Journal #10 Phillis Wheatley: So Ambiguous, Is She Like A Female Thomas Paine??

QUOTE:

“Improve your privileges while they stay, / Ye pupils, and each hour redeem, that bears / Or good or bad report of you to Heav’n…An Ethiop tells you ‘tis your greatest foe; / Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain” (Wheatley 756).


SUMMARY:

Wheatley writes this letter to the students of “Harvard,” basically warning them not to sin. There seems to be a little testimony as well as a short “Sunday school” lesson.


RESPONSE:

At the beginning of Wheatley’s letter, she seems to be explaining how she has heavenly guidance to help her write now that she has been “saved” from her native “land of errors” (Wheatley 756); and saved as in converted to Christianity. Her next paragraph is like reading a sermon, which could also be Wheatley’s way to display her knowledge (proving that she knows what she’s talking about). However, the last paragraph seems more like a prediction or warning about what the future may bring if the students continue to commit sins.

Is Wheatley’s warning really sincere? Or is she just letting the students at Cambridge of New England know that they won’t be so privileged forever, and this especially now that an “Ethiop tells [them] ‘tis [their] greatest foe” (Wheatley 756). It seems to me that Wheatley could be addressing the students sarcastically, or trying to throw what she believes the future will bring in their faces; that the tables will turn. Maybe Wheatley is using her own testimony (of being converted and educated after leaving Africa) to foreshadow that it is possible for Africans to become just as “privileged” as these students.

Whatever she meant, Wheatley is most likely proving that she is just as educated as the students, and that anyone could possibly give them a run for their money. So therefore, they should be good Christians (and not sin) if they want to keep their privileges. Wheatley sure had some confidence! I wonder what would have happened if all Africans were given the same education as her. I don’t think the fate of African Americans in history could have been anything like it was, or still is.