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The course of this text originally didn’t seem like anything new for me, in the sense of taking history classes in the past and reading the materials and connecting them to the time period. This was not the case, I realized earlier in the quarter. I actually connected to the literature and felt more understanding of the time periods because of reading first person narrative and having mini history lessons connecting the text to the specific year and how events in history reflected in the stories being written. This was especially showcased in the presentations that we did in class that aided in visualizing the time periods these texts were taking place. Not only in the time period of the stories, but also the time periods in which they were being written and the influences of the author’s experiences in life reflected in their popular stories.

The different texts we read were a wide variety of cultures and really showcased the mood of the seventeenth century. I appreciated the order in which we read these texts over the course of  the quarter. Meaning, the African American narratives starting the class out with the themes of captivity and oppression of the era. Then, Brockdown Brown’s portrayal of Native Americans and societal pressures during the time period. Next, we read “The Female Marine” and Irving’s stories. I enjoyed reading “The Female Marine” with the background of reading Wheatley’s narrative during the same era. It was interesting to see two very different female struggles during the same time period, though my opinion shifted when I realized “The Female Marine” was written by a man. Washington Irving’s stories were a fun, and nostalgic, read that I thought would have gone well with reading “Edgar Huntly,” just because of the darker, almost supernatural themes in both texts. All of these texts connected in some obvious, and some not so obvious, ways. They all worked in unison to remind me of our nation’s past and the issues that are still pertinent to the nation today.

In this assignment, it was interesting to view connections to the texts outside of class and in our current era.  It was fascinating to see the influences of these texts on our current time period, as well as, issues that are talked about in these texts are still very much relevant today. This is apparent in the racism of African Americans and mistreatment of Native Americans that are still being discussed on the news. It’s very evident that even with these classic texts that are supposed to teach a lesson on the mistakes of the time we, as a collective, do not always recognize the lessons or learn from them. It’ll obviously take more than literature to fix these issues but how we display and talk about these rhetoric's impact our culture and how people and situations are viewed. To have all of these displayed in a blog, in such a simple manner, really outline that there are plenty of issues that are occurring currently that were occurring in the seventeenth century. I especially appreciated being reminded that though we have come a long way from the seventeenth century, we still have some of the same issues present currently, just in a different package.

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In class we discussed how the ending of Hope Leslie could be perceived as a happy ending for some characters. We touched on the ending for Magawisca being a bit of a grey area and hard to discern since the narrator is an unreliable, Caucasian voice. This blog helped clear up some aspects of the text that confused me. In the sense, of Magawisca being portrayed as "run" out of the settlement though it is rightfully the Native Americans land originally, and how this contributed to the Indian Removal Act years later.

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In another class, I had used this article to support an argument of women's roles in classic literature. While reading "Hope Leslie," this article popped in my head. The way Sedgwick portrays some of the female characters is controversial and close to being shallow in some areas. But, one relationship that was interesting to see in a classic novel like this was the love between Hope and Magawisca. Even though they both loved the same man, Everell, they were never pitted against each other by Sedgwick. The ending of Hope giving Magawisca the likeness of Everell was an even bigger step of how they weren't competing with each other.

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Image: Planning the Grand Tour / Emil Brack / Wikimedia Commons

Call me strange, but I find few things more satisfying than curling up in a cosy place with a good book, no matter the weather outside. And when it comes to my choice of reading material, I have a particular penchant for literature that's at least 50 years old, at the minimum.

Yet as much as I love Robinson Crusoe, Wuthering Heights and Treasure Island, we need to talk about something, kind of like how Victor Frankenstein needed to talk with Captain Walton about what he'd done.

We need to talk about women in classical lit.

I know, I know. In a world where blatant sexism and misogyny are more in-our-faces than ever before thanks to TV and the internet, it would seem old books would be far down on the list of things we need to have a discussion about. But alas, alack, fie, and - well, you get the idea - classical literature is far from glorious when it comes to the portrayal of female characters.

The reason we need to talk about how women are portrayed in classical literature is because of how early we're usually exposed to them. Think about it for a moment: how many of you studied classical works like Great Expectations or Tom Sawyer in school? Unfortunately, when I was in school, we never discussed the problems with the stereotypical "bitter old crone" portrayal of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, nor asked why Daisy was written to be so vapid in The Great Gatsby. While the position of women in English society was discussed in our analysis of Pride and Prejudice, we never had a conversation about how things have - and have not - changed since then. We were simply told "that was the way things were back then" - never talking about why it wasn't OK that women essentially had no status unless they were married to a man. Since they're analysed at young ages, the potential influence these books can have on our worldview - and how we see women - is enormous.

Of course, many works of classical literature were written by women. But that still doesn't mean it's not frustrating to see Jane in Jane Eyre pine for the rather despicable Mr. Rochester, or how Mary Shelley (despite being so kickass she wrote Frankenstein when she was 20) treats Frankenstein's fiancée (and briefly wife) Elizabeth when she's murdered by the monster - essentially, she only exists in the story for Frankenstein to fall in love with and then get killed (which causes him to then seek revenge).

The roots of the problem go back almost to the very beginnings of Western literature. Greek mythology is rife with blatant misogyny (not to mention countless tales of rapes and sexual assaults perpetrated by Zeus and various other gods). Athenian tragedies were performed exclusively by men, even when depicting female characters, and women were typically portrayed as weak, submissive and little more than accessories in men's lives. Female characters rarely spoke to one another, and when they did, it was almost always about men. The vast majority of such works would fail the Bechdel Test. Sophocles' Oedipus the King is especially horrible with its theme of incest, and how Jocasta hangs herself after realising the man she has married is her son.

Perhaps even worse is how women are shown in The Odyssey - almost every one of whom Odysseus either has sex with while they try to distract him from his quest to return home (like Circe or Calypso) or outright try to kill him (like the Sirens) amid an atmosphere of sexual tension with hardly any motivation whatsoever for the female characters; it wouldn't be a stretch to say the word "empowerment" is a rather foreign concept to Homer.

A few centuries later, one can easily argue that one of the biggest issues with Shakespeare is how women are depicted in some of his works. Romeo and Juliet, anyone? Yes, it's a tragedy - not the least of which is how Juliet's entire life revolves around a single man and how she measures her entire self-worth based upon how he feels about her. Some of Shakespeare's women admittedly are strong - like Olivia in Twelfth Night - but for every Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra there's a Gertrude in Hamlet.

It's been adapted into films countless times, and was one of my favourite books growing up, but Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is one of the most blatantly misogynistic works of the nineteenth century. Lucy Westenra is transformed from a helpless, innocent virgin into an evil whore by Dracula, and ultimately gets killed by the male protagonists after it's claimed there is no longer anything redeemable about her. Mina Harker also appears to have little agency of her own, and is constantly being rescued from Dracula by men. Other than rejecting marriage proposals by other men, the women make virtually no decisions of their own. The other women we do get to know briefly - Dracula's three "brides" - are also depicted as wanton succubi, appearing at moments of sexual tension (such as when Jonathan Harker first encounters them one night at Dracula's castle, when he describes kissing one of them as she "arches her back").

The question readers have to ask is, why are women being depicted in such a ridiculous way? Why can't they make decisions of their own or, better yet, be seen as equals to men? Aren't women more than just sex objects?

All too often in classical literature, women are depicted as sirens, whores, virgins, idiots or other ridiculous - and outright offensive - stereotypes. Personal agency is a rarity for such characters, and even when they do have it, there is almost always a romantic motivation. For the writers from these bygone eras, it's almost as if having a vagina means characters are incapable of making their own destiny without a man.

Even classical science fiction - which almost by definition imagines a possible future - has its issues. It's interesting that in Aldous Huxley's 1931 work Brave New World, though set in a future society where race and gender have ostensibly been transcended (at least for those that choose to live in the society, the "savages" excluded), the female characters like Lenina serve as little more than the objects of romantic affection for characters like John. She is also depicted as incredibly "ditzy," despite allegedly being from one of the more "gifted" classes of society.

Works of fantasy are not exempted, either. Beloved as it is, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is problematic for the way it depicts women with any degree of authority. The White Witch is an evil queen who wants to rule Narnia purely for the sake of ruling (empathy? She has none of that), and given the fact the entire book is an allegory about Jesus Christ (Aslan the lion is of course merely a thinly veiled version of Christ, what with his being killed by the White Witch and rising from the dead and all), it's disturbing that women would be portrayed as the source of evil as Lewis depicts it. Oh, and the two female protagonists - Lucy and Susan - constantly follow after their brothers Edmund and Peter. The 2005 film version (which was shot in New Zealand) depicts things differently, but in the book they are mostly relegated to "support" roles when it comes time for the climactic battle against the White Witch's army, tending to the wounded as nurses rather than fighting like their brothers. It's not exactly empowering.

None of this admittedly rather lengthy diatribe means it's wrong to read classical literature, of course. After all, they're considered "classical" for a reason, and have stood the test of time to be considered of great cultural merit. But no book is "perfect," and we still need to question what it is we're reading and how we might be influenced by it and what the book is saying. Indeed, isn't questioning things one of the primary reasons why we read?

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We need to talk about women in classical literature

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Image: Planning the Grand Tour / Emil Brack / Wikimedia Commons Call me strange, but I find few things more satisfying than curling up in a cosy place with a good book, no matter the weather outside. And when it comes to my choice of reading material, I have a particular penchant for literature that's at least 50 years old, at the minimum.

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This article provided interesting background information on the history of why this theme of isolation and epidemics was in Irving's work. It was also interesting to learn that this was "America's first ghost story" and that it was published and popular before Halloween was widely celebrated in America.

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Washington Irving fled New York because of a yellow fever epidemic. Twenty-two years later, his classic story spoke to the chaos of his youth

smithsonian.com

A mysterious plague with no known cause. An indiscriminate infection that holds a community captive. Sound familiar? It did to Washington Irving, too. Irving, a native New Yorker, made his first trip up the Hudson River to Tarrytown in 1798, at age 15.

At that time, New York City was in the grip of its tenth epidemic of yellow fever, a viral disease that killed 5,000 residents of Philadelphia in a single year and was on track to do as much cumulative damage in New York. Yellow fever, which is spread by mosquitoes, was poorly understood at the turn of the 19th century. Medical professionals speculated that it was caused by slum conditions in city centers (including landfill and stagnant water-this was closest to the mark). They blamed West Indian refugees and shipments of rotten coffee. They even pointed the finger at the luggage of foreign sailors. The epidemics exacerbated post-colonial racial prejudice and encouraged xenophobia; Philadelphia built the nation's first quarantine station in response to a 1793 outbreak.

Yellow fever threw a bright light on economic inequality in the affected cities: families with the means to do so, like Irving's, fled the "miasmic" urban environment for more healthful climates. Families that could not afford to seek "pure air" suffered not only from the virus, but from the terror of their neighbors: infected neighborhoods were marked with yellow flags or roped off, and few doctors were willing to treat the disease, the symptoms of which included the kind of bleeding and vomiting best left to horror films.

These were the conditions that brought a teenage Irving to Tarrytown, in Westchester County, to stay with his friend James Kirke Paulding. The young writer, as Brian Jay Jones notes in his biography, was smitten by both the pastoral tranquility of the Hudson Valley region, and its less-than-tranquil ghost stories. And it was here that Irving supposedly first heard the rumor of a headless Hessian buried near the Old Dutch Church, who "rode forth to the scenes of battle in nightly quest of his head," as he would later write in his most famous tale, " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In truth, the ancestry of Irving's Headless Horseman is not so easily traced-Sir Walter Scott deserves some credit for the hellish equestrian, too-but knowledgeable readers can find Irving's own youthful experience of plague written upon every "bewitched" surface of the fictional village of Sleepy Hollow. (The real-world town of North Tarrytown renamed itself "Sleepy Hollow" in honor of Irving's story in 1999.)

In the nearly 200 years since Washington Irving published his most famous tale, the name of the imaginary hamlet has become synonymous with Halloween. At first glance, this conflation makes perfect sense: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," published in 1820, was America's first ghost story, and the Headless Horseman, everyone's favorite pumpkin-brandishing decapitate, was decidedly the new nation's first ghost. But Irving's spooky story of the ill-fated Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane never actually mentions Halloween-for the simple reason that the holiday was not yet celebrated widely in the United States, and would not be for nearly a century more.

Why does " The Legend of Sleepy Hollow " remain the original American fright-fest, inspiring interpretations and homages from Disney and Tim Burton to Kanye West to FOX? The answer has less to do with pumpkins or decapitated soldiers-and everything to do with Irving's language of pestilence.

The story's narrator, a Dutch historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker, describes the "sequestered glen" of Sleepy Hollow as a place with "contagion in the very air... it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land." Natives and newcomers alike were susceptible to this airborne infection, which caused them "to walk in a continual reverie." Their somnambulance is "unconsciously imbibed by anyone who resides there for a time...however wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region[.]"

Ichabod Crane, who is himself a "newcomer," is described as being far and away the most afflicted by this "visionary propensity"; he is addicted to scary stories and trades anecdotes out of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft for the haunted local histories told by his Dutch hosts. The "pleasure in all this," the narrator Knickerbocker warns, "...was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards."

In Irving's Sleepy Hollow the Dutch community can "vegetate," to use Knickerbocker's word-or better still, incubate-nurturing its visions and "twilight superstitions" without the interference of history. The town's collective sickness has made it into a time capsule-each day, nothing changes; each night, the Horseman comes. But the ending of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" offers a kind of vaccination : a way to leave contagion behind - and superstition, too. After attempting to court a local heiress, unlucky Ichabod is chased down by the headless Hessian (or believes he is), and vanishes in the night, leaving only his horse and a smashed pumpkin behind.

The residents of Sleepy Hollow are convinced that the Horseman has made off with Crane's head, but the narrator offers another possibility: that Crane may not, in fact, have perished by pumpkin, but instead recovered from his visions sufficiently to leave town under his own steam and take up work elsewhere as a "Justice of the Ten Pound Court". The appealing ambiguity of this ending is often lost on those who adapt the story for movies, television or other media. It's more cinematically satisfying to see the Horseman as the culprit behind Crane's disappearance; "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" depends on its famous villain, after all. In truth, it's not the Horseman or the hoax that we should fear, but the contagion that grips Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod's flight, far from being an act of cowardice, gave him back his life.

Just underneath the ghostly narrative that so many Americans know and love, a darker, an infinitely scarier story is being told, beside which the fear of a "goblin trooper" pales in comparison. If we read a little more carefully, we'll find a history lesson embedded in the Halloween tale, a reminder to contemporary readers that the pathologies of the past were just as terrifying as our own modern plagues-and just as cloaked in mystery and misunderstanding.

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What "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Tells Us About Contagion, Fear and Epidemics

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smithsonian.com A mysterious plague with no known cause. An indiscriminate infection that holds a community captive. Sound familiar? It did to Washington Irving, too. Irving, a native New Yorker, made his first trip up the Hudson River to Tarrytown in 1798, at age 15.

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While reading "The Female Marine," I couldn't help but see the parallels with the story of Mulan in Chinese culture. In Mulan, she joins the army in the place of her father and finds more opportunities to honor her family and build status for herself. Similar to Lucy and how she was able to leave prostitution and settle down respectably again. Specifically, the scene on page 71, when Lucy is first trying to pass as a man and her confidence only grows once she is acknowledged with a 'yes, sir' in the street. This scene reminded me of when Mulan first enters the army camp, and creates a whole situation only to regain her confidence when she is accepted as one of the guys.

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In class Tuesday, we discussed how doubles can function in literature and film (Get Out). Tonight I watched a Netflix original with Paul Rudd "Living with Yourself." In this film Rudd's character extracts his bad qualities and believed that he was cured from his bad traits, but it turned out that it just created another version of himself with everything he disliked about himself. I thought this went hand in hand with our conversation of how Clitherio is a double for Edgar and how Edgar has so much sympathy for Clitherio might be because he recognizes his own bad traits in him.

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Phillis Wheatley: The First Black Poet in America

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Phillis Wheatley: The First Black Poet in America

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I decided I wanted to know more of the story of Phillis Wheatley. In doing so I discovered that she is the first black poet in America. This article by June Jordan was published in 2002 and emphasizes what a miracle Wheatley was to her race and to the world. This article might be a little old to reference for this assignment but it opened my eyes to her poetry in a way that didn't happen in class. "Her husband, John Peters, advertised and begged that the manuscript of her poems she had given to someone, please be returned. But no one returned them." The hardships that she faced in her era despite her brilliance and better circumstances breaks my heart. It gives a new depth and irony to her poetry that calls for Christians to renounce their hate of Africans.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-privileged-and-impoverished-life-of-phillis-wheatley/
this link connects a more updated reference of Phillis Wheatley connection to the main character in Jordan Peele's "Get Out" that came out in 2018.

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It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery. Come to a country to be docile and dumb, to be big and breeding, easily, to be turkey/horse/cow, to be cook/carpenter/plow, to be 5'6" 140 lbs., in good condition and answering to the name of Tom or Mary: to be bed bait: to be legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master's son/the master's overseer/the master's visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in your heart: to live forcibly illiterate, forcibly itinerant: to live eyes lowered head bowed: to be worked without rest, to be worked without pay, to be worked without thanks, to be worked day up to nightfall: to be three-fifths of a human being at best: to be this valuable/this hated thing among strangers who purchased your life and then cursed it unceasingly: to be a slave: to be a slave. Come to this country a slave and how should you sing? After the flogging the lynch rope the general terror and weariness what should you know of a lyrical life? How could you, belonging to no one, but property to those despising the smiles of your soul, how could you dare to create yourself: a poet?

A poet can read. A poet can write.

A poet is African in Africa, or Irish in Ireland, or French on the left bank of Paris, or white in Wisconsin. A poet writes in her own language. A poet writes of her own people, her own history, her own vision, her own room, her own house where she sits at her own table quietly placing one word after another word until she builds a line and a movement and an image and a meaning that somersaults all of these into the singing, the absolutely individual voice of the poet: at liberty. A poet is somebody free. A poet is someone at home.

How should there be Black poets in America?

It was not natural. And she was the first. It was 1761-so far back before the revolution that produced these United States, so far back before the concept of freedom disturbed the insolent crimes of this continent-in 1761, when seven year old Phillis stood, as she must, when she stood nearly naked, as small as a seven year old, by herself, standing on land at last, at last after the long, annihilating horrors of the Middle Passage. Phillis, standing on the auctioneer's rude platform: Phillis For Sale.

Was it a nice day?

Does it matter? Should she muse on the sky or remember the sea? Until then Phillis had been somebody's child. Now she was about to become somebody's slave.

Suzannah and John Wheatley finished their breakfast and ordered the carriage brought 'round. They would ride to the auction. This would be an important outing. They planned to buy yet another human being to help with the happiness of the comfortable life in Boston. You don't buy a human being, you don't purchase a slave, without thinking ahead. So they had planned this excursion. They were dressed for the occasion, and excited, probably. And experienced, certainly. The Wheatleys already owned several slaves. They had done this before; the transaction would not startle or confound or embarrass or appall either one of them.

Was it a nice day?

When the Wheatleys arrived at the auction they greeted their neighbors, they enjoyed this business of mingling with other townsfolk politely shifting about the platform, politely adjusting positions for gain of a better view of the bodies for sale. The Wheatleys were good people. They were kind people. They were openminded and thoughtful. They looked at the bodies for sale. They looked and they looked. This one could be useful for that. That one might be useful for this. But then they looked at that child, that Black child standing nearly naked, by herself. Seven or eight years old, at the most, and frail. Now that was a different proposal! Not a strong body, not a grown set of shoulders, not a promising wide set of hips, but a little body, a delicate body, a young, surely terrified face! John Wheatley agreed to the whim of his wife, Suzannah. He put in his bid. He put down his cash. He called out the numbers. He competed successfully. He had a good time. He got what he wanted. He purchased yet another slave. He bought that Black girl standing on the platform, nearly naked. He gave this new slave to his wife and Suzannah Wheatley was delighted. She and her husband went home. They rode there by carriage. They took that new slave with them. An old slave commanded the horses that pulled the carriage that carried the Wheatleys home, along with the new slave, that little girl they named Phillis.

Why did they give her that name?

Was it a nice day?

Does it matter?

It was not natural. And she was the first: Phillis Miracle: Phillis Miracle Wheatley: the first Black human being to be published in America. She was the second female to be published in America.

And the miracle begins in Africa. It was there that a bitterly anonymous man and a woman conjoined to create this genius, this lost child of such prodigious aptitude and such beguiling attributes that she very soon interposed the reality of her particular, dear life between the Wheatleys' notions about slaves and the predictable outcome of such usual blasphemies against Black human beings.

Seven year old Phillis changed the slaveholding Wheatleys. She altered their minds. She entered their hearts. She made them see her and when they truly saw her, Phillis, darkly amazing them with the sweetness of her spirit and the alacrity of her forbidden, strange intelligence, they, in their own way, loved her as a prodigy, as a girl mysterious but godly.

Sixteen months after her entry into the Wheatley household Phillis was talking the language of her owners. Phillis was fluently reading the Scriptures. At eight and a half years of age, this Black child, or "Africa's Muse," as she would later describe herself, was fully literate in the language of this slaveholding land. She was competent and eagerly asking for more: more books, more and more information. And Suzannah Wheatley loved this child of her whimsical good luck. It pleased her to teach and to train and to tutor this Black girl, this Black darling of God. And so Phillis delved into kitchen studies commensurate, finally, to a classical education available to young white men at Harvard.

She was nine years old.

What did she read? What did she memorize? What did the Wheatleys give to this African child? Of course, it was white, all of it: white. It was English, most of it, from England. It was written, all of it, by white men taking their pleasure, their walks, their pipes, their pens and their paper, rather seriously, while somebody else cleaned the house, washed the clothes, cooked the food, watched the children: probably not slaves, but possibly a servant, or, commonly, a wife. It was written, this white man's literature of England, while somebody else did the other things that have to be done. And that was the literature absorbed by the slave, Phillis Wheatley. That was the writing, the thoughts, the nostalgia, the lust, the conceits, the ambitions, the mannerisms, the games, the illusions, the discoveries, the filth and the flowers that filled up the mind of the African child.

At fourteen, Phillis published her first poem, "To the University of Cambridge": not a brief limerick or desultory teenager's verse, but thirty-two lines of blank verse telling those fellows what for and whereas, according to their own strict Christian codes of behavior. It is in that poem that Phillis describes the miracle of her own Black poetry in America:

While an intrinsic ardor bids me write
the muse doth promise to assist my pen

She says that her poetry results from "an intrinsic ardor," not to dismiss the extraordinary kindness of the Wheatleys, and not to diminish the wealth of white men's literature with which she found herself quite saturated, but it was none of these extrinsic factors that compelled the labors of her poetry. It was she who created herself a poet, notwithstanding and in despite of everything around her.

Two years later, Phillis Wheatley, at the age of sixteen, had composed three additional, noteworthy poems. This is one of them, "On Being Brought from Africa to America":

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,
"Their color is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join the angelic train.

Where did Phillis get these ideas?

It's simple enough to track the nonsense about herself "benighted": benighted means surrounded and preyed upon by darkness. That clearly reverses what had happened to that African child, surrounded by and captured by the greed of white men. Nor should we find puzzling her depiction of Africa as "Pagan" versus somewhere "refined." Even her bizarre interpretation of slavery's theft of Black life as a merciful rescue should not bewilder anyone. These are regular kinds of iniquitous nonsense found in white literature, the literature that Phillis Wheatley assimilated, with no choice in the matter.

But here, in this surprising poem, this first Black poet presents us with something wholly her own, something entirely new. It is her matter of fact assertion that, "Once I redemption neither sought nor knew," as in: once I existed beyond and without these terms under consideration. Once I existed on other than your terms. And, she says, but since we are talking your talk about good and evil/redemption and damnation, let me tell you something you had better understand. I am Black as Cain and I may very well be an angel of the Lord. Take care not to offend the Lord!

Where did that thought come to Phillis Wheatley?

Was it a nice day?

Does it matter?

Following her "intrinsic ardor," and attuned to the core of her own person, this girl, the first Black poet in America, had dared to redefine herself from house slave to, possibly, an angel of the Almighty.

She was making herself at home.

And, depending whether you estimated that nearly naked Black girl on the auction block to be seven or eight years old, in 1761, by the time she was eighteen or nineteen, she had published her first book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral. It was published in London, in 1773, and the American edition appeared, years later, in 1786. Here are some examples from the poems of Phillis Wheatley:

From "On the Death of Rev. Dr. Sewell":

Come let us all behold with wishful eyes
The saint ascending to his native skies.

From "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield":

Take him, ye Africans, he longs for you,
Impartial Savior is his title due,
Washed in the fountain of redeeming blood,
You shall be sons and kings, and priest to God.

Here is an especially graceful and musical couplet, penned by the first Black poet in America:

But, see the softly stealing tears apace,
Pursue each other down the mourner's face;

This is an especially awful, virtually absurd set of lines by Ms. Wheatley:

"Go Thebons! Great nations will obey
And pious tribute to her altars pay:
With rights divine, the goddess be implor'd,
Nor be her sacred offspring nor ador'd."
Thus Manto spoke. The Thebon maids obey,
And pious tribute to the goddess pay.

Awful, yes. Virtually absurd; well, yes, except, consider what it took for that young African to undertake such personal abstraction and mythologies a million million miles remote from her own ancestry, and her own darkly formulating face! Consider what might meet her laborings, as poet, should she, instead, invent a vernacular precise to Senegal, precise to slavery, and, therefore, accurate to the secret wishings of her lost and secret heart?

If she, this genius teenager, should, instead of writing verse to comfort a white man upon the death of his wife, or a white woman upon the death of her husband, or verse commemorating weirdly fabled white characters bereft of children diabolically dispersed; if she, instead composed a poetry to speak her pain, to say her grief, to find her parents, or to stir her people into insurrection, what would we now know about God's darling girl, that Phillis?

Who would publish that poetry, then?

But Phillis Miracle, she managed, nonetheless, to write, sometimes, towards the personal truth of her experience.

For example, we find in a monumental poem entitled "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," these five provocative lines, confirming every suspicion that most of the published Phillis Wheatley represents a meager portion of her concerns and inclinations:

As reason's pow'rs by day our God disclose,
So we may trace him in the night's repose.
Say what is sleep? And dreams how passing strange!
When action ceases, and ideas range
Licentious and unbounded o'er the plains.

And, concluding this long work, there are these lines:

Infinite love, whene'er we turn our eyes
Appears: this ev'ry creature's wants supplies
This most is heard in Nature's constant voice,
This makes the morn, and this the eve rejoice,
This bids the fost'ring rains and dews descend,
To nourish all, to serve one gen'ral end,
The good of man: Yet man ungrateful pays
But little homage, and but little praise.

Now and again and again these surviving works of the genius Phillis Wheatley veer incisive and unmistakable, completely away from the verse of good girl Phillis ever compassionate upon the death of someone else's beloved, pious Phillis modestly enraptured by the glorious trials of virtue on the road to Christ, arcane Phillis intent upon an "Ode to Neptune," or patriotic Phillis penning an encomium to General George Washington ("Thee, first in peace and honor"). Then do we find that "Ethiop," as she once called herself, that "Africa's muse," knowledgeable, but succinct, on "dreams how passing strange!/When action ceases, and ideas range/Licentious and unbounded o'er the plains."

Phillis Licentious Wheatley?

Phillis Miracle Wheatley in contemplation of love and want of love?

Was it a nice day?

It was not natural. And she was the first.

Repeatedly singing for liberty, singing against the tyrannical, repeatedly avid in her trusting support of the American Revolution (how could men want freedom enough to die for it but then want slavery enough to die for that?) repeatedly lifting witness to the righteous and the kindly factors of her days, this was no ordinary teenaged poet, male or female, Black or white. Indeed, the insistently concrete content of her tribute to the revolutionaries who would forge America, an independent nation state, indeed the specific daily substance of her poetry establishes Phillis Wheatley as the first decidedly American poet on this continent, Black or white, male or female.

Nor did she only love the ones who purchased her, a slave, those ones who loved her, yes, but with astonishment. Her lifelong friend was a young Black woman, Obour Tanner, who lived in Newport, Rhode Island, and one of her few poems dedicated to a living person, neither morbid nor ethereal, was written to the young Black visual artist Scipio Moorhead, himself a slave. It is he who crafted the portrait of Phillis that serves as her frontispiece profile in her book of poems. Here are the opening lines from her poem, "To S.M., A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works."

To show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint.
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wondrous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid thy pencil, and thy verse conspire!
And many the charms of each seraphic theme
Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!

Remember that the poet so generously addressing the "wondrous youth" is certainly no older than eighteen, herself) And this, years before the American Revolution, and how many many years before the 1960s! This is the first Black poet of America addressing her Brother Artist not as so-and-so's Boy, but as "Scipio Moorhead, A Young African Painter."

Where did Phillis Miracle acquire this consciousness?

Was it a nice day?

It was not natural. And she was the first.

But did she-we may persevere, critical from the ease of the 1980s-did she love, did she need, freedom?

In the poem (typically titled at such length and in such deferential rectitude as to discourage most readers from scanning what follows), in the poem titled "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, etc.," Phillis Miracle has written these irresistible, authentic, felt lines:

No more America in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt Thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton tyranny with lawless head
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
Should you, my Lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel of fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat.
What pangs excruciating must molest
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seized his babe belov'd
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

So did the darling girl of God compose her thoughts, prior to 1776.

And then.

And then her poetry, these poems, were published in London.

And then, during her twenty-first year, Suzannah Wheatley, the white woman slaveholder who had been changed into the white mother, the white mentor, the white protector of Phillis, died.

Without that white indulgence, that white love, without that white sponsorship, what happened to the young African daughter, the young African poet?

No one knows for sure.

With the death of Mrs. Wheatley, Phillis came of age, a Black slave in America.

Where did she live?

How did she eat?

No one knows for sure.

But four years later she met and married a Black man, John Peters. Mr. Peters apparently thought well of himself, and of his people. He comported himself with dignity, studied law, argued for the liberation of Black people, and earned the everyday dislike of white folks. His wife bore him three children; all of them died.

His wife continued to be Phillis Miracle.

His wife continued to obey the "intrinsic ardor" of her calling and she never ceased the practice of her poetry. She hoped, in fact, to publish a second volume of her verse.

This would be the poetry of Phillis the lover of John, Phillis the woman, Phillis the wife of a Black man pragmatically premature in his defiant self-respect, Phillis giving birth to three children, Phillis, the mother, who must bury the three children she delivered into American life.

None of these poems was ever published.

This would have been the poetry of someone who had chosen herself, free, and brave to be free in a land of slavery.

When she was thirty-one years old, in 1784, Phillis Wheatley, the first Black poet in America, she died.

Her husband, John Peters, advertised and begged that the manuscript of her poems she had given to someone, please be returned. But no one returned them.

And I believe we would not have seen them, anyway. I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man. I believe that the death of Suzannah Wheatley, coincident with the African poet's twenty-first birthday, signalled, decisively, the end of her status as a child, as a dependent. From there we would hear from an independent Black woman poet in America.

Can you imagine that, in 1775?

Can you imagine that, today?

America has long been tolerant of Black children, compared to its reception of independent Black men and Black women.

She died in 1784.

Was it a nice day?

It was not natural. And she was the first.

Last week, as the final judge for this year's Loft McKnight Awards in creative writing, awards distributed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I read through sixteen manuscripts of rather fine poetry.

These are the terms, the lexical items, that I encountered there:

Rock, moon, star, roses, chimney, Prague, elms, lilac, railroad tracks, lake, lilies, snow geese, crow, mountain, arrow feathers, ear of corn, marsh, sandstone, rabbit-bush, gulley, pumpkins, eagle, tundra, dwarf willow, dipper-bird, brown creek, lizards, sycamores, glacier, canteen, skate eggs, birch, spruce, pumphandle

Is anything about that listing odd? I didn't suppose so. These are the terms, the lexical items accurate to the specific white Minnesota daily life of those white poets.

And so I did not reject these poems, I did not despise them saying, "How is this possible? Sixteen different manuscripts of poetry written in 1985 and not one of them uses the terms of my own Black life! Not one of them writes about the police murder of Eleanor Bumpurs or the Bernard Goetz shooting of four Black boys or apartheid in South Africa, or unemployment, or famine in Ethiopia, or rape, or fire escapes, or cruise missiles in the New York harbor, or medicare, or alleyways, or napalm, or $4.00 an hour, and no time off for lunch.

I did not and I would not presume to impose my urgencies upon white poets writing in America. But the miracle of Black poetry in America, the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as "political" or "topical" or "sloganeering" and "crude" and 'insignificant" because, like Phillis Wheatley, we have persisted for freedom. We will write against South Africa and we will seldom pen a poem about wild geese flying over Prague, or grizzlies at the rain barrel under the dwarf willow trees. We will write, published or not, however we may, like Phillis Wheatley, of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we "neither sought nor knew," as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

But not otherwise. And yet we persist.

And it was not natural. And she was the first.

This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

And this is: "Something Like A Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley": -

Girl from the realm of birds florid and fleet
flying full feather in far or near weather
Who fell to a dollar lust coffled like meat
Captured by avarice and hate spit together
Trembling asthmatic alone on the slave block
built by a savagery travelling by carriage
viewed like a species of flaw in the livestock
A child without safety of mother or marriage
Chosen by whimsy but born to surprise
They taught you to read but you learned how to write
Begging the universe into your eyes:
They dressed you in light but you dreamed
with the night.
From Africa singing of justice and grace,
Your early verse sweetens the fame of our Race.

And because we Black people in North America persist in an irony profound, Black poetry persists in this way:

Like the trees of winter and
like the snow which has no power
makes very little sound
but comes and collects itself
edible light on the black trees
The tall black trees of winter
lifting up a poetry of snow
so that we may be astounded
by the poems of Black
trees inside a cold environment

From the book Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays by June Jordan. Copyright 2002 by June Jordan. Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Civitas Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved.

One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental...

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The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America by June Jordan

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It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery.

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https://www.vox.com/2015/4/1/8326315/media-bias-black-mughsots
I think this has already been commented on in today’s society of the media depicting people of color as not as professional or not being  “painted in a good light.” For example, in the link above, the case of three white people being arrested for burglary vs. four other people of color being arrested for the same crime in the same day being depicted in vastly different ways. The four people of color have their mugshots displayed while the other three criminals are depicted with their student headshots. This was brought to my mind when we were discussing the different depictations of African Americans during the slavery period and how it solidified the nations view of them as “savages.” Recently, the case of Amber Guyger has been showcased in the media and has received praise for the depiction as Amber, an ex-cop, with a mugshot and Botham Jean being showcased as a “normal” man.

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A US former police officer who shot dead her neighbour inside his own apartment in Dallas has been found guilty of murder.

Amber Guyger, 31, argued she killed Botham Jean, 26, after mistakenly thinking she was in her own flat and that he was an intruder.

The verdict comes after a tense seven-day trial in which Guyger admitted: "I shot an innocent man."

The four-year police veteran is facing a possible life sentence in prison.

Cheers broke out as the verdict was announced. Guyger slumped down at the defence table and wept.

Victim was eating ice cream when he was shot

Guyger's lawyers argued she was distracted by sexually suggestive texts with another police officer and had just completed a nearly 14 hour shift when she made "a series of horrible mistakes" on the night of 6 September 2018.

Prosecutors accused her of bursting into Jean's apartment "commando-style" and firing at him while he was eating a bowl of ice cream on his sofa.

Police 'trying to smear' shooting victim

US police shootings: How many die each year?

Assistant District Attorney Jason Fine called her testimony "garbage" and said her actions were "not a mistake".

During the trial, the Texas Ranger who led the investigation testified it was common for residents at the complex where both Jean and Guyger lived to accidentally attempt to enter the wrong flat due to the building's design.

Guyger testified that she found the door unlocked, and noticed it open slightly when she pushed her key into what she said she thought was her apartment.

Prosecutors said the off-duty police officer failed to recognise signs, such as Jean's distinctive red door mat, that she was standing outside the wrong flat.

'The tide is going to change'

"This is a victory for black people in America," said civil rights lawyer Lee Merritt after the verdict was read.

"It's a signal that the tide is going to change here. Police officers are going to be held accountable for their actions and we believe that will begin to change policing culture all over the world."

"This should have been automatic. This should have been anticipated, expected", he continued, describing cases of police officers being punished for shooting unarmed black men such as Jean, as "rare".

The shooting sparked protests as community members feared that Guyger would not be held accountable.

She was initially arrested several days after the killing and charged with manslaughter before being released from jail that same day.

After weeks of tensions, she was eventually arrested and charged with murder.

Botham Jean, a native of St Lucia, worked as an accountant at Pricewaterhouse Cooper at the time of his death.

Former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings was among those to praise Jean after his death, calling him "a model citizen".

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US ex-cop who killed neighbour convicted of murder

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A US former police officer who shot dead her neighbour inside his own apartment in Dallas has been found guilty of murder. Amber Guyger, 31, argued she killed Botham Jean, 26, after mistakenly thinking she was in her own flat and that he was an intruder.