AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

POETRY OFF THE SHELF: PHILLIS REIMAGINED

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, “Phillis Reimagined.” Honorée Fanonne Jeffers spent the past 15 years working on a book about Phillis Wheatley, titled The Age of Phillis. The book is a hard one to describe. One the one hand, it’s deeply rooted in historical research—there’s even a bibliography at the end—but then on the other, it’s a poetry collection and ventures into all the territory a history book could never go. For instance, Phillis Wheatley’s childhood memories from The Gambia or her feelings about the people who owned her. Best I can describe the book is as a work of historical summoning. I talked to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers at the end of February, when we could still go to recording studios and I was asking her a bunch of random questions while I was figuring out the sound.

Helena de Groot: Honorée, could you tell me what the weather is like in Oklahoma City?

Honorée Jeffers: Cloudy. We have a saying here in Oklahoma, if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes and it’ll change.

Helena de Groot: That morning, before coming into the studio, she’d found two things on her doorstep: the book she’d spent a quarter of her life on and the dress she was going to wear in early to the big writers’ conference, AWP in early March. She didn’t end up going to the conference and about 2 weeks later, no one was going anywhere. Here’s our conversation from before all that about The Age of Phillis.     

Helena de Groot: So, before we dive in, you know, I wanted to just tell you that what I thought was so incredible about the book is that you weave this whole world around Phillis Wheatley. From the first-time iron was smelted in Africa, that would then serve later to make chains. There's a poem on the 18th century sugar industry. There is a poem on slavery in the Bible. And then, most shockingly, I mean, to me, I didn't know this stuff, there are quotes from these celebrated thinkers and politicians of the time, for instance, Thomas Jefferson, who says "religion indeed has produced a Phillis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism." And then there is Immanuel Kant, who writes in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, only a few years, I think, after Phillis Wheatley arrives in Boston, "the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling." Why did you decide to tell the story this way?

Honorée Jeffers: Well, Henry Louis Gates Jr. published a book called The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. And he was the one that talked about the Enlightenment thinkers: Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson and how Phillis Wheatley's presence as a literate black person—black woman—someone who was writing poetry, that that challenged Enlightenment thinkers who are basically the fathers of contemporary American racism.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Honorée Jeffers: And that’s actually what started me on this journey. And so, when I read the book by Henry Louis Gates, I realized how extraordinary she was, and very many people have this one poem by her that, you know, “’Twas Mercy Brought Me From my Pagan Land,” and that's what most people know. But they don't know what that meant in terms of the slave trade. They don't know how people were viewing black folks. And that's why I tell people, you have to take her in the context of a time when people were measuring the skulls of Africans and comparing them to orangutans. You've got to think about women's lives back then. You've got to think about the slave trade. You've got to think about children being taken away from their parents, the way that we are taking children away from their parents right now on the borders. You've got to think about all of that when you think about Phillis Wheatley.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And so, I realized very early on, and it was very daunting to me, that I was going to have to tell the entire story. And that her story is the African American story writ large. But if I had known that it was going to take me 15 years (LAUGHS), I wouldn't have done it. Because I'm real tired now.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I’m so glad you did, though. Well, let's move on to Phillis. Most biographers don't even go there but you tried to go as far back as you possibly could, starting before her arrival in Boston. And you learned Wolof, right? The language of Gambia and Senegal and Mauritania.

Honorée Jeffers: I haven't learned-learned it. I have a rudimentary vocabulary. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay. Okay. I won't overstate it then.

Honorée Jeffers: Right, please don’t!

Helena de Groot: Can you just tell me how you got that idea and how you went about it and what was that like?

Honorée Jeffers: Well, the way that I first encountered Wolof was, I went to Senegal to do research, just to walk the land, to engage the people, to go to Gorée Island. And it's a place where a lot of African Americans, when they go to Senegal they'll visit, Gorée Island had a slave castle. Only about 60,000 enslaved Africans came through Gorée Island, but it's a huge draw because they still have a lot of the original homes, etcetera and they still have the slave house. So, I went there, and I was there for 10 days. And right around day three (LAUGHS) I fell in love.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: With a Senegalese man named Idris-a-Jahate. He was quite beautiful, quite charming and he was my guide. So, we drove through the Senegalese countryside and it was really strange, I began to pick up words very quickly. What was also very strange was, the men that I would see looked very similar to my mother's brothers and to my cousins. And I did not go there … you know, some African Americans go to Africa and, you know, they want a feeling or they want to connect with their home or whatever. I didn't go there for that because I was very angry about the slave trade. I had done a lot of research and I already knew that there had been African involvement, not just, you know, passive involvement, but that it had been the basis of a lot of West African economy, going back to the late 17th, early 18th century. I was really angry. And so, the person—the tour organizer—we call him Brother Ibu Ibrahim-a-Jahate. He was an expatriate American. And he was very invested in the right way to view Africa, right? And I understood where he was coming from. You know, he was an older man. And he had come up through the Black Power Movement and all of that. But, you know, I was from a different generation and a different sort of intellectual direction. He was very brilliant, may in God rest his soul. But when I got there, I was very shocked by the fact that even though I was cranky, there was so much familiarity. And the people, and I'm pretty sensitive so I can tell when people are shining me on, I would meet people and they would say, you're not like other Americans that come over here. And I realized like I would come into the house and I would see that nobody had their shoes on. And I would take my shoes off and the other people on the tour, they would keep their shoes on. And I would be thinking, can't you see, you're tracking dirt into these people's homes, right? And you know, home training manners are very important there. And I grew up in the Deep South and home training is very important in the Deep South. So, I began to really connect very much and then when I fell in love with Idi, Idrissa ... You know, it's interesting, in 10 days when you're driving through the countryside and you're away from home, there's a timeless feeling. And so, it speeds things up in a way that you don't have. And so, by the time I left, we were almost engaged. We were in love. And then within two weeks, he had asked me to marry him because, you know, that's what people in a Muslim country do. They don't date.

Helena de Groot: Yes, of course.

Honorée Jeffers: Right. And so, then we would speak rudimentary Wolof. We would text. So, I picked up, you know, quite a few. And then when he and I separated and then divorced. It was devastating, not just for the emotional reasons, but also because I felt then cut off from the work that I was doing. And from the culture that I had become connected to.

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Honorée Jeffers: So, then I think a couple years later, I decided, well, I can't let that end my relationship with the culture, you know. So, I just had … I just came back from my first tutorial officially, you know.

Helena de Groot: Oh wow. Yes, that is beautiful. I want to get to a poem where you weave in some Wolof words. It's that poem called “Dafa Rafet,” which I'm pronouncing wrong, I'm very sure.

Honorée Jeffers: That's OK. “Dafa Rafet.” (LAUGHS) “Dafa Rafet” means it's beautiful.

Helena de Groot: Hmm. Can you tell me a little bit what you wanted to do with the poem, and then can you read it?

Honorée Jeffers: Well, in these short series of poems, I wanted to do what had never been done. There are some beautiful poets who've approached Phillis Wheatley's life, but no one ever really approached, except June Jordan, her childhood. Nobody ever really went to Africa in the imagination. And when I was in Senegal, I saw little children and they would be very friendly. And so, I wanted to have the family intact so that people would see, you know, what her loss had been when she came to America. So, this includes a line from one of my friend's little boy who was three. And he told his father, papa, I know all the things.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: And I thought that was just beautiful. And so yaay means mother, baay means father, and goonay means little child. And so, this is called “Dafa Rafet,” It Is Beautiful.

Honorée Jeffers:

(READS POEM)

Yaay, Baay, and Goonay, Someplace in the Gambia, c. 1756

 

When mother and child

walk from the village

to gather fruit, faces

recite quotidian love.

                        Do you have peace

                        (Waw, waw, diam rek)

Then, they are alone, and the toddler

points out the fat-bottomed

baobab, the mango

with its frustrating reach.

Mother pierces a low-hanging

jewel, and her small

shadow trills gratitude.

                        Yaay, you are so nice

                        (Waw, waw)

                        Yaay, I love you so

                        (Waw, waw)

No demonstration, but a hand

touching the tender head

that was breaded over cries.

Later that night,

the fater must listen, too.

                        Baay, I ate a mango

                        (Waw, waw)

                        Baay, I saw a bug

                        (Waw, waw)

The child sits closer

to his mat,

whispers ambiguous lights:

                        I know all the things-

and he does not answer,

but smiles at his wife:

their daughter is a marvel

and they must pray for humility.

***

Helena de Groot: Oh, Honorée, thank you.

Honorée Jeffers: I'm getting a little weepy here, Helena.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, me too. I mean, it's like you say, no one except June Jordan has done this. And it is so easy to forget that there was something that was whole before it was all broken up.

Honorée Jeffers: There was something that was whole. That is so beautifully put. Thank you, Helena. There was something that was whole. And, you know, I remember when I was a little girl, in elementary school, at Fayetteville Street Elementary School and I was about eight or nine. And I was a very awkward child, I didn't have any friends. My mother was my best friend. And I remember during school I would think about her, I’m wiping my tears here. I would think about her and I would ache. My body would ache, my whole body would ache, you know, missing her. And I would be thinking about what's momma doing now, you know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: You know, what's happening. And, you know, people would be teasing me, picking on me, that kind of stuff. I was a fat kid and very awkward. And I read very early. So, you know, I always wanted to talk about books, but they hadn't read any of the books because I read on, you know, I'm not trying to be shady, I read on a college level, right?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: So, I spent a lot of time by myself. And I remember once, it was snowing, and momma hadn't been paying attention to the radio. We didn't have Internet back then, of course. And they were closing the schools, but she didn't know. And so, you know, the buses were coming early and then people were coming and they were picking up their kids. And I was sitting on the steps and I was like, where's my momma, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And then, and mama, you know, probably to this day, momma is mad about this, they left me there. Everybody. The teachers all left and the principal left, everybody left me there. And I was sitting on the steps. And so, I didn't know this, but momma said that somebody came into her office, she was an adjunct professor, and they said, Trilly, don't you know, the schools are closing, you better go get your baby. And she said she jumped up and she grabbed her stuff.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And I thought she had left me. I thought she had abandoned me.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: You know, I was eight years old. I didn't know any better. And so, I took off walking. And I remember this because it was so cold and I was crying and I wore glasses then and my tears were creating like little teeny icicles on the bottom of my glasses, right. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: And I was like, I’m gonna walk on home. You know, I was pitiful.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Honorée Jeffers: You know, and then all of a sudden, I saw her car come up beside me and she was crying.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

 

Honorée Jeffers: And she said, why didn't you wait for me? And I said, I thought you didn't want me anymore.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And I …  I think about that little girl, you know. That's what really kept me going, Helena, in this project, over 15 years, it was not the adult woman. It was the child. The child that probably never healed from that rupture from her parents. And I knew that I had to do this for her, for that little bitty girl.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: I want to go back to the time when she arrives in Boston in 1761. And when the Wheatley family buys her. And then there's this really complicated relationship that starts where she becomes not quite a servant. But not quite a child. Something very complicated in between. And they teach her how to read and write. And I wanted to know from you how common was it for slave owners to teach the people they enslaved how to read and write at that time?

Honorée Jeffers: Well, you know, what we have in New England is a different situation than we have in the South. So, we don't have plantation slavery, you know, these large tracts of land. You know, it always makes me cringe whenever I see a movie that includes slavery that's up north and you have people singing negro spirituals or, you know, whatever, because it's a different time. But you had, it wasn't super common, I mean, there were a lot of white people who couldn't read and write, you know, working class white folks who couldn't read and write in New England. But you did have literate Black people because there wouldn't be a law down South until the aftermath of David Walker's appeal in 1829. He was advocating violence towards white slave holders. And so, then you began to have laws in the 19th century being passed that forbid teaching to read and write to enslaved African Americans, right? So, we have to understand that when Miss Phillis was alive, that was a different scenario. And so, you had black folks who had been taught to read and write so that they could know the scripture.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Honorée Jeffers: Christianity is very important. And that's the whole thing that people … when people see that phrase, “‘t was mercy brought me for my pagan land,” she's not saying, thank you, white folks, for, you know, snatching me from my parents. She's saying I have been anointed by God to survive the Middle Passage, right. Then on the other side, you can talk about the fact that certainly that's a Christian indoctrination. Right? (LAUGHS) More than likely, if she was from The Gambia, her parents were probably Muslim.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Honorée Jeffers: And so, yes, it wasn't incredibly common, but when you had people who joined churches, even though they were made to sit in different places, you know, the black folks, they were reading scripture. And so, yes, many of them were literate. But literacy was acknowledged as a weapon against slavery. And that’s why those rules were made, you know.

 

Helena de Groot: Aha! That is so interesting. I mean, I'm so grateful that you also point out that those laws came later and that racism in America, it’s not a straight line from like, okay, slavery was bad. And then since then, it's just gotten better and better every year, whatever. You know, like that there’s the advances made and then the backlash and how that often set back progress many decades. And I think it's something that, you know, optimistic white specifically Americans often forget.

Honorée Jeffers: Well, there's a reason why my Twitter handle is Black Library Girl.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: And the reason for that is in black communities, literacy is very important. Many of us that are from the Deep South can tell you the ways in which white Southerners tried to block us from educating our children. Many of us can tell you the first ancestor in our family who knew how to read and write, who went to school. I can tell you that my mother's father, Charlie James Sr. did not know how to read and write. All he knew how to do was write his name. And so, when my mother graduated from Spelman College in 1955 and came back to her hometown of Eatonton, Georgia. She told me that, and she was a schoolteacher in Eatonton, and she told me that when her daddy would, you know, take her down to the little tiny, you know, downtown area of Eatontown, if you blink, you know, you’re going to miss it, that he would dress in church clothes and he would be all puffed up because his child was a schoolteacher. His grandparents were enslaved people. So, even as problematic as some people find Phillis Wheatley's poems, there is a reason that, you know, she is a revered ancestor because what she did was so great. But yes, as you talked about, there’s a very complicated relationship that Miss Phillis had with the Wheatleys. But I think we should. I mean, even as they were slave holders. So, we know that's very complicated. I still have gratitude toward those people, you know, at the same time, understanding they were involved in the accursed …

Helena de Groot: Yes!

Honorée Jeffers: … You know, business of slave trading. So, you know, it's tempered, you know.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And I mean, that was also really …  it is already remarkable that you went so deep and far, literally far afield, you know, to try and understand where she was from and what the first sights and sounds were that she may have encountered. But what I thought was even more impressive was the way in which you try to get inside the skin of her mistress, Miss Susanna Wheatley. I mean, I don't know, maybe that is not harder because you're around white people all day long, I suppose, but … 

Honorée Jeffers: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: But still, to sort of not see them as these one dimensional perpetrators, racists but to really get inside her skin, feel her pain, feel her whatever, like that complicated relationship that she had, love, you know, that she had for Phillis. Can you talk a little bit about how ... Or, you know, what we do? Why don't you first read that poem, let me find the actual title. Let me find it now.

Honorée Jeffers: I know which one you’re talking about.

Helena de Groot: You know. Which one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, it's on page 51.

Honorée Jeffers: Yes. “Susanna Wheatley Tends to Phillis in Her Asthmatic Suffering.”

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, I'd love for you to read that. And then I would love to know how you did it.

Honorée Jeffers: Okay.

Honorée Jeffers:

(READS POEM)

“Susannah Wheatley Tends to Phillis in Her Asthmatic Suffering”

Boston, January 1767

When you own a child,

            can you treat her the same?

                        I don’t mean when you birth her,

            when you share a well of blood.-

This is a complicated space.

            There is slavery here.

                        There is maternity here.

            There is a high and a low

that will last centuries.

            Every speck floating in this room

                        must be considered.

            I don’t want to simplify

what is breathing-

            choking-

                        in this room, though there are those

            of you who will demand that I do.

Either way I choose, I’m going

            to lose somebody.

                        I want to be human,

            to assume that because Susannah

had three offspring who died as children—

            the details gone

                        about coughs that clattered

            on, rashes that scattered across

necks or chests,

            air that did not expel,

                        never exhaled to cool tongues—

            that Susannah would be desperate

to cling to a new little girl.

            Her need for care, her fear,

                        would rise into Psalms.

            When Phillis’s face

was not her mirror,

            would that have mattered?

                        When water did not drench

            Phillis’s hair, but lifted it high

into kinks,

            would that have mattered?

                        Can I transcribe the desire

            of a womb to fill again?

That a daughter was stolen

            from an African woman and given

                        into a white woman’s hands?

            And did Susannah promise the waft

of that grieving mother’s spirit

            that she would keep this daughter safe

                        yet enslaved—

and this

is the craggiest

hill I’ve ever climbed.

**

 

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I want to know about that. You know, “the craggiest / hill I've ever climbed,” did you climb it alone? Did you talk about it with friends? Did you talk about it to yourself, like in a diary or something, like how did you sift through this?

Honorée Jeffers: Well, when I was at the American Antiquarian Society doing research, each of us was assigned a mentor, every fellow while we were there. And my mentor was the great Caroline Sloat, just a wonderful woman. And Miss Caroline, she hated when I called her Miss Caroline.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: (LAUGHS) But, you know, at that point, you know, she was nearly old enough. You know, I'm in my 50s now. She was old enough to be my mom and I just wasn't reared like that. You know, to be calling older people by their first name without a handle. But I remember coming to her and saying, Miss Caroline, I realize that Susanna Wheatley had lost three children in childhood. She had two little girls who died and then a little boy who died. And that was a common event in the 18th century. And she only had two children who survived, the twins, Nathaniel and Mary. One of the little girls– parents would do this; they would have inscribed on the tombstone the exact age. And the little girl was, I think it was seven years, six months and 18 days or something like that. And I realized that this little African girl was the approximate age of Sarah Wheatley when she died.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And I thought, Miss Phillis had asthma her whole life, she was sickly. So, it wasn’t like she could be carrying, you know, buckets of water and doing all kinds of housework. There wasn’t anything, any purpose, that she was going to serve other than to be a child and to keep this lady company, that's all she could have done. So, we still don’t know who purchased her, but I thought, well, if it was the daddy, he would have said, well, you know, my wife needs somebody. Because the children were getting older, they were, you know, in their 20s or something like that, right? And if it was the momma, if it was Susanna, then she would have seen that little girl.

 

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: Right? And so, I said that to Miss Caroline and Miss Caroline said, and that's why you have to write a book, Honorée. And she said it again. And that's why you have to write the book. She said, nobody who is white is going to be able to see these things that you are seeing. And, you know, Miss Caroline was white and from Connecticut, right? And here was this woman saying to me, you know, listen now, you're the black woman. Go ahead and do what you need to do. This has to be done. And that's where I began to think about this very complicated relationship, you know, mother and daughter relationships are complicated anyway. OK.

Helena de Groot: Sure. (LAUGHS)

Honorée Jeffers: You know what I’m saying? All of us, you know, why are you wearing your hair that way? That kind of stuff, right. And so, I’m always thinking about this relationship, this complicated relationship, where there is love but there had to be a bit of resentment, just a little bit, that people were always saying to her, oh you are so lucky, not be in Africa with all of those heathens.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: With all those godless heathens. Then you put in the fact that this was an enslaved child.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Honorée Jeffers: Then you put race in there. Because her patrons, the people who supported her, the people who distributed her work, who were very helpful in getting her the subscribers that would allow her to get her book published, they were all white.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And most of them were part of the Congregationalist network, the religious network to which Susanna Wheatley belonged. So, these were people who would help her, they would pass her poems along and they would say, look how extraordinary this is. And that is … there's a poem in my book about my understanding of how she does this, because as a black woman poet in the 21st century, I do the same. I could not get what I have right now if I did not have, as my grandma can say, you know, white folks to speak for me.

Helena de Groot: Yes. Yes.

Honorée Jeffers: You know, to write me letters of recommendation, to bring me to school. So, it's a balancing act. You know.

Helena de Groot: That's so interesting, that comparison.

Honorée Jeffers: Right. But I need black people in my life. Right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: I need to be around black people. And I think she needed to be around black people. I mean, she married a black man, and her best friend was a black woman!

Helena de Groot: Yes, exactly.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Honorée Jeffers: So, one thing that Miss Caroline at the American Antiquarian Society said to me is, that I was noticing things that nobody else had noticed. For example, when I came back home, I was looking at a picture that had been magnified many, many times of Miss Phillis. And that's where I saw the ring in her nose.

Helena de Groot: Yes. I love that, it’s so defiant. You know?

Honorée Jeffers: It's very defiant, isn't it? And then I was thinking, how come I'm the first person to ever say—I'm not going to say I'm the first person to ever see it, but no one had ever said, well you know, there's a ring in her nose. And that's why it says it imagines the life and times. Because I begin to imagine what, you know, these relationships might have been as they evolve.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Phillis Wheatley’s relationships with her owners continued to evolve, even after they died. Susanna died very soon after Phillis Wheatley published her book of poems and after she was emancipated. John Wheatley died just four years later, around the time she met John Peters, the free Black man she would go on to marry. But what she discovered after John Wheatley died, was that he hadn’t left her a penny. And Phillis would be destitute for the rest of her life. We don’t know how she felt finding this out. So Honorée Fanonne Jeffers wrote a letter, a letter she imagined Phillis Wheatley writing to her best friend, Obour Tanner, who was still enslaved, with, in italics, the parts she imagined Phillis thinking. I asked Honorée if she could read it for me.

Honorée Jeffers: Okay.

Helena de Groot: And I don't know how you want to do this, but I'd love for you to find a way to distinguish between that sort of italicized text …

Honorée Jeffers: Yeah, I’ll do a little thing with my voice. Hopefully, it's not too corny. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Okay.

Honorée Jeffers: Okay.

(READS LETTER)

Lost Letter #21: Phillis Wheatley, Boston, To Obour Tanner, Newport

March 13, 1778

 

Sister:

 

My master has died and sanctified his soul.

I did not expect him to last this long

after his bad fall and my dear mistress passing.

 

There was much suffering and when my

asthma came, I could not tend to him.

 

my beloved told me stop calling the old man master

i’ve not been owned for years but the word

will not desert my lips my beloved is angry

 

my master did not leave me a pound or a shilling

i was a slave for twelve years an unpaid servant for five

 

God’s mercy on my master now!—

He was a gruff man, but he never laid

his hand on me in strife.

 

There was no whip or stick, only a mere

nod when I completed a task.

 

i am my own property and not nathaniel’s a

woman of twenty-four with my own name master

did not give me that but he did not slap it away

 

The truth too cloudy, that I was alone

and small that summer morning on the docks.

 

my beloved knew his mother until she died he

cannot see my fears that any dear look is a bright

word from heaven why my affection is steadfast

 

May God pull my master quickly into paradise.

Please say many prayers for him.

 

Your Phillis.

 

***

Helena de Groot: Thank you. Can you tell me about the conditions of their life … the material conditions of their life together?

Honorée Jeffers: Mr. John and Miss Phillis, they were poor. They were very poor. And one of the reasons for that is when they married, it was the middle of the American Revolution and there was a lot of poverty among white people as well, okay? And so, John Peters was in and out of debtor’s prison through their entire marriage. And people that she thought were her friends, they were no longer her friends. And she was all by herself.

 

Helena de Groot: That is such a tragic part of the story and I didn’t really understand it. Like, why did she lose her patrons?

Honorée Jeffers: Well one of the things that was going on is, there was an economic depression happening. So, moneys tight. That may have been one of the problems. Her marrying John Peters, who was not only not part of the religious network, but he was suing people who owed him money. And this was a black man.

Helena de Groot: I see.

Honorée Jeffers: I mean, we're talking about in the 18th century, that was really … that's what I really understand about people always when they say that Miss Phillis was like a toady to white people. She had married a very arrogant man. I will say arrogant, but he thought well of himself, right? So, you know, here we have black people who are not even by some viewed as fully human. To bring this back to the Enlightenment period and notions of race. And here we have this woman married to this, you know, uppity black man who is bold enough to be taking white folks to court. Right?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Right.

Honorée Jeffers: I mean, that would have lost her some friends.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Honorée Jeffers: I mean, I can't prove that. But that's probably what happened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. You discovered some ways in which the story is sort of told in one way and maybe that’s not exactly how it happened.

Honorée Jeffers: So, I guess no spoilers. People will have to read the book, right? And read the afterword to be able to get all the information. But I found out that a lot of what we thought had happened with him had not. And that we had no proof that Mr. John had abused Miss Phillis. We had no proof that he had abandoned her. He hadn't abandoned her. He was in debtor's prison. You know, I always wanted to talk about how people, white and black, never really questioned whether he was mean to her or not. They just automatically assumed that it had to be true.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Honorée Jeffers: And that hurt me.

Helena de Groot: No, of course! And also, because it is so disappointing when people confuse or attribute someone’s individual struggles to their moral character instead of looking at well, what are the circumstances that made this so?

Honorée Jeffers: Yes. That’s a very American thing. And when I was in Africa, one of the things—one of the blessings—I mean, I had never really thought, oh, well, poor people are, you know, don't have good moral standing because my mother had been poor. But I didn't really understand how much I connected the attitude where, you know, poor people are poor because they don't work. If you just work super hard—nd my mother used to say that. You know, she'd always say, well, I pulled myself up. And I would say, yeah but mama, you are extraordinary. And you shouldn't have to be extraordinary to not be poor. But when I was in Africa, there was never this attitude that if people were in poverty, it meant something about their character. That was just a roll of the dice. And that's what I realized about them, Mister John and Miss Phillis, I mean, he was doing the best he could. And the other thing that people have to understand when we're talking about when she passed away at the age of about 30 or 31, the average lifespan for black women in America in the 18th century was 33.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Honorée Jeffers: Black women had a very hard time. Which is one of the reasons I wrote this book, and everybody’s not going to get it, but I did my best. I laid it all out there on the altar as a gift for her. People have to understand that even with police brutality and even how truly lucky we are, and how hard our ancestors had it and in particular how hard black women had it.

Helena de Groot:  Yeah. Honorée, you teach African American literature at the University of Oklahoma and you’re ...

Honorée Jeffers: Early African American.

Helena de Groot:  Early. But that's the thing, you know, the most heartbreaking period in time. I mean, there is a lot of heartbreaking periods to choose from when it comes to the treatment of African Americans in this country. But maybe this is still the most unforgivable period. Why? Why you?

Honorée Jeffers: You now. I was a child that listened to old folks and my grandmother was two generations removed from slavery. Her great grandmother was like six or seven when freedom came. One of her first memories—my mother told me that great grandma Mandy would tell her this, that one of her first memories is of her father being sold down the river to Mississippi. And I used to listen to old folks, and they would talk about the old ways. And I've always written about history and it's very painful, Helena. It’s very painful. And then President Obama was inaugurated. And I thought, nobody's going to be interested in this anymore because it's a new day now, right? And I was glad it was a new day. And I didn't want things to be bad, simply so that somebody would, you know, read my work on history, right? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

 Honorée Jeffers: I’m like, well, you know, we all have our moment, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And now here we are again.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: But to me, the beauty is that I am sitting in this studio, talking to you. And I am of this line of people. I think that there is beauty in that, even if it's painful. I'm here. I've survived. I say that at the end of one of the poems. They had love. They still do. I'm still here.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Honorée Jeffers: And that's why I teach it.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Helena de Groot: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five poetry collections The Age of Phillis, The Glory Gets, Red Clay Suite, Outlandish Blues and The Gospel of Barbecue. She has won fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. In 2018, she was awarded a lifetime achievement award called the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction. She’s a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, and she’s been sheltering in place in Norman, just south of Oklahoma City. To find out more about her work, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot, and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. I know it’s getting really, really, really long, but you can do it. Thank you for listening.