Review: The Story of Phillis Wheatley

I have long loved teaching the letters and poetry of Phillis Wheatley to high school students, but I have not had the opportunity yet to share her life and work with middle schoolers. Biographer K.A. Ellis is an able and inspiring guide who welcomes younger readers into Wheatley’s life while also offering many spiritual lessons.

From the Gold Coast of Senegambia to a glimpse of village life in 1760, author K.A. Ellis depicts the riches and traditions of West Africa. She imagines the moments of a little girl’s capture and her march through the final fort as she boards the slave ship Phillis with hundreds of slaves of every age.

Colonies of every country were greedy and passed laws to that end. It soon became common to kidnap children and pregnant mothers. The younger the slave, the more years of service. In the graphic reality of this horror-filled trade, Ellis’s chapters make clear that these ship owners and crews had been “blinded by Satan” to see people as cargo. Yet Ellis turns the tide at the end of each chapter and returns to the potential and hope of Phillis’s life to come.
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Once the ship is in Boston, seven-year-old Phillis stands on the auction block. Her tribal name has disappeared, and her new owners, John and Susannah Wheatley, are the ones to first call her Phillis. Phillis is quickly befriended by their daughter Mary, and the family educates her at home when she is not doing housework. Learning English and Latin, Phillis writes her first poetry. Here, Ellis’s storytelling shines in her paraphrases of Wheatley’s verses and in the account of Phillis’s coming to Christ at Old South Meeting House.

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