The publisher says that “The Vigorous Virtues is a different kind of devotional book that draws lessons for today from the heroes of the past. If you love history, are passionate about diversity, and need powerful success principles as a guide through life, this is the book! Find out how virtues such as Courage, Compassion, Perseverance and Integrity have inspired historical figures to success — and can do the same for the reader!”
The “Faith Month” is December. Today, we remember Phyllis Wheatley, an African who came as a girl slave to the United States. Her slave owners taught her how to read the Bible. Soon, she was reading every book that she get her hands upon. And she began to read poetry. She was the first African American to publish a book of poetry.
Phillis Wheatley
“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 Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye;
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.
Phillis Wheatley, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly, was born around 1753 and went to heaven on December 5, 1784. Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls her “the Toni Morrison of the 18th Century.”
She had arrived in Boston on July 11, 1761, on board the Phillis, a slaver that was returning from Senegal, Sierra Leone, and the Isles de Los, off the coast of Guinea. Most likely a native Wolof speaker from the Senegambian coast, she was “a slender, frail, female child,” naked except for a kilt made from “a quantity of dirty carpet,” as a descendant of her owners wrote in 1834. Susanna Wheatley, the wife of a prosperous tailor and merchant, John Wheatley, acquired her as a house servant, and named her after the slave ship. …” The Wheatley family taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
She sent her poem “On the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”, to Selina Hastings, an English countess who was a prominent leader in the evangelical revival in England and the African country of Sierra Leone. Whitefield himself was her chaplain. She introduced Wheatley to London’s foremost bookseller and printer.
“Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston” was published in September, 1773….Within a month of the book’s publication and Phillis’s return to America, the Wheatleys freed her.’
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Quotes from “Phillis Wheatley on Trial” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The New Yorker, January 12, 2003. The engraving of Wheatley is probably by Scipio Moorhead. It was published as the frontispiece Wheatley’s book published in London by A. Bell, bookseller, Aldgate, 1773. This image is without copyright restriction from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a40394. [20191214_0555]
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