How have institutions of racism and slavery contributed to shaping or warping the livelihoods of individuals? While our modern society has developed and continues to refine a language that refuses to interpret this history with terms from a European lexicon, language used in the Transatlantic Slave Trade served to dehumanize and deprecate the autonomy of slaves. This not only created a view that enslaved people were like objects, but also reinforced the unequal and one-sided power slave masters wielded over subjugated individuals.
I recently looked at a still image photograph titled “Sale in New York” uploaded by The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division into the NYPL’s digital collections. The image reads: “For Sale, A likely, healthy, young, NEGRO WENCH, Between fifteen and fixteen Years old: She has been ufed to the Farming Bufinefs. Sold for want of Employ- Enquire at No. 81, William-ftreet, New-York, March 30 1789.” While it’s unclear if this specific advertisement was posted in a newspaper clipping or another venue of publication, the language used here implicates an established slave auction system in New York in the year of 1789.
The young girl in the advertisement is either fifteen-sixteen, but is specifically described as a wench. The Oxford English Dictionary terms wench as “a girl of the rustic or working class” (Wench, n1) or “a female servant, maidservant, serving-maid” (Wench, n2). This phrasing informs the reader of her low class and social standing as well. However, the audience has no knowledge of this particular girl’s background, her family, date of birth, or even name. This specific narrative describes personhood, but in a way that has diminished this young female subject to object- specifically an object “for sale” so she can be employed for work.
I believe that pre-nineteenth century poet Phillis Wheatley combats this aforementioned “objecthood” in her work as a poet as she voices issues she encountered in her own personal experiences as a black slave. She was seized from West Africa and taken to Boston aboard the slave ship Phillis in 1761 (Wheatley 8). In “want of a domestic” in August 1761, Susanna Wheatley, wife of prominent Boston tailor John Wheatley, purchased a “frail female child…for a trifle” (Poetry Foundation). She was reported to be of “slender frame and evidently suffering from a change of climate,” nearly naked with “no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her.”
While Wheatley was brought to America twenty-eight years before the “Sale in New York” advertisement was released, I found myself juxtaposing the frail poet to the faceless, nameless girl in the ad. Perhaps the girl in the advertisement could have been just as sickly as Wheatley when she first arrived in America. More importantly, I found myself reflecting on Wheatley’s “On Being Brought From America,” and how it asked her audience to reconsider the lens through which black individuals and slaves were imagined.
“On Being Brought From America” does not illustrate a narrative. Rather, Wheatley spoke on ideas of Christianity, salvation, and history. The speaker in the poem is a slave brought from Africa to America by “mercy.” It is this mercy that converted the speaker to Christianity, which she had no knowledge of in Africa. However, the speaker refers to her soul as something that was once “benighted.” The OED describes benighted as something “overtaken by the darkness of the night” (Benighted, adj1) or “involved in intellectual or moral darkness” (Benighted, adj2). The speaker parallels her skin color and original state of ignorance and explains how Christianity was able to enlighten her. By learning “that there’s a God” and “there’s a Savior too,” Wheatley reminds her audience that although her kidnapping and subsequent voyage were at the hands of human beings, there is a force more powerful than they who was acted directly in her life (3).
In the next half of the poem, Wheatley addresses those who “view our sable race with scornful eye,” distancing her reader from an audience that fosters a more critical or negative view on those who are slaves (5). By doing so, she nudges the reader to a more positive view. Sable is desirable, contrasting greatly to the description of “diabolic die” (6). In the second to last line, the speaker groups together Christians and Negroes in a move that can both address Christians or include Christians in those who can be “refin’d” and “join the angelic train” (Wheatley 7-8). The last line of the poem implies that the angelic train will include both white and black individuals.
Wheatley ultimately addresses an audience who accepts and even promotes slavery, laying out an ultimatum to either join her, the black female Christian in her critique of the existing power structure, or to continue to foster beliefs in the current system. Her voice speaks not only to her contemporaries and those who live in her society, but carries on to address the same individuals who dehumanized the young girl in the advertisement.
Works Cited
Wheatley, Phillis. “On Being Brought From America.” Poetry Foundation. 1773. Web. 18 October 2018.
Wheatley, Phillis. Complete Writings. New York: Penguin Classics. 2001.
“Benighted, adj1.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1887. http://www.oed.com.lehman.ezproxy.cuny.edu/view/Entry/17727?isAdvanced=false&result=2&rskey=9Bb2J9&.
“Benighted, adj2.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1887. http://www.oed.com.lehman.ezproxy.cuny.edu/view/Entry/17727?isAdvanced=false&result=2&rskey=9Bb2J9&.
