MYSTERIOUS WAYS INDEED (via Mike Daley):

The Triumphs and Travails of Phillis Wheatley (Lucas E. Morel, December 05, 2003, Ashbrook.org)

The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers offers an engaging account of the triumphs and travails of Phillis Wheatley, an African slave girl who quickly mastered the English language upon arriving in the United States at the age of eight. Within a few years, she not only taught herself to write but to compose poetry that begged the credulity of New England's powers that be. So much so, she could not solicit enough subscribers to purchase her book of poems because few thought an African could have written them. A trial of sorts was set up to determine the veracity of the teenager's claims, which Gates uses to explore this and later controversies surrounding the young poet's life.

To see why her poetry remains so controversial, one need only read "On Being Brought from Africa to America," which Wheatley penned in 1773 at the age of 14:

'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:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die,"
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

The poem focuses on Providence and salvation: specifically, the poet's conversion to Christianity as a consequence of her surviving the infamous middle passage from Africa to America. She was later criticized for defending the slave trade as a means of civilizing Africans brought to America. But to this reader's lights, further reflection upon the poem suggests that its true intention is to move the reader to think more soberly, candidly, and conscientiously about the supposed benefits of the notorious middle passage. In sum, how is "being brought from Africa to America" (note the passive voice) a betterment of the African's condition?

Wheatley's poem raises several important questions: In what way is being brought from Africa to America an act of God's "mercy"? If Africa is really "Pagan," what makes America a land of "Christians" who offer a "Saviour" to the African slave? If Wheatley's "benighted soul" can be "taught" to "understand" the truths of Christianity, does this not establish her equal humanity, thereby refuting claims that Africans are not moral, rational beings? In short, do Americans really believe in America? Read this way, the poem becomes rife with irony. It gets the reader to agree almost too quickly with its premises in order to move them to conclusions they have yet to act fully upon. To agree with the poem is to leave one to reconcile American principles-religious and political-with American practice toward the African.

Remeniscent of the jarring passage in Keith Richburg's Out of America:

Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.

Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist - a mere spectator - watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that's when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them -or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.

[...]

Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.

In short, thank God that I am an American.

Thank goodness we are finally worthy of such folk.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 5, 2003 8:42 PM