Someone You Should Know: Phillis Wheatley (Black History Month)

This article was published in its entirety in my column at The Gospel Coalition Canada and in French at TPSG.

Captured and shipped across the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean at age 7, the young girl is purchased at a Boston auction in 1761 by John Wheatley for his wife Susanna. Her birth name is unknown to us, as the little girl is given the name of the vessel that tore her away from everything she’d ever known. 

A Genius in Bondage

Phillis soon demonstrates such a capacity for languages that not only does she read fluent English by age 9, but she also reads and translates Greek and Latin classics by age 10. As a young teenager, she is composing poetry by which she demonstrates a remarkable grasp of literature, geography, history and politics. At the age of 13, she publishes her first poem in the Newport Mercury. David Waldstreicher, a biographer of Wheatley states, “She became fluent and culturally literate and able to write poems in English so quickly that we shouldn't hesitate to call her a genius.”

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