Divine Details: A Legacy with Teeth
Like an endowed chair, but you were chained to it. Like a long-term artist residency with minimal chores and access to an historic New England house except, you belong. Except you cannot belong. I often think about you Phillis Wheatley, first of our kind, the only reason we remember the name of a particular slaveholding family Wheatley, a particular profitable slaveship Phillis, and whoever the boat was named after. You were named after the boat, and the family that bought you before your front teeth came in. Those who would imagine themselves as your benefactors, make themselves more interesting than their neighbors because dinner at their house meant you, not only serving the table, but creating poetry, performing on the spot, offering hosts and guests alike a chance at immortality. And they live now through your words. Like the names on buildings, endowed funds or attached to the salaries of my mentors. Like the names of the fellowships some of us apply for every year. Names that ring with our desire to be chosen. I think of you, first of our kind. Arriving without your front teeth. Which means what? Are your baby teeth among the bones of those who did not survive the journey with you, washed out of the hold with so much blood and matter?
Yesterday I found out that one of my teeth is dead. Way in the back, a molar, like those teeth you didn’t have yet, when John and Susanah named you when they claimed you on the dock. It will stay there in my mouth though. What they call a natural implant, deep rooted and about to undergo a root canal. No, I don’t have dental insurance anymore. That was only for the short time that I was a named chair at a midwestern university. A time when I was far from home and cold. I know you know enough about that. How after Susanah died and freed you, you could not afford the heat to live in a harsh New England climate. And no one would publish your second book without their esteemed names to frame your bio, your biology. You couldn’t afford anymore to get sick. But you did get sick again and died. Free. First of our kind to follow love, be the brave the first, the free the independent scholar. I love you. And I wish I knew your name.
I made this collage, a revision of the frontispiece from your book. You know my books too have the name of a slaveholder on the front inside page. What happens next? I wanted to make your bonnet into a feathered crown and so I did. I wanted to make your writing plume plush and purple so I did that too. I wanted you to have so much more than the bare minimum. When I was seven years old I played you in the Black history month play at a school that was all white except for me. They put gray construction paper chains around my wrists. I made you this collage with scissors and with glue. I put black glitter all around your face. I offered every form of printed fabric, like there could be a relationship to print that was worthy of you and us, that was soft and supported you, a fabric that linked you to me by choice, that supported you as if you could be at home. This collage (I keep changing the title of it) is a ceremony where I insist, with not a little bit of desperation that I can rename your chair, reclaim the place you sit from thieves. What is your name?
The frame of your frontispiece portrait says who owns you, calls you servant, I want to serve you and I want to break you out. So the one place where I break the frame it is with teeth. Yes, the same teeth you didn’t have. With teeth no one can see. The smile of a of a young black girl, but her mouth is closed. And I pray that no one steals whatever she might say to call themselves the coolest white person in history. And her smile, let it break the frame that now encircles you. Closed mouth, the smile of knowing something no one knows, and if you tell me I won’t tell them either. This smile can hold your freely given name.
P.S. Prints of my collage for the artist provisionally known in capture as Phillis Wheatley and 20 other ancestral collages are now available in multiple sizes as an ongoing fundraiser for the transformation of independent scholarship into communal abundance known as Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Click on the images below to see the range.
And Thursday is our workshop inspired by June Jordan’s Living Room on Housing as a Human Right. Relevant to artists and to all of us. The artist provisionally known in capture as Phillis Wheatley died as Phillis Peters, a black mother in unlivable housing. June Jordan’s essay “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” was the subject of my first ever essay in college. You should read it. And sign up for the workshop here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/living-rooma-writing-workshop-on-housing-as-a-human-right-tickets-89969484149
