The Age of Phillis
5/5
()
About this ebook
Written by Scribd Editors
In 1773, a young African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words astonished many and maddened others, but it was clear that this was an extraordinary young woman.
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers imagines Wheatley’s life, including her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the mysterious John Peters and her early death at the age of about thirty-three. Included throughout are poems about Wheatley's turbulent times, an era of the transatlantic slave trade as well as political, philosophical and religious upheavals.
Jeffers is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. The Age of Phillis was on the National Book Award’s Longlist for Poetry in 2020. She was awarded the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction for an Alabama writer.
Phillis is not seen as a stereotypical racial or literary symbol, but as a human being who lived her life while making her own lasting contributions to history.
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 collection The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award, the George Washington Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois is her first novel and was a New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an Oprah Book Club Pick.
Read more from Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Age of Phillis Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Glory Gets Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Glory Gets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to The Age of Phillis
Related ebooks
The Glory Gets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mule-Bone Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brown Girl, Brownstones Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Philadelphia Fire: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMama Day: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Linden Hills: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We Are Bridges: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Fire in the Flint Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThey Call Me George: The Untold Story of The Black Train Porters Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Reparations Now! Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoul Clap Hands and Sing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In West Mills Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Let's Tell This Story Properly Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMay We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Not Without Laughter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/51919 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Betsey Brown: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Poetry For You
Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Waste Land and Other Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Age of Phillis
13 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A very creative reimagining in poetry of the life of America's first important Black poet Phillis Wheatley who lived during the Revolutionary War period of American History. The author has done a great amount of research and has a twenty page discussion of what she found at the book's end. Her poems include little known facts such a she married a free Black man and gave birth to three children who died in infancy. I teach History and really learned a lot and got a greater appreciation for this wonderful American author.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I have read 9 of the 10 NBA 2020 longlisted books for poetry now--one I have been unable to get my hands on despite having 3 library cards. This is the book that should have won.This book is amazing. It is poetry, but it is also history and psychology and so many other things. Jeffers spent years and years researching the woman known as Phillis Wheatley Peters. She has read secondary work, she has read primary work, she has searched for extant letters, done census research, researched the earliest publications about her. So. Much. Work. This volume consists of Jeffers' own poems on topics in PWP's life--her capture and enslavement, childhood and religion, trips and freedom, marriage and friendships. Her writing, its publication, the people she met and knew well. She also includes poems on other African-Americans living in 18th-century New England. They were most definitely there, and I recognized many (but not all) of their names, and I went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. Jeffers explains her research and thought processes in prose the last section, Looking for Miss Phillis.This book did not even make the NBA shortlist, and frankly I don't get it. Perhaps they considered it too fact-based, too historical. As a historian, I loved it..
1 person found this helpful
Book preview
The Age of Phillis - Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
The Age of PHILLIS
WESLEYAN POETRY
The Age of
phillis
HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Copyright © 2020 Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Designed by Richard Hendel
Typeset in Galliard by Passumpsic Publishing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
NAMES: Jeffers, Honorée Fanonee, 1967– author.
TITLE: The age of Phillis / Honorée Fanonee Jeffers.
DESCRIPTION: Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2020. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: A collection of original poems speaking to the life and times of Phillis Wheatley, a Colonial America-era poet brought to Boston as a slave
—Provided by publisher.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019040204 (print) | LCCN 2019040205 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819579492 (cloth) | ISBN 9780819579515 (ebook)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Wheatley, Phillis, 1753–1784—Poetry. | African American women authors—Poetry. | Women slaves—Massachusetts—Boston—Poetry. | Slavery—Massachusetts—History—18th century—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3560.E365 A74 2020 (print) | LCC PS3560.E365 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040204
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040205
5 4 3 2 1
Excerpt from Genius Child
is from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from mulberry fields
is from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 2004 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., boaeditions.org.
Excerpt from Middle Passage.
Copyright © 1962, 1966 by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden by Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Excerpt from Heritage.
Copyright 1936 by Countee Cullen.
Reprinted with permission of Amistad Research Center.
Cover art by Sanuiah Q. James, 2014.
for Phillis Wheatley Peters
CONTENTS
Prologue: Mother/Muse
This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
— Langston Hughes, from Genius Child
AN ISSUE OF MERCY #1
Mercy, girl.
What the mother might have said, pointing
at the sun rising, what makes life possible.
Then, dripped the bowl of water,
reverent, into oblivious earth.
Was this prayer for her?
Respect for the dead or disappeared?
An act to please a genius child?
Her daughter would speak
of water, bowl, sun—
light arriving,
light gone—
sometime after the nice white lady
paid and named her for the slave ship.
Mercy: what the child called Phillis
would claim after that sea journey.
Journey.
Let’s call it that.
Let’s lie to each other.
Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.
What got Phillis over that sea?
What kept a stolen daughter?
Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.
Mercy,
Dear Brethren.
Water, bowl, sun—
a mothering, God’s milky sound.
Morning shards, and a mother wondered
if her daughter forgot her real name,
refused to envision the rest:
baby teeth missing
and somebody wrapping her treasure
(barely) in a dirty carpet.
’Twas mercy.
You know the story—
how we’ve lied to each other.
Book: Before
And pleasing Gambia on my soul returns,
With native grace in Spring’s luxuriant reign,
Smiles the gay mead and Eden blooms again,
The various bower, the tuneful flowing stream,
The soft retreats, the lovers golden dream …
— Phillis Wheatley, from PHILIS’S Reply to the Answer in our Last by the Gentleman in the Navy
What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
— Countee Cullen, from Heritage
THE SMELTING OF IRON IN WEST AFRICA
c. Sometime in antiquity, date unknown
Utilitarian—
then,
at some point,
an embrace of beauty.
A glow:
the man waits,
a picture in his head.
He will claw
out the dream’s
tincture,
pour it into mold—
and in that dream,
he has met
the hyena laughing
about chains. The man
will pound metal
to forget that
grievous sound.
He will master
what was brought
from earth,
from viscera’s
need—
until his hands seize,