Poetry for Students, Volume 29

African American studies in the twentieth cen-
tury. Today, a handful of her poems are widely
anthologized, but her place in American letters
and black studies is still debated. Recent critics
looking at the whole body of her work have
favorably established the literary quality of her
poems and her unique historical achievement.

Poem Text

’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye. 5

‘‘Their color is a diabolic dye.’’

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as

Cain,

May be refined, and join the angelic train.

Poem Summary

Line 1
In line 1 of ‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to
America,’’ as she does throughout her poems
and letters, Wheatley praises the mercy of God
for singling her out for redemption. So many in
the world do not know God or Christ. How is it
that she was saved?

Although she was captured and violently
brought across the ocean from the west shores
of Africa in a slave boat, a frail and naked child
of seven or eight, and nearly dead by the time she
arrived in Boston, Wheatley actually hails God’s
kindness for his delivering her from a heathen
land. Here Wheatley seems to agree with the
point of view of her captors that Africa is
pagan and ignorant of truth and that she was
better off leaving there (though in a poem to the
Earl of Dartmouth she laments that she was
abducted from her sorrowing parents). Here
she mentions nothing about having been free in
Africa while now being enslaved in America. In
fact, the whole thrust of the poem is to prove the
paradox that in being enslaved, she was set free
in a spiritual sense.

Line 2
Line 2 explains why she considers coming to
America to have been good fortune. She was in

a sinful and ignorant state, not knowing God or

Christ. Many readers today are offended by this

line as making Africans sound too dull or brain-

washed by religion to realize the severity of their

plight in America. It is also pointed out that

Wheatley perhaps did not complain of slavery

because she was a pampered house servant.

The image of night is used here primarily in

a Christian sense to convey ignorance or sin, but

it might also suggest skin color, as some readers

feel. It seems most likely that Wheatley refers to

the sinful quality of any person who has not seen

the light of God. From this perspective, Africans

were living in darkness. She was instructed in

Evangelical Christianity from her arrival and

was a devout practicing Christian. Indeed, the

idea of anyone, black or white, being in a state

of ignorance if not knowing Christ is prominent

in her poems and letters. A soul in darkness to

Wheatley means someone unconverted. In her

poems on atheism and deism she addresses any-

one who does not accept Father, Son, and Holy

Ghost as a lost soul. Calling herself such a lost

soul here indicates her understanding of what

she was before being saved by her religion.

Line 3

Line 3 further explains what coming into the

light means: knowing God and Savior. William

Robinson, inPhillis Wheatley and Her Writings,

brings up the story that Wheatley remembered

of her African mother pouring out water in a

sunrise ritual. Susanna Wheatley, her mistress,

became a second mother to her, and Wheatley

adopted her mistress’s religion as her own, thus

winning praise in the Boston of her day as being

both an intelligent and spiritual being. The def-

inition ofpagan, as used in line 1, is thus chal-

lenged by Wheatley in a sense, as the poem

celebrates that the term does not denote a per-

manent category if a pagan individual can be

saved. Wheatley proudly offers herself as proof

of that miracle.

Importantly, she mentions that the act of

understanding God and Savior comes from the

soul. It is not mere doctrine or profession that

saves. By making religion a matter between God

and the individual soul, an Evangelical belief,

she removes the discussion from social opinion

or reference. At the same time, she touches on

the prejudice many Christians had that heathens

had no souls. She wants to inform her readers of

the opposite fact—and yet the wording of her

On Being Brought from Africa to America