "colored" boarding house in a bad part of town. Her health was failing. Several of Mrs. Wheatley's relatives, having heard nothing from her, sought her out. They found her living in filth and poverty, she and her remaining child both "sick unto death, in a state of abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of squalid poverty."

Henri Grégroire, a French historian who wrote of colonial Boston, said, "The sensitive Phillis, who had been reared almost as a spoiled child, had little or no sense or need of how to manage a household, and her husband wanted her to do just that; he made his wishes known at first by reproaches and followed these with downright bad treatment, the continuation of which so afflicted his wife that she grieved herself to death."

Is this what made Phillis grieve herself to death? Or was it grief at not being able to publish another volume of poetry? Or at the loss of her former life, friends, and status?

At any rate, help came too late. Phillis Wheatley Peters and her last child died on December 5, 1784. A grandniece of Mrs. Wheatley's, who was passing up Court Street, saw her coffin being borne to the Old Granary Burial Ground.

She was, by my calculations, thirty years old.

After her death, when Peters was released from prison, he placed a notice in a local paper, asking the person who had borrowed Phillis's manuscripts to return them immediately, as all her works were to be published.

Phillis had left her manuscripts with Mrs. Wallcutt She returned them to Peters. Obviously in need of money, he went about selling Phillis's gift books, books that had been presented to her in her celebrity days by famous and well-placed people.

A copy of John Milton's
Paradise Lost,
for instance, with the inscription on the flyleaf reading, "Mr. Brook Watson to Phillis Wheatley, London, July 1773," is now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Watson was former lord mayor of London.

Or Peters may have tried to sell Phillis's complete set of Alexander Pope's
Works
(thirteen volumes) that were given to her by Lord Dartmouth (and are now at the University of North Carolina).

Although a grandniece of Mrs. Wheatley's saw Phillis's coffin being borne to Old Granary, no one really knows where she is buried. Her grave went unmarked.

In today's world, Phillis would have been a celebrity, talking on morning shows, reading her poetry at presidential inaugurals, touring, and speaking. In eighteenth-century Boston, there was no place for her. She died in poverty and obscurity. Yet, more than two hundred years later, she remains what she was meant to be from the day she was sold on the auction block next to Avery's Distillery in the South End. America's first black poet.

As in all my historical novels, I will attempt to tell my readers what and who in the book is real and what and who was invented for the sake of story.

Perhaps, where characters are concerned, it would be simpler to tell which ones I made up. They are Aunt Cumsee; Sulie; Bristol; Mrs. Chelsea, who traveled to London with Phillis; Kunkle, the first mate on the
Phillis
(although there were many like him); Maria, her maid in London; and the lady Phillis met who was a sister to Lopez the slave trader. All the other characters really lived and played a part in Phillis's life.

However, I took risks with this book, in that I created my own Phillis, as I created my own Harriet in
Wolf by the Ears.

"Don't tell me someone is finally going to put flesh on that girl," an African American librarian and friend said when I told her I was writing this book. "It's about time."

This is what I have attempted in my novel, to flesh Phillis out. All the books written about her at present are scholarly, concerned with the dry facts of her life or her classical poetry.

We are told that Phillis was modest, shy, reverent, gentle, and unpretentious.
Yes,
I thought,
that may have been her public persona, but what was she really like?
So I set out to discover her.

Phillis Wheatley presented herself to me as I read between the lines of all the scholarly work. My Phillis is vain, confused, silly, and at times conniving. She has moods. She falls in love indiscriminately. These are the watermarks of most teenagers. Imagine a teen given the celebrity, the adulation, that Phillis was given, yet held on the tether of slavery, sometimes given some slack and other times drawn in.

I made Phillis real. Not in accordance with the speculation of the scholars. Because then I would have one more scholarly book. I did not set out to do that.

So, then, my Phillis falls in love with Nathaniel. I developed relationships between her and the Wheatleys, between her and Mary, Prince, Obour—indeed, everyone who crossed her path. This is the job of the historical novelist. I took the facts and I ran with them.

Research tells us that Mrs. Wheatley tutored her. Yet in
The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley,
edited by John Shields, we are told that likely it was Nathaniel who tutored her in Latin and Greek and the classics. "Given the wealth and status of the Wheatley family," we are told here, "it is likely Nathaniel attended Boston Latin School through the sixth form." Mrs. Wheatley did not know Greek and Latin. Nathaniel did. Although she may have had additional instruction from learned ministers, I went with Nathaniel as her tutor.

It is speculated that Phillis came from Senegal, West Africa. So I created a background along that line and recounted the middle passage as best I could, after considerable study concerning that terrible experience. Captain Quinn really did bring her over on the
Phillis,
and it is thought that Obour did come with her. However, nowhere is it mentioned that her mother made that voyage. This is my invention.

As to how and when she wrote her poems, I adhered closely to the schedule of production. As for the poetry itself, it is very scholarly, very eighteenth century. It relies heavily on Greek and Roman mythology. It would not be understood or enjoyed by my readers. For this reason, I have not quoted it at any length.

Her meeting and "oral exam" in front of the distinguished men of Boston did happen, although no one knows the questions they actually asked her.

Mrs. Wheatley did take her about Boston to meet important personages, to display her, and have Phillis recite. She was accruing a support group to get the first book published.

Phillis's trip to London is written much as it happened. She went under Nathaniel's protection, saw and did all the things I have portrayed, with the exception of the scene in which Nathaniel walks in with Mary Enderby. (Although he did court Mary Enderby on this trip and married her that November.)

In London she was received, celebrated, and coddled. And Benjamin Franklin did call on her. Nathaniel would not receive him, however. It is believed that was because of the recent Somerset Decision, which pronounced Negroes free, "simply by breathing the free air of England." And because Franklin was antislavery.

When Phillis returned to America she did nurse her mistress, and later cared for her master. He freed her in October of that year, after London reviews of her book criticized the fact that she was in bondage.

Scipio Moorhead did draw her portrait.

Hundreds of other parts of this book are true. I cannot name them all here. A perusal of the scholarly books on Phillis Wheatley will bring them to light.

As for Phillis's meeting with George Washington in Cambridge in December 1775, it did happen. I saw the meeting with Washington as the high point of her life. From that moment on the war worsens and so does Phillis's condition. It steadily goes downhill.

I saw no reason to elaborate on her troubles after marriage in this book. I wanted my readers to see her in the prime of her creativity, in her girlhood, touched by the wand of the Wheatleys' kindness and generosity. That wand, as I see it, was a double-edged sword, in that they lifted her out of poverty and servitude, educated, and nurtured her. Yet at the same time they kept her in silken fetters.

One can interpret their treatment in two ways. Did they use her for their own enjoyment, then cast her aside, unprepared for what would follow? She was' constantly referred to as "Mrs. Wheatley's Negro girl who writes poetry."

Or did they rescue her from terrible circumstances and give her the opportunity of a lifetime, an opportunity that her own willfulness brought to a bitter end?

Did they prepare her for life? Or make her so dependent on them that she could not function when left to her own devices? Was it fair to educate and encourage her to be a poet when the world was not ready for a black poet? Should she have been kept a slave? Not educated?

All is open to interpretation. I have interpreted the facts in my own way. In this author's note, I separate them from my fiction, so my readers may be able to make their own judgments.

Alderman, Clifford Lindsey.
Rum, Slaves and Molasses: The Story of New England's Triangular Trade.
New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1972.