For generations, the name Phillis Wheatley has carried weight in the Greenville community, owing to the longstanding legacy of the Phillis Wheatley Community Center.
The center has been a hub of learning, growth and camaraderie for Black children in Greenville for more than a century, from the worst years of racial segregation to the ongoing social and economic challenges of today. In all that time, the center has remained a place where fond memories are formed, where lifelong friendships are forged.
But the name, itself, carries a much deeper legacy.
The woman behind the name
While Phillis Wheatley herself never visited Greenville, nor does she have any direct connection to the area, there was a reason Hattie Logan Duckett, who in 1920 founded the Phillis Wheatley Community Center, chose Wheatley as its namesake.
Born in 1753, Wheatley was the first Black author to publish a book of poetry in the United States, something she did when just 20 years old. She became an international literary celebrity, her work read by kings and revolutionaries, alike.
A portrait of Phillis Wheatley now hangs at the community center in Greenville that bears her name.
For the founders of the center, Wheatley is a symbol of how the station of one’s birth should not dictate the scope of their ambition. Duckett wanted the young ladies at the time to aspire to mature and articulate just like Phillis Wheatley. Although the community center, which first served only young girls, soon opened its doors to boys as well, the lesson still stands.
But for Wheatley, who accomplished much before dying at 31, life was not a simple success story.
Born in West Africa — most likely present-day Gambia or Senegal — Wheatley was sold into slavery as a child and arrived in Boston on a slave ship on July 11, 1761, at the age of 10 or 11, according to the National Women’s History Museum.
Wheatley’s original name is lost forever, erased by the bondage that carried her to America, and it is not without a sense of cruel irony that scholars have noted the source of the name by which we all know her today.
‘The Phillis’
Wheatley had arrived in Boston on the slave ship “The Phillis,” and when she was purchased by the wealthy Wheatley merchant family of Boston, “Phillis” was the name they gave her.
Soon after arriving in Boston, Wheatley began to show a prodigious talent for the written word, writing poems at the age of 12, according to the Phillis Wheatley Historical Society.
Her first published poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” which appeared in the Newport Mercury newspaper in 1767 when Wheatley was 13 or 14 years old, told the story of two men, Hussey and Coffin, who had narrowly escaped becoming castaways in a terrible storm near Cape Cod.
Wheatley had heard the story while serving food to the two men, who had been guests at the Wheatley house after the storm, and she later wrote of their ordeal:
Suppose the groundless Gulph had snatch’d away
Hussey and Coffin to the raging Sea;
Where wou’d they go? where wou’d be their Abode?
With the supreme and independent God,
Or made their Beds down in the Shades below,
Where neither Pleasure nor Content can flow.
Soon her talent spread farther across the Colonies, as she used her poetry to comment on current events, from the Boston Massacre to the Stamp Act.
But so impressive was her poetic output that Wheatley was forced to undergo “examinations” from Boston’s intellectuals to prove that a Black girl was truly capable of producing such work (one such intellectual, founding father John Hancock, later testified that her work was indeed her own.)
Wheatley visited London to meet the literary crowds there and became famous throughout Europe, according to the Poetry Foundation — all while a slave of the Wheatley family.
In 1775, she wrote a poem directly addressed to General George Washington, praising the future first president’s “virtue” while advising him to “let the goddess guide” his actions, she was then personally welcomed into Washington’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
These close associations with the power brokers of America and England would lead to later accusations that Wheatley had been too obedient and servile to the white elite, although Wheatley never fully hid her thoughts on America’s original sin of slavery — even if the publishers of the day frequently censored her more critical poems from reaching the broader white public.
She also faced criticism from white intellectuals for being unworthy of her acclaim, most notably from Thomas Jefferson, who dismissed Wheatley and all other Black poets as being incapable of understanding love itself — and therefore, incapable of producing what he deemed true poetry.
“Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry,” Jefferson wrote in his book “Notes on the State of Virginia.” “Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet … Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whatley [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”
For her part, Wheatley offered her own criticism of slave owners. When the American Revolution broke out, Wheatley called for the end of slavery as a facet of the Revolution, comparing slave owners to the Egyptians who had enslaved Moses and the Jews of Israel in the Book of Exodus.
She wrote, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom. It is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our Modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.”
By 1778, however, Wheatley had grown impatient with the posturing of a society that proclaimed to fight for freedom yet kept so many in chains.
She wrote:
But how, presumptuous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with th’Almighty mind—
While yet (O deed ungenerous!) they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric’s blameless race?
Wheatley did not live to see that hypocrisy corrected, though she did gain freedom herself.
After publishing her collected poems under the title “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” she was emancipated and later married a free Black grocer named John Peters.
But they did not live happily-ever-after.
Wheatley and Peters struggled through poverty, according to the National Women’s History Museum. Two of their babies died. John Peters was arrested for debt. Wheatley became a maid at a boarding house, working to raise her one surviving son. She died in obscurity and poverty in 1784. Her infant son died shortly thereafter.
Although Wheatley’s life ended in obscurity during her own era, her name now adorns museums and history books, literary anthologies and college textbooks – and even right here in Greenville, over the doors of a community center that has honored her legacy for more than 100 years.
A Hymn to the Evening
by Phillis Wheatley
Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main
The pealing thunder shook the heav’nly plain;
Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,
Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.
Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,
And through the air their mingled music floats.
Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dies are spread!
But the west glories in the deepest red:
So may our breasts with ev’ry virtue glow,
The living temples of our God below!
Fill’d with the praise of him who gives the light,
And draws the sable curtains of the night,
Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind,
At morn to wake more heav’nly, more refin’d;
So shall the labours of the day begin
More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.
Night’s leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes,
Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.
