She looks straight at you — not in profile, as the old engraving had it, but eye to eye.
The 49th stamp in the Black Heritage series honours Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784), the first author of African descent in the American colonies to publish a book. Born in West Africa and brought to Boston on a slave ship, she was enslaved by merchant John Wheatley and educated in his household; by eleven she was composing poems of her own. Her 1773 collection, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, moved between hymns, elegies and narrative verse, and charmed readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Kerry James Marshall's ink-on-paper portrait imagines her later in life, at work on a second, unpublished book. It echoes the frontispiece of the 1773 volume — similar dress, the same desk, the hatched lines of an engraving — yet turns her toward us, confident and free. Wheatley was freed in 1773; in late 1775 she sent George Washington an ode, and he replied with praise and an invitation to visit.
Schools and libraries across the country carry her name. This is a smaller monument.
PERFECT FOR: letters that say something, Black History Month displays, classroom and library shelves, gifts for poets, and collectors of the Black Heritage series.
