Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784): A Poetic Peacemaker
In the month of March, our country intentionally celebrates the contributions of women who have gone before and remain with us. These venerated women have made significant imprints on humanity’s social canvas. As a Christian liberal arts academician, researchers can readily find women breaking glass ceilings in the disciplines of biblical studies, theological studies, Christian ministry, education, psychology, philosophy, politics, and economics, just to name several. When Criswellian scholars read broadly within our disciplines, Augustine’s repeated maxim, “Take Up and Read,” has a new application for our “academic community of shepherd-scholars.”
Which is to say, we adopt the relationally pedagogical identity of our polyglottic Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ who understood culture because He knew what was in the hearts of people (John 2:25). However, since Criswellians do not possess the attribute of omniscience, we can only know diverse cultural stories by pursuing the academic road less traveled.
Years ago, I took a detour off the beaten path of dominant male voices to listen to the counsel of an unlikely female poet and abolitionist intellectual named Phillis Wheatley.
Phillis Wheatley is considered the mother of the African American literary tradition. She was kidnapped at the tender age of six or seven, arriving on the shores of New England famished and afraid after a treacherous journey through the dreaded Middle Passage. Upon arrival, Wheatley and her caged cohorts entered a strange new Bostonian world whereby abject poverty and forced labor characterized their existence as chattel.
In the late eighteenth century, Phillis Wheatley stood before an eighteen-member tribunal of aristocratic, aged, Caucasian men in Boston, Massachusetts, to justify her existence in the world of letters. The tribunal was skeptical that a woman of African descent could write such prolific poetry and prose based on prima facie observations of her gender and ethnicity, leading these learned men to require attestation through oral examination. Wheatley submitted herself to the barrage of questions before passing with flying colors, vindicating her enslaver’s testimony that she had the ability to think and write critically as an intellectual leader.
In Henry Louis Gates’s work, “The Trials of Phillis Wheatley,” he rightly opines the onus for the tribunal was nothing less than sexism and racism. The Bostonian gentry disbelieved that a person possessing Wheatley’s social location could speak in her own voice. They claimed Wheatley was simply an intellectual puppet used by others to bolster their economic and political status in society.
Nevertheless, she was an amazing African diasporic evangelical thinker and activist who possessed a distinctly Augustinian worldview coupled with a revised evangelical understanding of salvation. Wheatley was unafraid to announce the triune providence of God in all things while remaining committed to evangelical activism as a means of grace that liberates both soul and body from spiritual and social tyranny within her literary corpus. Lamentably, men of letters in Colonial America refused to publish her works.
By God’s sweet providence, Wheatley was finally published in Great Britain through the peacemaking efforts of Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and New Testament scholar and abolitionist, Granville Sharp. They did not look upon her gender and ethnicity with contempt; but rather, they celebrated Wheatley’s voice while vying for her holistic emancipation despite the racialized worldview of the colonial American sociopolitical economy.
Unfortunately, the narrative of inferiority continues to plague women in general, and black women in particular, when opportunities for advancement are automatically adjudicated the result of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives rather than one’s ability to lead well. There are persons lurking in the shadows looking for opportunities to denigrate and disgrace female contributions to societal achievement and wellness.
Without peacemakers leveraging their influence, Phillis Wheatley’s ability to penetrate the soul through poetically subversive protest would have remained dormant, and the African American literary tradition would have been stillborn.
At Criswell College, we desire our graduates to serve as peacemakers who pursue truth and righteousness through mercy and reconciliation. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God” (Matt 5:9).
Curtis A. Woods, PhD
Vice President for Academic Affairs
Criswell College
