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The Story of the African Poet Who Called America to Christ
Phillis Wheatley, Evil Times, and the Providence of God
Where is God when terrible things happen?
People are being trafficked against their will even now. The question Where is God? rises in the deserts of Libya, in the brothels and brick kilns of India, in the back streets of Atlanta and beyond, as innocent and trapped people suffer at the hands of others.
This same question has perplexed God’s people from ancient Rome to America’s past during the transatlantic slave trade. And this is where we find the namesake of our story—Phillis Wheatley.
Phillis’s story is one of beauty determined to emerge from ashes. Throughout her life we see God continually intervening despite man’s evil intentions to bend her life to their will and away from his.
At just six or seven years old, Phillis was snatched from her parents and forced from Africa’s shores, along with thousands of Africa’s men, women, and children. She would never again see her parents, her Senegambian village, or any of Africa’s beautiful shores. She sailed on the rough, high seas of the brutal Middle Passage, and it’s difficult to imagine a child so young enduring the horrors of this trip: hundreds of adults in a single voyage, chained together in the hold of a massive ship, moving across the ocean, with the stench of death and misery all around. They were all bound for uncertain lands and even less certain futures.
A carefree girlhood was ripped from under her feet in exchange for a life of servitude many worlds away. Phillis was forced, shackled, and shoved through a single door like the one at Gorée Island’s “Door of No Return,” a literal fort doorway in Senegal.
This was the door through which she—and many others—entered the transatlantic slave trade.
The Story of Phillis Wheatley
K. A. Ellis
This biography takes middle-graders on a journey through the life of the remarkable African poet Phillis Wheatley, who called for the abolition of slavery while trusting in God’s plan. Part of the Lives of Faith and Grace series, this book shows how God works through ordinary people.
Providence Uses Evil for Good
Why does God allow such profoundly evil doors to swing wide and swallow people whole? Often he is opening that same door from the inside for his redemptive good and purposes. It’s good to remember that God’s providence isn’t the same as his approval, and many terrible things happen even in the Bible; but God is reporting those deeds of men, not approving of them. Sometimes, we confuse these two. He grieves over man’s wickedness; he sent his son Jesus to deliver us from such evil intentions in ourselves—and in others. The Bible is completely truthful about God and painfully honest about humanity—more than any other religious text ever composed.
The Bible insists there’s a difference between reporting and approval. God didn’t author the transatlantic slave trade that stole Phillis from her parents; the whole system was born out of man’s sinful, base nature. He didn’t design the door that swallowed Phillis whole; rather, he was sovereign over it and already working, waiting, and redeeming.
No human cruelty can destroy God’s plan for someone’s soul, and this is how it was for Phillis. By God’s strength and will, she survived the trauma of the voyage at sea and stepped into a vastly different world than the one she left. The slave ship delivered her to Boston Harbor, and then likely to a slave market behind the now historic Faneuil Hall. She was sold to the wealthy Wheatley family as their servant for life.
The Wheatley’s purchase of the six-year-old as a domestic servant meant her Wolof name was lost in the transaction. She became Phillis Wheatley; Phillis after the name of the slave ship that brought her to the colonies, and Wheatley after the family who now owned her.
The Wheatleys taught Phillis to read in order to serve them better, but God had something different and greater in mind. Everyone found her mind to be acute and brilliant. By the time she was nine years old, she had learned English and Latin fluently. God wanted her to hold something sharper and more penetrating than a broom; he was giving her languages, a quill pen, and an ink pot. What could he be up to here?
The first Bible verse she mastered in Latin and English was yet another one of God’s doors, this time to understanding his world and his Word:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. —Genesis 1:1
When God closes any door, he opens another; a door that he has opened cannot be closed, nor can a door he has closed be opened. Through this one verse, God opened and closed many other doors throughout this young woman’s brief life.
Providence Through God’s Word
In the Old South Congregationalist Meeting House, Boston’s wealthy elites sat in their reserved pews. Judges, merchants, politicians, and university professors occupied the bottom congregant boxes, while Phillis sat above them all in the segregated gallery. The galleries made the enslaved as invisible as possible to the wealthy people seated in the floor boxes, yet ironically, they were also seated somehow closer to the heavens.
God is wherever his people are, no matter their circumstances.
The Word of God doesn’t recognize social segregation, however. More truth about God flowed into Phillis’s ears, mind, and soul up way into the rafters. As Reverend Joseph Sewall preached on the Ethiopian eunuch from the book of Acts, she heard about an African outsider much like herself who rested from his desert travels with Scripture open on his lap. Like her, this biblical African was also hungry to know this God of redemption. The apostle Philip ran alongside his chariot to tell him he, too, was included in God’s story. The eunuch in Acts left Philip, rejoicing that he was included in something so much greater than himself. As Phillis heard his story, she rejoiced as well.
“Shall Africa’s sons forget the common God?” Phillis would later write. She was reaching back to Psalm 68:31, where Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God. There was the Ethiope, prophesied and fulfilled in God’s precious Word. If God welcomed this African eunuch into his kingdom with his full African-ness intact, then she too could be welcomed!
That’s a precious moment for us all, when we discover we’re not merely a footnote to God’s story but have been a part of it all along—more Providence! Soon Phillis was examined and baptized and joined the church as her own “first act of spiritual freedom.”
Phillis’s conversion is a witness to Providence and the Word. Scripture is not the private property of the powerful; it belongs to God alone and his truth goes where it will. It always reaches his beloved. The God who is sovereign over all things has made his Word sufficient; it is clear, rich, and available enough to reach, invite, and include a brilliant teenager high up in a slave gallery. God’s Word found its best target in the least likely vessel.
This is Providence, working through God’s Word.
Providence Works Through Ordinary People
In 1773 Phillis sailed to London. She had written her first book of poetry, and the world noticed. She was to be published! Her captors handed her the English language as a domestic tool, but the Lord crafted it into a transatlantic reputation for poetry and praise.
In London Phillis met the English attorney Granville Sharp. Sharp himself was famous for arguing the Somerset case that declared slavery unenforceable on English soil. Sharp was also a Christian who was trained in biblical Greek and Hebrew, and the two found much common ground in their love for freedom, theology, and ancient languages. Sharp drew up Phillis’s emancipation papers and, with the stroke of pens, God opened a new door: this time, to her freedom.
Publication and emancipation made 1774 her annus mirabilis: her “year of miracles.”
This is yet another way that providence works, through God’s common grace. God gave Phillis the ordinary mechanisms of human relationships and skill without waiting for her circumstances to be completely favorable. Even when the difficulties are still swirling around us, we can trust that God is already moving through them no matter how hostile or challenging they may appear. In fact, God had been moving in Phillis’s life since before Genesis 1:1, and he is still moving in ours today to display his glory to a broken world of sin.
God’s Providence in Evil Times
Although Phillis Wheatley lived a remarkable life, she yet died a hard and unremarkable death. She returned to the colonies as a free and published poetess just as the Revolutionary War erupted. Her international fame brought her to a short marriage. Her imperfect yet much-loved Wheatley family died one by one, and she herself died while giving birth to a second stillborn child.
On December 5, 1784, at just thirty years old, Phillis closed her eyes on Boston a final time. When they opened, she saw her Savior welcoming her home.
The exact spot where they laid her to rest has never been found. Yet God, in his infinite providence, preserved her first volume of poetry across more than 250 years. Her praise of him is still in print, and God made sure that her words and her soul survived the silence of an unmarked grave.
And where was God this whole time? Where he has always been. He was at the Door of No Return. He was in the rafters of the Old South Meeting House, where Phillis first saw herself in Christ’s story. He was in the hands of an English abolitionist who helped her secretly draw up freedom papers.
And Phillis knew he was the source of spiritual freedom and of everyone else in the world, including her captors. She wrote about God’s providence over her soul and over the worst episodes of her life, all to bring her to trust him in everything:
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
God is wherever his people are, no matter their circumstances. He promises never to leave them alone, and he will keep that promise forever. Even today, he is with his people in the Libyan deserts, in Indian brothels and brick kilns, in the back streets of trafficking in Atlanta, and over every voice crying the oldest question in the world. He promises that he’s always working to work things for their good and for his glory.
Where is God in evil times?
In his presence and in his providence, he is there; always and forever for his own.
K. A. Ellis is the author of The Story of Phillis Wheatley: The African Poet Who Called America to Christ.
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