comfort in who she is, though she gives the credit
to God for the blessing. Arthur P. Davis, writing
inCritical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, comments
that far from avoiding her black identity, Wheat-
ley uses that identity to advantage in her poems
and letters through ‘‘racial underscoring,’’ often
referring to herself as an ‘‘Ethiop’’ or ‘‘Afric.’’ As
her poem indicates, with the help of God, she has
overcome, and she exhorts others that they may
do the same. She places everyone on the same
footing, in spite of any polite protestations
related to racial origins.
In fact, although the lines of the first qua-
train in ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to
America’’ are usually interpreted as celebrating
the mercy of her white captors, they are more
accurately read as celebrating the mercy of God
for delivering her from sin. Her being saved was
not truly the whites’ doing, for they were but
instruments, and she admonishes them in the
second quatrain for being too cocky. Notably,
it was likely that Wheatley, like many slaves, had
been sold by her own countrymen. Wheatley
does not reflect on this complicity except to see
Africa as a land, however beautiful and Eden-
like, devoid of the truth. To a Christian, it would
seem that the hand of divine Providence led to
her deliverance; God lifted her forcibly and dra-
matically out of that ignorance. The world as an
awe-inspiring reflection of God’s will, rather
than human will, was a Christian doctrine that
Wheatley saw in evidence around her and was
the reason why, despite the current suffering of
her race, she could hope for a heavenly future.
The impact of the racial problems in Revo-
lutionary America on Wheatley’s reputation
should not be underrated. Even Washington
was reluctant to use black soldiers, as William
H. Robinson points out inPhillis Wheatley and
Her Writings. In fact, blacks fought on both
sides of the Revolutionary War, hoping to gain
their freedom in the outcome. Indeed, racial
issues in Wheatley’s day were of primary impor-
tance as the new nation sought to shape its iden-
tity. Could the United States be a land of
freedom and condone slavery? This question
was discussed by the Founding Fathers and the
first American citizens as well as by people in
Europe. Wheatley’s identity was therefore some-
how bound up with the country’s in a visible
way, and that is why from that day to this, her
case has stood out, placing not only her views on
trial but the emerging country’s as well, as Gates
points out.
While Wheatley’s poetry gave fuel to aboli-
tionists who argued that blacks were rational
and human and therefore ought not be treated
as beasts, Thomas Jefferson found Wheatley’s
poems imitative and beneath notice. Jefferson,
a Founding Father and thinker of the new
Republic, felt that blacks were too inferior to
be citizens. Although he, as well as many other
prominent men, condemned slavery as an unjust
practice for the country, he nevertheless held
slaves, as did many abolitionists. This discrep-
ancy between the rhetoric of freedom and the
fact of slavery was often remarked upon in
Europe.
InA Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America,
Betsy Erkkila explores Wheatley’s ‘‘double voice’’
in ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’’
She notes that the poem is ‘‘split between Africa
and America, embodying the poet’s own split
consciousness as African American.’’ Given this
challenge, Wheatley managed, Erkkila points
out, to ‘‘merge’’ the vocabularies of various
strands of her experience—from the biblical and
Protestant Evangelical to the revolutionary polit-
ical ideas of the day—consequently creating ‘‘a
visionary poetics that imagines the deliverance of
her people’’ in the total change that was happen-
ing in the world.
Erkkila’s insight into Wheatley’s dualistic
voice, which allowed her to blend various points
of view, is validated both by a reading of her
complete works and by the contemporary model
of early transatlantic black literature, which
enlarges the boundaries of reference for her
achievement. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould
explain such a model in their introduction to
Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black
Atlantic. Reading Wheatley not just as an African
American author but as a transatlantic black
author, like Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equi-
ano, the critics demonstrate that early African
writers who wrote in English represent ‘‘a dia-
sporic model of racial identity’’ moving between
the cultures of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Carretta and Gould note the problems of being a
literate black in the eighteenth century, having
more than one culture or language. Such a person
did not fit any known stereotype or category.
Western notions of race were still evolving. No
wonder, then, that thinkers as great as Jefferson
professed to be puzzled by Wheatley’s poetry.On Being Brought from Africa to America