Speaker 1: My name is Jacqueesse Thomas, and you're listening to Black Lit,
Speaker 1: a podcast about Black literature and the stories behind the storytellers.
Speaker 1: When we talk about early African American literature, it's easy
Speaker 1: to focus on books, the first novels, the first published poets, etc. However,
Speaker 1: we now understand that the reality is much much broader.
Speaker 1: Black literature in early America existed in letters, newspapers, and
Speaker 1: even songs. So you have to look beyond the obvious,
Speaker 1: and in these spaces we find some of the most
Speaker 1: profound stories of resilience, connection, and self definition. It's the
Speaker 1: writings passed from hand to hand, stories whispered from one
Speaker 1: to another, and sometimes it's a friendship written in ink,
Speaker 1: held on to for decades, surviving all odds. One such
Speaker 1: story can be told in the letters between Philips, Sweetly
Speaker 1: and Overturn. Now, Phyllis wrote many, many letters to different people,
Speaker 1: but these letters, written over the course of six years,
Speaker 1: are very special. Their correspondence offers us a rear glipse
Speaker 1: into friendship, faith, and an intellectual exchange between two black
Speaker 1: women who are enslaved at the height of the Revolutionary War.
Speaker 2: I would never make a claim about a first African
Speaker 2: American anything in this period, because there's a lot of
Speaker 2: you know, oftentimes our ideas of oh, what is the
Speaker 2: first novel to be written or the first story, those
Speaker 2: are in flux and change often. One thing I would
Speaker 2: say for Black literature in general is that we can't
Speaker 2: understand Black literature if we focus just on books. You
Speaker 2: have to look to other print media. So much literature
Speaker 2: that's published in newspapers, for example, and we're thinking about
Speaker 2: even songs and broadsides. There's a lot of other places
Speaker 2: where African American literature happens that aren't books. Given how
Speaker 2: much the landscape for early African American literature has changed
Speaker 2: and shifted in the last couple of decades, the classes
Speaker 2: that I teach now just wouldn't be possible for undergrad
Speaker 2: me because I wouldn't have had the things to do them,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't have had access to the same texts, I
Speaker 2: wouldn't have had access to the same resources. Every you know,
Speaker 2: things are just different and changing all the time, and
Speaker 2: sometimes there's a new rediscovery of a piece that shifts
Speaker 2: how we teach and what we teach it with. So
Speaker 2: those are super, super exciting and one of the things
Speaker 2: that really kind of draws me to this field is
Speaker 2: that possibility. There's always possibility in the black archive.
Speaker 1: What is interesting and beautiful about these letters between these
Speaker 1: two black women, between these two slaves, to be exact,
Speaker 1: is that they share something beyond the ideas of survivor mode.
Speaker 1: They were building a sisterhood while the world was burning
Speaker 1: literally around them. The war wasn't some distant, unfathomable conflict.
Speaker 1: It was smoldering right outside of their front doors, impossible
Speaker 1: to ignore. But through all of this chaos, Phyllis and
Speaker 1: Uber kept writing, kept sharing, both very aware of the
Speaker 1: world around them, the community that they were building, the
Speaker 1: care for each other, and the importance of communicating.
Speaker 3: The closeness of their relationship. I think that really comes
Speaker 3: out of the less and when you contrast them with
Speaker 3: other letters she wrote, it's not that she doesn't say
Speaker 3: what she thinks in her letters. It's just that there's
Speaker 3: another dimension to that relationship that we don't get to
Speaker 3: see elsewhere. And it should suggest to us that she
Speaker 3: is not alone, that she has a what I call
Speaker 3: it a cohort, a community. That the idea that she
Speaker 3: could only have done this if she'd been isolated which
Speaker 3: was kind of standard in the literature for a long time,
Speaker 3: that she could only have been as studious and as
Speaker 3: much of a as conversant with Anglo American literary culture
Speaker 3: if she had not been part of a enslaved and
Speaker 3: African community. I think that's nonsense, Like why can't we
Speaker 3: imagine that she was code switching. Why can't we imagine
Speaker 3: that she had a whole range of audiences and interlocutors.
Speaker 3: And that's one of the things I want to convey,
Speaker 3: and how sensitive she is to who she's talking about
Speaker 3: and dealing with. We're talking about someone who has had
Speaker 3: a cosmopolitan experience. We have no idea what her life
Speaker 3: is like before she's eight, but many people who are
Speaker 3: in the slave trade have experience a lot of locations
Speaker 3: and are moved around a lot before they end up
Speaker 3: where they end up. And she's highly likely one of
Speaker 3: those people, even though she's only about eight years old
Speaker 3: when she gets to Boston, and Boston is a place
Speaker 3: where that's ten to fifteen percent African when she gets there,
Speaker 3: and there's a particularly been an upswing of importation, so
Speaker 3: there are a lot of enslaved people her age, and
Speaker 3: a lot of those people are from different parts of
Speaker 3: West Africa, and she knows that there are a lot
Speaker 3: of different ways to connect to people. And so rather
Speaker 3: than see her as having converted to a dominant culture,
Speaker 3: I see her as someone who has realized that culture
Speaker 3: is multiple and that there are different languages and she's
Speaker 3: adept at learning them. So I argue that the neoclassical
Speaker 3: literature is particularly important to her. And that's not instead
Speaker 3: of the Christian stuff, it's in addition to and in
Speaker 3: relationship to it. So if we think of those two
Speaker 3: things as languages that she's completely able to riff on
Speaker 3: so quickly, why would we think that she doesn't have
Speaker 3: others that don't necessarily come out in the poetry, but
Speaker 3: that we might get glimpses of in letters, or we
Speaker 3: might get glimpses of from knowing who she's talking to
Speaker 3: and where she was. So the political languages are others
Speaker 3: for me. So what does this have to do with
Speaker 3: obor isn't it interesting that they talk about their you
Speaker 3: get glimpses into their mutual friends. And it's certainly clear
Speaker 3: that Phyllis had traveled to Newport probably several times that
Speaker 3: and her first poem is published in the newspaper there,
Speaker 3: so there's some relationship between Newport and Boston and religious
Speaker 3: folks and others there. It's clear that she knows some
Speaker 3: of the people that Ober knows, and that they're aware
Speaker 3: that there are people who travel between Newport and Boston
Speaker 3: and Connecticut. So she's part of these wider black networks
Speaker 3: which are connected to the Wheatly's networks, and ministers and
Speaker 3: other folks you know who are referred to who carry
Speaker 3: the letters, mister Babcock's servant, Ebenezer Pemberton, people who were
Speaker 3: able to point to as being who they were.
Speaker 4: I definitely like to think about them as being in community.
Speaker 4: But even more than that, Like, what really interests me
Speaker 4: is the kind of there's a tension between the public
Speaker 4: and private. On the one hand, these letters between Uber
Speaker 4: Tanner and Phyllis Wheatley have this air of intimacy because
Speaker 4: it's in the genre of the letter, but then there's
Speaker 4: also this kind of public performative part of it, because
Speaker 4: there wasn't an expectation that this correspondence would just stay
Speaker 4: between two people. And so then I'm thinking, like, so,
Speaker 4: what were the real conversations like between Luthertanna and feel
Speaker 4: this movie, like, that's what I want to know. So anyway,
Speaker 4: that's kind of what I think about the relationship between
Speaker 4: the two, that there's some part of it that we've
Speaker 4: got to think about as an element of performativity, and
Speaker 4: then there's some part of it that's more intimate, and
Speaker 4: like I can't know which is which.
Speaker 5: The letters are an interesting glimpse into the American colonial
Speaker 5: landscape through the eyes of a friendship between two black
Speaker 5: women who are also enslaved at times. Phil's Leatly, who's
Speaker 5: based in Boston, and Obertanner, who is based in Newport.
Speaker 5: And what we find by way of their letters is
Speaker 5: that at various points they are made refugees. Boston is
Speaker 5: under siege, so Latly has to leave in seventeen seventy five.
Speaker 5: Newport will be under siege by the end of seventeen
Speaker 5: seventy six, and uber China has to leave Newport. So
Speaker 5: I think the Revolutionary War is a big deal to them,
Speaker 5: especially since they're living in places where the Revolutionary War
Speaker 5: is happening. It's not an abstract idea, it's not a
Speaker 5: theoretical problem, it's a real life problem. I would also
Speaker 5: say that what is important is the friendship as they articulated,
Speaker 5: because there are a number of stories, a number of
Speaker 5: answers to questions that we just can't get because they
Speaker 5: already know one another, So questions like how do they
Speaker 5: need I have no idea, and any of the other
Speaker 5: kind of background questions, the letters don't provide answers to that.
Speaker 5: But what the letters do do is kind of dig
Speaker 5: into their friendship.
Speaker 1: There is a theory that they meant on the passage
Speaker 1: coming over, which would have solidified their connection. John Wheatley
Speaker 1: was a merchant by trade. The two families could have
Speaker 1: crossed paths at some point, a Newport, or any other
Speaker 1: number of possibilities. The mystery on how their friendship was
Speaker 1: initially formed will remain just that a mystery, but the
Speaker 1: sentiment and the words she chose to send to Uber
Speaker 1: can be felt and are meaningful. Considering there was a
Speaker 1: war going on and all of the other circumstances, there
Speaker 1: was definitely a sense to write with sincerity and intention.
Speaker 1: On July nineteenth, seventeen seventy two, Wheatly writes.
Speaker 6: Dear Uber, I have received your kind letter, and I'm
Speaker 6: glad to hear of your welfare. I have been indisposed
Speaker 6: for some time past, but through divine goodness, I am
Speaker 6: somewhat better at present. I hope the correspondence between us
Speaker 6: will continue, which may have the happy effect of improving
Speaker 6: our mutual friendship. Till we meet in the region of
Speaker 6: consummate blessedness. Let us endeavor, by the assistance of divine grace,
Speaker 6: to live the life, and we shall die the death
Speaker 6: of the righteous. May this be a happy case. I am,
Speaker 6: dear friend, your affectionate sister.
Speaker 1: This phrase draws from numbers twenty three to ten in
Speaker 1: the Bible, where Balam expresses a desire to die the
Speaker 1: death of the righteous. Wheatley uses this reference to emphasize
Speaker 1: her aspiration for a virtuous life leading to a blessed afterlife.
Speaker 1: She expresses her appreciation for Tanner's friendship and emphasizes the
Speaker 1: importance of maintaining their correspondence to strengthen their bond. She
Speaker 1: reflects on her recent illness and conveys her hope that
Speaker 1: with divine assistance, they will lead righteous lives together and
Speaker 1: ultimately attain eternal happiness, and we shall die the death
Speaker 1: of the righteous. This letter highlights Wheatley's deep spirituality, her
Speaker 1: relationship with the Bible and the value she placed on
Speaker 1: enduring friendships. They wrote to hold on to each other,
Speaker 1: to carve out a space where their voices mattered. And
Speaker 1: we know that it mattered because Uber cherished this exchange.
Speaker 1: She held on to it for nearly half a century
Speaker 1: because they were important to her, and perhaps she also
Speaker 1: knew how important they would be for others in the future.
Speaker 6: For us, the.
Speaker 5: Letters go from seventeen seventy two to seventeen seventy nine,
Speaker 5: and Ubertanna holds on to the letters until the early
Speaker 5: eighteen thirties, until right before she dies, and then she
Speaker 5: gives them to her pastor's wife. And I think that
Speaker 5: that's an important kind of testament to the relationship that
Speaker 5: she has weekly and also her own sense of her
Speaker 5: legacy and wanting to make sure that Wheatly's story is
Speaker 5: told alongside her own. So she hands off the letters
Speaker 5: to her pastor's wife, Kavin eith Feacher, who thirty years
Speaker 5: later and he is eighteen sixty three, gives them to
Speaker 5: her nephew in law, who then gives them the Charles Dean,
Speaker 5: who works for the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is why
Speaker 5: we can read the letters today.
Speaker 1: This was more than just her friendship, more than even sisterhood.
Speaker 1: This was legacy building. Wheatley wasn't just writing to connect.
Speaker 1: She was playing chess in a world that tried to
Speaker 1: keep her off the She sent poems to people in
Speaker 1: power not just because she believed in them, but because
Speaker 1: she wanted to be seen. She knew the value of
Speaker 1: her work. She knew that her words had the strength
Speaker 1: of immortality. She knew she was worthy, and she very
Speaker 1: well knew the game.
Speaker 7: Well, why did she choose to write Washington? She could
Speaker 7: have created poetry and she could have wrote to other people.
Speaker 7: Why did she choose to write the Secretary of North America?
Speaker 7: Who was this dude England sit Over to be like
Speaker 7: the person responsible for all of North America? Why did
Speaker 7: she use George Whitfield's rhetoric Earth in seventeen seventy to
Speaker 7: write one of her most popular poems and then specifically
Speaker 7: take that poem and send it to the Countess of Huntington,
Speaker 7: who is in the Hastens in order to kind of
Speaker 7: get a financial beneficiary and to get someone she She
Speaker 7: had rhetorical goals, aims, and desires and strategy, so a
Speaker 7: lot of us think when she writes these people and
Speaker 7: you know, some of these people are slave owners, and
Speaker 7: she's not saying anything about slavery. It's all about like Christianity.
Speaker 7: I think that a lot of it was her trying
Speaker 7: to get herself in front of people who she felt
Speaker 7: had some power, right, and we kind of knew. I
Speaker 7: was thinking about how power is going to be played out,
Speaker 7: whether or not England was in control of North America,
Speaker 7: or whether or not the Americans will be in control
Speaker 7: of North America, whomever. Right, she wanted to put herself
Speaker 7: in front of those people, perhaps that she would be
Speaker 7: the example, right, you know, an African person willing to
Speaker 7: be part of the colonial American society, part of the
Speaker 7: American society post revolution and one vein but also too
Speaker 7: in this sense that you know, she felt that she
Speaker 7: had something to say, not necessarily for those people at
Speaker 7: that particular time, but for us.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: And one of the ways that we think about if
Speaker 7: African American rhetorical practices have been in part uniquely signified
Speaker 7: to or connected to abolitionism, right, one of the most
Speaker 7: important twos of abolitionism is that you don't write simply
Speaker 7: for yourself to be free, but for the next generation
Speaker 7: of people to live in a more prosperous society. So
Speaker 7: my thinking too is that she's trying to define a
Speaker 7: moral authority that would far exceed her temporer time on earth.
Speaker 7: She wanted to leave a lasting rhetorical and written record
Speaker 7: to how she tried to how she labored, what her
Speaker 7: vocation was. And so I think that she, like so
Speaker 7: many Africans in this particular period, so many African Americans
Speaker 7: in this particular period, began to kind of think about
Speaker 7: ways in which they can produce written records.
Speaker 4: In fact, Phillis Whitey only published one volume, a forward you,
Speaker 4: but she tried to publish the second one, but you know,
Speaker 4: there was a little thing like the revolution, that war,
Speaker 4: that kind of you know. And so when shed an
Speaker 4: advertisement for that second volume, she listed a table of contents,
Speaker 4: and in her table of contents it was a series
Speaker 4: of letters that she was including as part of her
Speaker 4: second volume. So that tells me that when Phyllis Wheatley
Speaker 4: was doing her letter correspondence, there was some part of
Speaker 4: it where she was thinking these letters might be for
Speaker 4: public consumption. And so then that makes me think, how
Speaker 4: does one do that, Like, how do you write a
Speaker 4: letter and balance the private and the public.
Speaker 1: Not by choice, but she always had two audiences in mind,
Speaker 1: one the white people who might publish her in two
Speaker 1: the black people who would truly understand. And so, like
Speaker 1: every great poet, she wrote with layered texts, with words
Speaker 1: that would carry the truth for those who needed it
Speaker 1: while still being respectable.
Speaker 7: African American people have at least have always had to
Speaker 7: be speaking to at least two audiences right trying to
Speaker 7: think about their identity themselves, especially if other black people
Speaker 7: will be reading it. They're thinking about that particular audience,
Speaker 7: but they're also concerning themselves with their survival life line.
Speaker 1: You are listening to Black lit when they say that
Speaker 1: the Bible was used to keep black folks in chains,
Speaker 1: but Phyllis flipped it back on them. She didn't swallow
Speaker 1: the version of Christianity that said know your place. She
Speaker 1: read deeper, looked harder, and found her own faith, a
Speaker 1: faith that called slavery what it was.
Speaker 7: And in seventeen seventy four, for instance, she wrote a
Speaker 7: letter to Samson Acum, who is a Native American Presbyterian
Speaker 7: minister who also goes to London prior to Weekly and
Speaker 7: he'd written about the treatment of enslaved Africans, and she
Speaker 7: writes him alert and says, thank you for your advocacy
Speaker 7: for black people. And she says that everything I write,
Speaker 7: and of course I'm paraphrasing and summarizing here, but she says,
Speaker 7: everything I write, I do not for their hurt, but
Speaker 7: to convince them of the strange ascertainty of their actions
Speaker 7: and conducts, which is diametrically opposite.
Speaker 1: In this letter, Wheatley eloquently critiques the hypocrisy of those
Speaker 1: who advocate for liberty while oppressing others, drawing parallels between
Speaker 1: the plight of enslaved Africans and the Israelites in Egypt.
Speaker 8: She writes, for in every human breast God has implanted
Speaker 8: a principle which we call love of freedom. It is
Speaker 8: impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance. And by the
Speaker 8: leave of our modern Egyptians, I will assert that the
Speaker 8: same principle lives in us. God grants deliverance in his
Speaker 8: own way and time, and get him honor upon all
Speaker 8: those whose avarice impels them to countenance and help forward
Speaker 8: the calamities of their fellow creatures. This I desire not
Speaker 8: for their hurts, but to convince them of the strange
Speaker 8: absurdity of their conduct, whose words and actions are so
Speaker 8: diametrically opposite, how well the cry for liberty and the
Speaker 8: reverse disposition of their exercise of oppressive power over others
Speaker 8: degree I humbly think it does not require the penetration
Speaker 8: of philosopher to determine.
Speaker 7: So therefore, she's very mindful that people are using Christianity,
Speaker 7: using faith to say that African people should be enslaved,
Speaker 7: that they need to be controlled, that they're violent xyz.
Speaker 7: And she said that I don't see this in the
Speaker 7: literature that I'm reading about God. I don't see this right.
Speaker 7: And thus she's revising that narrative about how she's assessing
Speaker 7: her faith. And she goes on, I think with that
Speaker 7: particular perspective, which I think would make her feel that
Speaker 7: she's the one who's in the superior position, that she's
Speaker 7: the one who has been author to offer an education
Speaker 7: and to moralize, if you will, people who are less
Speaker 7: learned on the tenets of Christianity.
Speaker 3: Isn't it interesting that she gets political in that wonderful
Speaker 3: letter which she talks about the hypocrisy of of the
Speaker 3: modern Egyptians, and who is she talking about it? She's
Speaker 3: talking about the British. Who are the modern Egyptians of
Speaker 3: the British, of the Americans? Are they both like that?
Speaker 3: We only have it because somebody chose to take it
Speaker 3: out of her letter and put it in the newspapers
Speaker 3: where it gets reprinted. But that shows us so we
Speaker 3: have no idea. She may have written dozens or hundreds
Speaker 3: of letters that we don't have right or said different
Speaker 3: things to different people. She's trying things out. She doesn't
Speaker 3: know what's going to happen next, who's going to win
Speaker 3: the war, and all these things. And so this is
Speaker 3: the wind into her practice all the way through, from
Speaker 3: the beginning, all the way to the end. And so
Speaker 3: often we've wanted to say, oh, she's she throws in
Speaker 3: her lot with the Patriots and things don't work out
Speaker 3: for her in its drag, or she has these kinds
Speaker 3: of ideas. This is what she thinks about white people,
Speaker 3: or this is what she thinks about the patriots, or
Speaker 3: this is what she thinks about Christianity, like as if
Speaker 3: she's not someone who's like saying different things to different people,
Speaker 3: and it's evolving depending on what she thinks is possible,
Speaker 3: and she doesn't know what's going to happen next. It's
Speaker 3: because we know so little that the chronology is and
Speaker 3: are missing so much, and the life is so relatively short, right,
Speaker 3: that the chronology is important. And it's actually the paying
Speaker 3: attention to that where we can see her making decisions
Speaker 3: and choosing to do certain things at certain times in
Speaker 3: certain situations. And for me, that proves both that how
Speaker 3: deliberate she is and how creative she is, but also
Speaker 3: how political she is.
Speaker 1: And Wheatley wasn't alone in this fight. Black writers, preachers,
Speaker 1: and thinkers were flipping the script everywhere, challenging these so
Speaker 1: called men of God at every turn.
Speaker 7: That's why the nineteenth century looks like it look. And
Speaker 7: slavery would come to an end in the eighteen sixties
Speaker 7: in part because per slavery advocates would be the members
Speaker 7: of Congress and all these other people, but they would
Speaker 7: continuously use religion. Right as the two suggest that African
Speaker 7: people were enslave. But you have so many African American
Speaker 7: people and some I guess you know Anglo American people
Speaker 7: writing at the time as well, would you know challenge
Speaker 7: against that and say that you know the way that
Speaker 7: they see faith, Christianity or Islam, because Islam is very
Speaker 7: important in early America too. The way that they are
Speaker 7: seeing these faith kind of the way that they read them,
Speaker 7: would suggest that slavery shouldn't be a part of God's children.
Speaker 1: Wheatley wasn't begging for approval. She was teaching and holding
Speaker 1: up a mirror, making them see their own contradictions. And
Speaker 1: it is in that act that she reclaimed her power.
Speaker 1: The letters feel deeply personal, but they weren't meant to
Speaker 1: be hidden. Back then, letters weren't private like text messages
Speaker 1: are today. They passed through hands and were copied and
Speaker 1: were sometimes even published. Phyllis knew this. She expected her
Speaker 1: words to last, and.
Speaker 5: I think as of right now, what makes the friendship
Speaker 5: important is that currently the only documented by way of
Speaker 5: letters friendship between two black women who were also enslaved.
Speaker 1: Uber didn't just hold on to Phyllis's letters. She made
Speaker 1: sure that they survived so that we could read them today.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about black joy. It persists. Even in
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century, when the world told them that they
Speaker 1: were nothing, Phyllis and Uber built something undeniable. They wrote
Speaker 1: themsel into history. In history for once held on to them.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to all of the guests on today's episode
Speaker 1: in order that you heard their voices. Bridget Fielder, David Wallsheiser,
Speaker 1: Cassie Smith, Tara a Bidam, Elima Shabaz reading the Letters
Speaker 1: by Phillip Sweetley and Don Holmes.
Speaker 3: Black Lit is a.
Speaker 1: Black Effect original series in partnership with I Heart Media.
Speaker 1: Is written and created by myself Jack Queise Thomas and
Speaker 1: executive produced alongside Dolly s Bishop. Chanelle Collins is the
Speaker 1: director of Production, Head of Talent Nicole Spence, writer producer
Speaker 1: Jason Torres, Our researcher and producer is Jabari Davis, and
Speaker 1: the mix and sound design is by the humble Duane Crawford.
Speaker 1: Gratitude is an action, so I have to give praise
Speaker 1: to those who took the time out to write review.
Speaker 1: Please keep sharing and we will promise to bring more
Speaker 1: writers and greater episodes to you. Also, if you're looking
Speaker 1: to become a writer or in search of a supportive
Speaker 1: writing community, join me for a free creative writing session
Speaker 1: on my website Black writers Room dot com, b LK
Speaker 1: Writer's Room dot com, or hit me up directly for
Speaker 1: more details at underscore t h A T S P
Speaker 1: E a c E.
Speaker 6: That's peace.