Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
“Did you not hear me ask Sir Thomas about the slave trade last night?…There was such a dead silence.”
MANSFIELD PARK, Jane Austen
It is fitting in certain English novels
that there should be significant absences
in Bath or London, journeys of consequence
to the colonies, and banishments
to darkest Dorset or a coastal town.
It is appropriate too that there should be
rain of whatever kind falling frequently,
forcing protagonists and antagonists
to be housebound, introspective,
Enslaved in the Gambia or Senegal,
scholars surmise, she survived the nauseous
and violent bottom line of the
Triangular Trade to be bought aged eight
as a maid for his wife by John Wheatley,
merchant and tailor of British-ruled Boston,
a known progressive in education.
She was christened ‘Phillis’ after the slave ship
that took her childhood. She was prodigious,
and was removed from domestic duties.
Tutored by his daughter, at twelve she knew
Latin,
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – tale
of adultery and obsession –
was published in 1850. In the year
the Crimean War began, he became
the U.S. Consul in Liverpool,
a post gifted by his friend the President.
He did not like the job despite the fees
from the cargoes of cotton and molasses
hoisted ashore. Whether in a Hansom cab
home to his family in lodgings in the town,
on the steam ferry to the rented villa
in the gated park on the Wirral,
‘…sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments…’ TWEET, President Trump
In a letter to the New York Times three years
before the war, General Robert E. Lee
described slavery per se as ‘a moral
and political evil’ and, in the States,
‘a greater evil to the white man’
than the black. In 1857 Lee
had been his father-in-law’s executor.
George Custis had manumitted his slaves
on his death bed there and then but ‘no white man
was in the room’.
‘And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.’ DEUTERONOMY 12.3
‘Black deaths do not have a good press, especially when they occur in the custody of our custodians. The media leads the public to believe that our guardians can do no wrong. Racism leads them to believe that blacks can do no right. The silence of the custodial system is compounded by the silences of racism.’ DEADLY SILENCE: BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY,
‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe, and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ Francesco Petrarch
Somewhere near the estuary of the Don,
with its mudflats and meanders, north
of the Sea of Azov, and somewhere
near the Volga Delta, with its pelicans
and flamingos, north of the Caspian,
on the steppe lands are black rats and fleas
and yersinia pestis. The rats
like human warmth, and the fleas can leap.
THE COLSTON BUN
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
A SORT OF EDEN
A SORT OF EDEN
PHILLIS WHEATLEY: 1753-1784