The Black Radical Tradition in The Age of Phillis — The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)

Abstract

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) is the culmination of nearly fif-teen years of research on the eighteenth-century enslaved poetess Phillis Wheatley, who was manumitted in 1773 and married John Peters, a Boston grocer, five years later. In “Looking for Miss Phillis,” the essay that concludes this collection of ninety-nine in-dividually titled poems, Jeffers explains that she wrote this book because she got tired of waiting for someone to write a biography of Wheatley that discussed her “free lineage,” in-cluding the family, customs, and cosmologies that informed her life before enslavement.1 All existing biographies, including Vincent Carretta’s carefully researched Phillis Wheatley: Bi-ography of a Genius in Bondage (2011), begin their treatment of Wheatley “at the Boston Harbor in 1761, with her disembarking a slave ship” (174). And what of her marriage to John Peters? Jeffers asks why literary historians “have entrusted the story of Phillis Wheatley and John Peters to a white woman [Margaretta Matilda Odell] who may have made assumptions about Wheatley’s husband, assumptions that might not just be wrong, but also the product of racial stereotypes” (173). What if Wheatley wasn’t a “sycophant” (180)? What if John Peters wasn’t a “hustler” who abused and then abandoned Wheatley (180)? The extant archives do not support these depictions of Wheatley or Peters, and the only evidence of Odell’s authorial claim to being a “collateral descendant” of the white Wheatleys is her claim itself.