Celebrations of Phillis Wheatley’s Boston Pub Date

At the end of November 1773, the ship Dartmouth was moored in Boston’s inner harbor, watched by a militia-style patrol of volunteers to ensure the tea it carried was not unloaded and taxed.

The Rotch family’s vessel, under the command of James Hall, brought other cargo as well. Among those items were copies of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

Wheatley had recently become legally free, and she was counting on sales of those books for her income.

Fortunately, by 1 December the local Whigs made clear that everything could be unloaded from the Dartmouth except the East India Company tea, so the books came ashore.

Historians only recently recognized the connection between Wheatley’s book and the Boston Tea Party because no one mentioned it at the time. Wheatley may have been worried 250 years ago today, but by the time she was writing the letters that survive she had her books on dry land and was busy promoting orders.

Wheatley wrote that her books would arrive “in Capt. Hall,” using the common way of referring to a ship by its master rather than its name. About ten years ago Wheatley biographer Vincent Carretta, researcher Richard Kigel, and others realized that the captain of that name arriving in Boston around that time had to be James Hall on the Dartmouth.

The sestercentennial of the Tea Party thus coincides with the sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s book in America, and both events are being commemorated this season.

Ada Solanke’s play Phillis in Boston will have its last performances for the year in Old South Meeting House, the poet’s own church, on Sunday, 3 December. That site-specific drama depicts the poet, her friend Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, her recent owner Susannah Wheatley, and abolitionist Prince Hall. Order tickets here.

The next evening, 4 December, the Boston Public Library will host “Faces of Phillis,” a free program discussing the poet from various perspectives. It will start with a staged reading of parts of Solanke’s plays about Wheatley. Then there will be a panel featuring Solanke, sculptor Meredith Bergmann, and Kyera Singleton of the Royall House & Slave Quarters museum. The evening will conclude with Boston’s Poet Laureate, Porsha Olayiwola, performing a dramatic reading of her own work and one of Wheatley’s poems.

“Faces of Phillis” is scheduled to last from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. Register for that event here.

Learning about Phillis Wheatley in London and Boston

Ade Solanke is a British playwright of Nigerian descent. She earned an M.F.A. in screenwriting at U.S.C. on top of British degrees, and she’s now a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths College in London.

Solanke specializes in stories about the African diaspora. In 2018 her play Phillis in London debuted at the Greenwich Book Festival. It dramatized the experiences of Phillis Wheatley in the summer of 1773, visiting the imperial capital to promote the publication of her book of poetry.

On Monday, 30 October, Solanke will be at the Massachusetts Historical Society for a reading from that play and a panel discussion about researching it, titled “Bringing Phillis to Life.” The other panelists will be:

• Tara Bynum, author of Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America.
• David Waldstreicher, author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley.

That event starts at 5:30 with a reception, and the program will begin at 6:00. Admission is $10, free to members. People can also watch online for free. Register to attend one way or the other through this page.

On Friday, 3 November, Solanke’s new play Phillis in Boston will premiere at the Old South Meeting-House—no doubt the event that’s bringing the playwright to Boston. (There will be preview performances the previous two nights.)

Directed by Regge Life, Phillis in Boston explores the life of the poet soon after she returned from London. Revolutionary Spaces says:

The play celebrates friendship, love, community, and joy by centering Wheatley’s relationships with her friend and confidant Obour Tanner, her husband-to-be John Peters, and the dynamic abolitionist Prince Hall. Phillis in Boston examines slavery in New England through the lens of Wheatley’s complex relationship with her enslaver Susanna Wheatley, who supported Wheatley’s literary ambitions even as she kept her in bondage.

Phillis in Boston is designed to be performed in the meetinghouse where Wheatley and other revolutionaries were congregants.

Solanke’s play will run in that space through Sunday, 3 December, on evenings from Wednesday through Sunday. Tickets cost $15–35. For more information and to reserve seats, visit this page.

(The striking image above comes from the webpage of an event at the British Library earlier this month, all inspired by the sestercentennial of Wheatley’s book.)

“An underrated part of Wheatley’s story”

This year seeing the Sestercentennial of the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, we continue to see more discussion of her.

Here’s an extract of Deborah Kalb’s interview of David Waldstreicher, author of the new biography The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley:

Early on I decided I needed to read anything and everything Phillis Wheatley read, especially anything she referred to or I could be sure made an impression on her.

That meant getting myself an education in Greek and Roman classics that I never had previously (and which I now think of as a gift that Phillis gave me).

At a certain point, listening to the Fagles translation of Homer’s The Odyssey on a cassette tape in my old car while commuting, I realized that this Mediterranean world, replete with a traffic in women, long dangerous voyages, shipwrecks, and poets who tell the tale, may have seemed to her not so much ancient and strange as familiar.

As I put it eventually, “the classical revival provided her with a way of talking about her experience as an enslaved woman without talking about it directly.”

I knew that an underrated part of Wheatley’s story was that she propelled herself, much like a Homeric bard, into interactions with leading men of her day: Lord Dartmouth, Franklin, George Washington, leaders in Boston, and others she wrote poems about, such as the evangelist George Whitefield (the elegy she wrote after his death made her famous outside Massachusetts).

But the book really came together when I began to read the Boston newspapers. Knowing when she wrote various poems, I began to be able to plot her responses to events in real time.

Waldstreicher proposes that over a dozen poems in those newspapers might have been written by Wheatley.

Also recently, the Newport Historical Society shared Amelia Yeager’s essay on reading between the lines of Wheatley’s letters to Obour Tanner to learn more about that enslaved resident of Newport than sparse home-town records supply. Tanner was about the same age as Wheatley, also born in Africa and kidnapped across the ocean, and the two young women appear to have bonded quickly.

Wheatley died young, with her second book manuscript and any letters she’d saved soon lost. In contrast, Tanner lived for a long time and kept her letters from Wheatley. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, the Massachusetts Historical Society discussed Wheatley’s life and letters, and those documents are now part of the M.H.S.’s collection.