SNATCH’D
October 18, 1773, Phillis Wheatley was freed from slavery after her poetry made her the most celebrated enslaved person in the British Empire. She was the first published African American poet and considered the mother of the African American literary tradition. As her poetry attests, she was ‘snatch’d’ from West Africa at the age of seven and sent to Boston Harbor on the slave ship “the Phillis,”which is what her slave owners called her. Her poetry was evidence of her intellectual equality, and the inherent humanity of the Black race, a fact that many refused to believe. She was made to stand before 18 of Boston’s intellectual elite who examined her and concluded that she was, indeed, a poet.
From one of her poems:
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that son and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?