HER NAME IS POETRY AND ETERNITY.


 She was named Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that took her away, and Wheatley, after the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal. In Boston, slave traders put her up for sale:


"She is seven years old! She will make a good mare!"


She was groped, naked, by many hands.


At thirteen, she was already writing poetry in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At twenty, Phillis was questioned by a tribunal of eighteen distinguished gentlemen in robes and wigs.


She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some passages from the Bible, and she also had to swear that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. Sitting on a chair, she endured her long examination, until the tribunal accepted her: she was a woman, she was black, she was a slave, but she was a poet.


Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States.


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