Biography tells the story of the poet who gave Houston’s Wheatley High School its name
Houston’s Phillis Wheatley High School celebrates its centennial in four years. As with many institutions with long histories, Wheatley High School became its own entity independent of its namesake. The school over the years educated a number of prominent Houstonians. Musical alumni include jazz greats like Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Hubert Laws and members of the Crusaders, including Joe Sample and Stix Hooper. Boxer George Foreman passed through Wheatley, as did several NFL stars. Notable elected officials from Wheatley include Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland.
But what of the woman whose name greets students when they arrive at the school?
Three years ago, poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers published an awardwinning collection of lovely and provocative poems that sought to reframe the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, a corrective to an unreliable and inaccurate biographical account written by Margaretta Matilda Odell nearly 200 years ago. Now Wheatley’s life and art are the subject of the book “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey Through American Slavery and Independence.” The scope of research and analysis provided by biographer David Waldstreicher matches the heaviness of his book’s subtitle.
Biographies of poets can veer into dry territory. Waldstreicher’s text feels like a series of narrative enjambments: Each page bleeds into the next with a tantalizing sense of discovery as the author pulls into better focus a short, brilliant life lived in an era of opaque conflict.
Early years
Wheatley’s first name came from the name of the slave ship that brought her to Boston from West Africa. The Wheatley family — John, Susanna and their teenage daughter Mary — purchased her in 1761 and gave the 8-year-old child the name Phillis. The Wheatley family noted Phillis making charcoal letters on the walls of their home. They taught her to read English. By 12 she was writing letters and verse.
From the outset, Waldstreicher covers the complicated confluence of influences that informed
her work in the Colonies as revolutionary fervor began to rise. “All three revivals — Greco-Roman, Protestant, British American — could, and did, challenge, and also justify African slavery,” he writes. “All three subcultures — religious, political and literary — could welcome her or shut her out. And indeed, all three did both, before and after her emancipation. That’s what cultures do in the harsh but clarifying light of politics. The arc of this history bends both toward and away from justice.”
Finding renown
Waldstreicher contextualizes Wheatley’s verse, which begins to find favor in Boston and London. She became the third woman and the first person of African descent in the Colonies to publish a book of poems. That her work and renown take place amid the American Revolution creates a complicated narrative, with strands about freedom, revolution and slavery forming a cultural knot.
Cast of characters
In addition to charting Wheatley’s development as a poet, Waldstreicher’s research also connects her to figures wellknown and obscure to create a less insular view of the poet, including Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman in Rhode Island, who Wheatley may have met onboard the “Phillis” and with whom she maintained a long correspondence. Correspondences with cleric Samson Occom and Gen. George Washington are also discussed.
Thomas Jefferson: not a fan
While Washington offered admiration for Wheatley’s work, Thomas Jefferson was among the most outspoken in his criticism, infamously writing: “Religion, in
deed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”
An incomplete story
Wheatley died at age 31 in 1784. Two of her children died before her, one shortly after. At the time of her death, her husband, John Peters, was in debtor’s prison. Upon his release, he tried to publish her second book, to no avail.
“Phillis Wheatley’s end and her ends are shadowed by the absence of the book we don’t have,” Waldstreicher writes, “a pile of manuscript lost somewhere
in a nation’s origins.” The book works through 13 “unattributed Wheatleyan poems” that the author includes in the appendix, leaving readers to “make up their own minds whether Wheatley wrote them and how much that matters.”
As much clarification and detail as he brings to Wheatley’s life and work, he admits to “the historian’s paradox: to remember, to discover, to revise the past is also to realize, always, how much we don’t know.”
Fittingly, the final chapter is not titled “The Afterlife” but rather “The Afterlives.”