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    The Age of Phillis
    The Age of Phillis
    The Age of Phillis
    Ebook284 pages2 hours

    The Age of Phillis

    By Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

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    About this ebook

    “An arresting and meticulously researched collection of poems” about the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first black woman to publish a book in America (Ms. Magazine).
     
    In 1773, a young African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley’s book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: This young woman was extraordinary. 

    Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood with her parents in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters, and her untimely death at the age of about thirty-three.

    Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley’s relationship to black people and their individual “mercies” is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 20, 2020
    ISBN9780819579515
    The Age of Phillis
    Author

    Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

    Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award. She teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.

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    • 5/5
      A very creative reimagining in poetry of the life of America's first important Black poet Phillis Wheatley who lived during the Revolutionary War period of American History. The author has done a great amount of research and has a twenty page discussion of what she found at the book's end. Her poems include little known facts such a she married a free Black man and gave birth to three children who died in infancy. I teach History and really learned a lot and got a greater appreciation for this wonderful American author.
    • 5/5
      I have read 9 of the 10 NBA 2020 longlisted books for poetry now--one I have been unable to get my hands on despite having 3 library cards. This is the book that should have won.

      This book is amazing. It is poetry, but it is also history and psychology and so many other things. Jeffers spent years and years researching the woman known as Phillis Wheatley Peters. She has read secondary work, she has read primary work, she has searched for extant letters, done census research, researched the earliest publications about her. So. Much. Work. This volume consists of Jeffers' own poems on topics in PWP's life--her capture and enslavement, childhood and religion, trips and freedom, marriage and friendships. Her writing, its publication, the people she met and knew well. She also includes poems on other African-Americans living in 18th-century New England. They were most definitely there, and I recognized many (but not all) of their names, and I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Jeffers explains her research and thought processes in prose the last section, Looking for Miss Phillis.

      This book did not even make the NBA shortlist, and frankly I don't get it. Perhaps they considered it too fact-based, too historical. As a historian, I loved it..

    Book preview

    The Age of Phillis - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

    The Age of PHILLIS

    WESLEYAN POETRY

    The Age of

    phillis

    HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS

    WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

    Middletown, Connecticut

    Wesleyan University Press

    Middletown CT 06459

    www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

    Copyright © 2020 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. All rights reserved.

    Manufactured in the United States of America.

    Designed by Richard Hendel

    Typeset in Galliard by Passumpsic Publishing

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    NAMES: Jeffers, Honorée Fanonee, 1967– author.

    TITLE: The age of Phillis / Honorée Fanonee Jeffers.

    DESCRIPTION: Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: A collection of original poems speaking to the life and times of Phillis Wheatley, a Colonial America-era poet brought to Boston as a slave—Provided by publisher.

    IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019040204 (print) | LCCN 2019040205 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819579492 (cloth) | ISBN 9780819579515 (ebook)

    SUBJECTS: LCSH: Wheatley, Phillis, 1753–1784—Poetry. | African American women authors—Poetry. | Women slaves—Massachusetts—Boston—Poetry. | Slavery—Massachusetts—History—18th century—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.

    CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3560.E365 A74 2020 (print) | LCC PS3560.E365 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040204

    LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040205

    5 4 3 2 1

    Excerpt from Genius Child is from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

    Excerpt from mulberry fields is from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 2004 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., boaeditions.org.

    Excerpt from Middle Passage. Copyright © 1962, 1966 by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

    Excerpt from Heritage. Copyright 1936 by Countee Cullen.

    Reprinted with permission of Amistad Research Center.

    Cover art by Sanuiah Q. James, 2014.

    for Phillis Wheatley Peters

    CONTENTS

    Prologue: Mother/Muse

    This is a song for the genius child.

    Sing it softly, for the song is wild.

    — Langston Hughes, from Genius Child

    AN ISSUE OF MERCY #1

    Mercy, girl.

    What the mother might have said, pointing

    at the sun rising, what makes life possible.

    Then, dripped the bowl of water,

    reverent, into oblivious earth.

    Was this prayer for her?

    Respect for the dead or disappeared?

    An act to please a genius child?

    Her daughter would speak

    of water, bowl, sun—

    light arriving,

    light gone—

    sometime after the nice white lady

    paid and named her for the slave ship.

    Mercy: what the child called Phillis

    would claim after that sea journey.

    Journey.

    Let’s call it that.

    Let’s lie to each other.

    Not early descent into madness.

    Naked travail among filth and rats.

    What got Phillis over that sea?

    What kept a stolen daughter?

    Perhaps it was mercy,

    Dear Reader.

    Mercy,

    Dear Brethren.

    Water, bowl, sun—

    a mothering, God’s milky sound.

    Morning shards, and a mother wondered

    if her daughter forgot her real name,

    refused to envision the rest:

    baby teeth missing

    and somebody wrapping her treasure

    (barely) in a dirty carpet.

    ’Twas mercy.

    You know the story—

    how we’ve lied to each other.

    Book: Before

    And pleasing Gambia on my soul returns,

    With native grace in Spring’s luxuriant reign,

    Smiles the gay mead and Eden blooms again,

    The various bower, the tuneful flowing stream,

    The soft retreats, the lovers golden dream …

    —  Phillis Wheatley, from PHILIS’S Reply to the Answer in our Last by the Gentleman in the Navy

    What is Africa to me:

    Copper sun or scarlet sea,

    Jungle star or jungle track,

    Strong bronzed men, or regal black

    Women from whose loins I sprang

    When the birds of Eden sang?

    — Countee Cullen, from Heritage

    THE SMELTING OF IRON IN WEST AFRICA

    c. Sometime in antiquity, date unknown

    Utilitarian—

    then,

    at some point,

    an embrace of beauty.

    A glow:

    the man waits,

    a picture in his head.

    He will claw

    out the dream’s

    tincture,

    pour it into mold—

    and in that dream,

    he has met

    the hyena laughing

    about chains. The man

    will pound metal

    to forget that

    grievous sound.

    He

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