"Would you become a pamphleteer then? A writer of newspaper articles?"
"Well, no, but—"
"And why not a pamphleteer?"
"It's obvious why, isn't it? At the end of the day one wraps garbage in newspapers. And while a pamphlet can be valuable and stir people to action, a hundred years hence it may be forgotten — as the injustice it assails is forgotten — or it will be preserved only as a historical document, interesting for what it reveals about a moment long past, but never appreciated as art I'm speaking of writing poems about oppression."
"Is poetry the right means for that?"
"How do you mean?"
"Tell me, Phillis, what is it about Virgil, Pope, and Horace that you love? Come now, don't be shy."
"The beauty, which age does not wear—"
"And?"
"The truth…"
"Which is timeless, no?"
"Yes, that's right."
"May I suggest something?"
"Please."
"I cannot read tea leaves so I have no idea what the future will bring or how your poetry will be received in the colonies a century from now. But of one thing I can assure you: You can never be censured. You are the first internationally celebrated woman poet in the colonies. The first American poet of your people. I'm sure they will take pride in your achievement, as John and I do. And you, my dear, are — by nature and temperament — a poet, regardless of what Jefferson says. You are not a pamphleteer. Your job is simple. I did not say easy, for no one knows better than you how difficult it is to create even one line of verse worth passing along to the next generation, or a poem that speaks to the heart of Christendom — white and colored — on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a noble calling, Phillis, this creating of beauty, and it is sufficient unto itself."
"Is it? Sometimes I wonder if my people see me — my work — as useless."
"Useless?"
"It doesn't serve their liberation, does it?"
"Why? Because you do not catalog horrors? Only praise what on these shores is praiseworthy?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Dear, dear Phillis…"
"Why are you laughing? What did I say? Am I amusing?"
"Oh no, of course not! But would you call Benjamin Banneker's work useless?"
"Hardly! While still a boy, he built from wood the first clock made wholly in America. From what I hear, it keeps perfect time to this very day."
"What, then, of Santomee?"
"Who?"
"He was a slave in New York, one trained in Holland, who practiced medicine among the Dutch and English, probably saving many lives. And there is Onesimus, who in 1721 came up with an antidote for the smallpox. All of them proved the genius of your people. All of them enriched others through their deeds, thereby providing in the example of their persons, and the universal value of their products, the most devastating broadside against the evils of Negro bondage imaginable. And you have done no less."
"You think so?"
"I know so."
"Thank you, ma'am. You are most kind."
"Will you continue, then, with this bristling, new poem?"
"Perhaps, if I can find my way into it. The problem is not that I don't feel outrage whenever I read or see or hear of injustice, it's rather that I fear I have no real talent for that sort of writing and rhetoric. For things I hate. I think I can compose passably well a hymn to morning, but as soon as I turn my pen to painting a portrait of a slave suffering beneath the lash, I cut myself off from what flows most easily from me — the things I love — and the words fall woodenly, unconvincingly, onto the page."
"No, it's not your best work."
"You're not supposed to say that!"
"Sorry! I was just agreeing with you, that's all. You needn't bite my head off!"
"You're supposed to tell me it's good."
"Fine, it's good."
"You don't mean that."
"You're right, I don't, but I'm in no mood for an argument before breakfast. And it's not why I wanted to talk to you."
"Why did you?"
"You know how yesterday I felt poorly and stayed in bed?"
"Yes?"
"Well, I didn't bother with the post. All the mail, scented and sealed with candle wax, sat on a wig stand until I awoke this morning. I began looking through it, and I found a letter addressed to you. Perhaps I shouldn't give it to you if you're planning now on starting a new life as a composer of pamphlets."
"Oh, please! Who is it from?"
"Phillis, I think you should sit down."
"Who?"
"May I read it to you?"
"I can read!"
"But I would enjoy it so!"
"All right, then! Read!"
"Ahem…
"Miss Phillis,
Your favor ofthe 26th of October did not reach my hands till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted But a variety of important occurances, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming but not real neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the poem, had I not been apprehensive that, while I only meant to give the world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public prints…. If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses, and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great respect…
Your obedient, humble servant,
George Washington"
"He said… servant?"
"Here, see for yourself."
"This a complicated time, isn't it?"
"Yes, dear, I think it is."
A Soldier for the Crown
YOU ALWAYS WERE a gambler.
Before the war broke out, when you were still a servant in Master William Selby's house, you'd bet on anything — how early spring thaw might come, or if your older brother Titus would beat your cousin Caesar in a wrestling match — and most of the time you won. There was something about gambling that you could not resist. There was suspense, the feeling that the future was not already written by white hands. Or finished. There was chance, the luck of the draw. In the roll of dice or a card game, there was always — what to call it? — an openness, a chance that the outcome would go this way or that. For or against you. Of course, in bondage to Master Selby there were no odds. Whichever way the dice fell or the cards came up, you began and ended your day a slave.
But did you win this time?
Standing by the wooden rail on a ship bound for Nova Scotia, crammed with strangers fleeing the collapse of their colonial world — women and children, whites and blacks, whose names appear in Brigadier General Samuel Birch's Book of Negroes—you pull a long-shanked pipe from your red-tinted coat, pack the bowl with tobacco, and strike a friction match against a nail in your bootheel. You know you are fortunate to be on board. Now that the Continental Army is victorious, blacks who fought for the crown are struggling desperately to leave on His Majesty's ships departing from New York harbor. Even as your boat eased away from the harbor, some leaped from the docks into the water, swimming toward the ship for this last chance to escape slavery. Seeing them, you'd thought, That might have been me. But it wasn't; you've always been lucky that way, at taking risks. Running away from bondage. Taking on new identities. Yet you wonder what to call yourself now. A loyalist? A traitor? A man without a country? As the harbor shrinks, growing fainter in the distance, severing you forever from this strange, newly formed nation called the United States, you haven't the slightest idea after years of war which of these names fits, or what the future holds, though on one matter you are clear: