Copyright © 2022 by Danyel Smith

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Roc Lit 101, a joint venture between Roc Nation LLC and One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

One World is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Roc Lit 101 is a trademark of Roc Nation LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Smith, Danyel, author.

Title: Shine bright : a very personal history of black women in pop / Danyel Smith.

Description: New York : Roc Lit 101, 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020057494 (print) | LCCN 2020057495 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593132715 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593132722 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African American women musicians. | Popular music—United States—History and criticism. | African American singers. | Women singers—United States.

Classification: LCC ML82 .S615 2021 (print) | LCC ML82 (ebook) | DDC 782.42164092/2 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020057494

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020057495

Ebook ISBN 9780593132722

oneworldlit.com

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Michael Morris

Cover images: Larry Washburn/Getty Images (record), MicrovOne/Getty Images (face), NSA Digital Archive/Getty Images (flowers)

ep_prh_6.0_148350782_c0_r0

INTRO

PROLOGUE

PART I

THE DIXIE CUPS

LEONTYNE + DIONNE + CISSY

MISS ROSS

GLADYS

DONNA

MARILYN + PEACHES

STEPHANIE + THE WIZ

JODY + DENIECE

PART II

WHITNEY + ARETHA

PART III

JANET

MARIAH

OUTRO

GRATITUDE

NOTES

IMAGE CREDITS

INDEX

Delroy Russell’s Phyllis Wheatley (linoleum print, 2008)

INTRO

My love of music is intense. My commitment to it is steadfast. This project is an attempt to figure out why.

When I talk about Black women in music—at colleges, on my Black Girl Songbook show, to my husband, my friends—it’s normal for me to weep. My voice breaks, I’m looking up because my eyes are brimming. Someone hands me a tissue. It’s dramatic but it’s real. There are no reasons.

I’m asked, Why does Tina Turner matter? Why is Mary J. Blige important? and my answers are passionate and learned because I want credit to be given where credit is due. I weep because I want Black women who create music to be known and understood, as I want to be known and understood. For so long, little that I have accomplished has felt quite mine. When folks show me love, like at a party celebrating my birthday, those glowing candles, lighting up my face, look like doom. I’ve spent a career—as a reporter, editor, producer, author, host—speaking to Black women who feel the same. But we all love music. Please read this the way Martha Wash sings it in 1990’s Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now): the music is my life.

It goes back to my ashy-knees era. My climbing-plum-trees era. The 1970s in Oakland, California. Me in two long braids and a key on a ball chain around my neck.

Why speak, now, on those Kodachrome days? Because behind my picture-day smiles is a lust for loudness. I go to therapy because I still clench my fists when receiving feedback. I still smell the Vitapointe vat, and eggs frying in oleo. Hear a bus braking out front? It’s a reminder that I don’t need a boyfriend to, as Aretha Franklin sings, go someplace far. Recorded music? That I chose, or turned up, or turned off? Back then, it was a bright and rare thrill, up there with holding a sparkler. I liked to sing school songs with my school friends, but the real songs, on the radio or on the record player, were breathtaking. Most of the time they were sung by adult Black women—even when they weren’t.

Played by my mother on a boxy portable with the speaker in the top, my earliest favorite records were 45s. We didn’t have a stereo system with turntable, amplifier, eight-track player, and standing speakers. And as my mother didn’t yet drive, my sister and I didn’t hear a lot of radio. On the portable we listened to a lot of Jean Knight’s Mr. Big Stuff, and King Floyd’s Groove Me. My sister is a blur of hazel eyes and overalls. My mother is haze itself, and she is the DJ.

A granddaughter of Louisiana, my mother may have been responding to the fact that Knight, Floyd, and producer Wardell Quezergue all hailed from New Orleans. Both Mr. Big Stuff and Groove Me were huge pop hits, loved by millions of Americans, and listeners around the world. Both songs were recorded on the same day in 1970, in a Mississippi studio, in the very same session. I didn’t know what horns were on Mr. Big Stuff, but I liked them. And the background singers had me from the first Oh-oh ye-ah.

I’d expect the line to arrive, and it would. Oh-oh ye-ah. They sang it the exact same way each time. I wanted the song to go on longer than its two and a half minutes. And when the arm with the needle floated into the shiny blank part of the vinyl, I wanted to hear it again. This itch is in every wise definition of pop: young people want it over and over.

Most of the recorded voices I heard when I was a kidlet were men singing alto and soprano, vocal ranges associated with women. From Eddie Kendricks to Frankie Valli to Philip Bailey, it was the age of the falsetto. It was also the age of me riding a Big Wheel, and reading our neighbor’s Archie comics. Unless I saw a man singing I pretty much assumed a woman was singing. At the age of, say, six, I could not believe that the person singing I’ll Try Something New—I will build you a castle / With a tower so high / It reaches the moon—was a man called Smokey Robinson, with his group of Miracles.

My brain backflipped. First of all, what names! Smokey on a man and not a bear. And why was Smokey the Man singing like a woman? Surely he had his own male voice. I did like the song, though. There was talk of playing every day on the Milky Way. But I needed more rhyming and stories and promises of fun.

I got it in morning care at Bella Vista Elementary, where my mother dropped us before her shift as an admin in the dental area of the county hospital. I was one of the free-ish breakfast kids, a gnawer of cantaloupe, down to the rind. Our morning-care teachers taught us to sing the Stylistics’ Betcha by Golly, Wow, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s The Candy Man, and B. J. Thomas’s Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. In memory, these teachers are soft. They smell like themselves. I can’t recall their race at all.

We kids held sticky hands and sang. The vibrations in my body flowed through to my friends. We saw approval in the faces of our teachers when we were in unison on a series of notes: Write your name across the sky / Anything you ask I’ll try. I literally had no idea what I was singing about and did not care. When we sang, the happiness was as intense as any I’d felt.

Our little chorus of eight or ten often walked in a loose line around to what we called the old folks’ home and sang for people who had been alive since the Great Depression and the turn of the twentieth century. When we sang they leaned in, desperate, or overcome. I had great-grandparents, so I wasn’t afraid, even when some of the old folks reached toward us, as if we were not quite real.

My sister and I spent most weekends with our great-grandparents. The three of them were in their early seventies, and they were active. Big Lottie and Dorson—they were the parents of my grandmother Little Lottie and my great-aunt Betty (and of my great-aunt Marjorie, who died before I was born). They took us to Mass, gave us the run of the house and yard, and when it was time for Arthur Duncan to tap dance, sat us in front of The Lawrence Welk Show. Dorson had worked on passenger trains, usually in the club car. Big Lottie had been a housekeeper in the historically all-white Piedmont area of Oakland.

Dorothy, on my paternal grandfather’s side, fed us pot roast and rice, ran a daycare out of her home, and lived a musical life rich with Adventist hymns and Johnny Cash’s Blackish gospel. Mother Dorothy had worked mostly as a maid. Her husband, my great-grandfather Pedro, was a Filipino immigrant who’d worked as a houseman and chauffeur. He died the year I was born.

It took a village, in the innocent time when the tall people were watchful and sinless, to raise my sister and me. Our clothes were handmade—and embroidered and appliquéd. Our afternoons were spent dodging bees near the red rosebushes, and drinking apple juice highballs with Big Lottie. At Mother Dorothy’s, there was a stone birdbath to monitor, and hydrangeas to deconstruct.

On a dare from my grandpa Dorson, I listened with him to the entirety of game 7 of the 1972 World Series. He was almost blind from diabetes, so the radio was his domain. I loved him for not being surprised I was fascinated by people named Catfish, Blue Moon, and Rollie Fingers. Loved him for talking me through the narrative of the first six games. And when the A’s won, it was the first time I felt like a part of a hometown. I’m from Oakland; we can have wild hair and strange nicknames. We win big. And we do it on the radio.

Which I was starting to get into. When I finally heard Betcha by Golly, Wow on a car radio, I was psyched to already know all the words. The lady was singing so sweetly about Candyland appearing each time someone smiled. Another household favorite was the Stylistics’ I’m Stone in Love with You, featuring Russell Thompkins, Jr., on lead vocals. Thompkins is still known for his countertenor and for his falsetto, the male ranges similar to the female contralto of singers like Evelyn Champagne King or Phyllis Hyman, or the mezzo-soprano of Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, or Donna Summer. As literal as I was back then about lyrics and musical mood, when Thompkins sang I’m just a man / An average man / Doing everything the best I can, it didn’t override the fact of the voice sounding like a woman’s. I felt concretely that she was singing to me.

When I was eight, after some chaperoned trial runs, my sister and I walked the six blocks to Bella Vista by ourselves. I knew to wait for the green light before crossing, and to look both ways even so. I could also neatly make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I read everything I saw, and was known as Chatty Cathy, especially about music. But I of course didn’t yet know that falsetto is from the Italian falso: false. Didn’t know that in Elizabethan times, women were not allowed to perform onstage with men, so young male performers, dressed in women’s costumes, acted and sang women’s parts. These male teenagers were paid the least of all the actors. We need you here but don’t want you here was the message.

From the Shakespearean stage to pop music’s global arenas, the story has not changed. Pop music is not now, nor was it historically, written for bass or baritone voices. Michael Jackson, Michael Bolton, George Michael, Prince, Bruno Mars, Bob Marley, Tevin Campbell, Paul McCartney, Sam Smith, Usher Raymond, Johnny Mathis, Justin Bieber—all tenors, most often singing in soprano and in falsetto. The bottom-heavy voices of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Nat King Cole, Bill Withers, Eddie Vedder, Nate Dogg, and Frank Sinatra are actually exceptions. Throughout pop history, it is the rich, high, strong, womanly voice that is the prize.

I also assumed the Stylistics’ songs were being sung by a Black woman because I was a small Black woman, and because the people around me were mostly Black women. Who else but a Black woman would lead me, or at least take me on trial runs?

My young life didn’t include a lot of media. I have vague memories of Denise Nicholas on Room 222. Out of Chicago, Soul Train was syndicated to seven cities in 1971, but Oakland was not one of them. In second and third grade, I was being haunted by Highlights magazine fables and zipping through Roald Dahl novels. I was playing under clotheslines out back of our apartment building. Trying to grow radishes in the hard soil along the driveway. Searching couch cushions for wayward hamsters.

Despite what contemporary documentaries about 1970s culture will have you believing, Black music, even big hits like Groove Me and Mr. Big Stuff, were not just always wafting from grocery-store speakers. Blues, soul, R&B, and Black gospel were most often relegated to the backs of record stores, if they were heard at all. Black music has always had to fight for the credit it deserves for the massive impact it’s had on American culture. My family was at the forefront, in Northern California, of selling folks the sounds they craved.

My great-aunt Elizabeth Betty Reid and her husband, my great-uncle Melbourne Reid, sold race records out of their garage in Richmond, California, in the early 1940s. That enterprise morphed into Berkeley’s beloved Reid’s Records, launched in 1945. Specializing in blues, R&B, gospel, and choir supplies, the record store was one of the oldest record stores in the United States, and, according to author, critic, and editor Lee Hildebrand, certainly the oldest in the Bay Area. Reid’s was not a glamorous business. Aunt Betty and Uncle Mel often protested unfair retail policies in what was then a young music industry. Reid’s finally succumbed in February 2019 to racial retail politics, music streaming, and the gentrification of California’s East Bay Area.

In addition to the Berkeley store, Betty and Mel had a Reid’s stall in Oakland’s Swan’s Market back when Swan’s stayed crowded with an endless variety of people going about the business of buying my aunt’s records, purchasing linguiça and cabbage, or, as in the case of my mother, flipping through paper packets of ladies’ dress and children’s clothes patterns. Candy proprietors handed my sister balloons. We were allowed juicy pickles in waxed paper. Betty—in her nineties an author, a California Woman of the Year, and our nation’s oldest park ranger—is our late grandmother’s sister, and as those two wavered between impasse and hostility, we took Gramma’s side in a long war about which we grasped little. I barely saw Betty or our cousins our entire lives.

In 1989, Lee Hildebrand assigned me my first paid story—a live review of Natalie Cole, who was playing Oakland’s Paramount Theatre. I don’t know if Lee knew I was Betty’s niece. That I recall, he never spoke to me about her. But in a town as small as Oakland when Oakland was a Black city, it would be odd if he didn’t know. It also seems like Lee, a culture reporter in love with nuance, might know that our family of groups of sisters was not as close as it could seem. My sister worked the counter at Reid’s in Berkeley when she was in her early twenties. We were roommates at that time, and I never visited her there.

When I called my mother about the Cole job, she was like, That’s great! How much are they paying you? I had to call Lee back to inquire. At the time I was ringing up Clinique at Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco. Second job was working at a nonprofit serving youth parolees. I’d dropped out of UC Berkeley. My sister was a part-time counselor at a Head Start day camp. We were on and off food stamps. We had cute boyfriends, talked our way into nightclubs, and knew all the dope dealers. We got our nails done at hood-ass MacArthur-Broadway mall. Got guys to drive us to the City for no gas money. Once, we stole a refrigerator. We figured shit out.

But Raquel and I had few plans beyond next month’s rent and groceries. We didn’t even talk about having or not having plans or goals—that’s how free we were. That’s how indigo deep we were into a long post-high-school era, aswirl as it was in our blues, sandalwood incense, and survival. That’s how broke we were. That’s how little we had to lose.

I would have drowned without Sade’s When Am I Going to Make a Living. Without sweet bitters from Vesta (who died alone in a hotel room of a bona fide enlarged heart), without Anita Baker’s tenacious middle-class optimism about love. Caron Wheeler of Soul II Soul advised us to keep on moving. Don’t stop, she sang in 1989, like the hands of time.

The Natalie Cole assignment was a beacon, though. My life was shining back at me from the future. Not so long after the show, the girl with the ashy knees and a key on a chain around her neck became music editor of SF Weekly. Then a weekly columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and a monthly columnist at Spin. In a new marriage, I moved to New York to be rhythm and blues editor at Billboard, and to escape both the warmth and the cold comforts of the city I was born in.

I loved Oakland. I wrote some for the Black-owned Oakland Post, but they had very little money. The Oakland Tribune had no interest in me. And neither did the San Francisco Chronicle. In my untrained way, I had tried to be a journalist. But I had no bachelor’s degree. No journalism school. No network. No friends in high or even medium places. No internship at a proper daily or local television station. No membership in the National Association of Black Journalists. I truly just did not know how to act.

I was a music-and-culture writer. A hip-hop specialist when the mainstream was skeptical at best and hostile at worst to the art form. If Bill Adler—then Run-DMC’s publicist—had not recommended me for the Billboard job, my come-up would have been even more nontraditional.

And while there, I also started reviewing shows and albums—from Tina Turner to Ice Cube to Neil Diamond to Kenneth Babyface Edmonds—for The New York Times. Then started work as the second music editor at Vibe, and the first Black one. To say I became editor in chief of Vibe in 1994—and the first woman and the first Black person to have the job, and the first woman to run a national music magazine—is a criminal abbreviation. And I mostly trained myself. Editing people’s term papers for money, learning nonfiction writing from Dr. Charles Muscatine, blasting Janet Jackson’s Miss You Much at obscene volumes while crossing the old Bay Bridge, stomping on a San Francisco pier to Public Enemy’s Can’t Truss It—it all prepared me well for heading the premiere hip-hop and culture magazine of the 1990s and 2000s. I was a journalist. I had been journaling since childhood. I performed fearlessness from memory. I led genius teams. I wrote my ass off. I was everywhere. I loved it. It wore me out.

The girl who created The 5th Grade Daily Arrow (that one handwritten edition), who was page-two editor of her junior high school newspaper, The Far & Near, and photography editor of her high school yearbook, went on to become an editor at large at Time Inc., and then editor in chief of Vibe again, editor of Billboard magazine, and a senior editor of culture at ESPN.

I wrote two novels, both published by Random House. I’ve written for everyone from The New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone to Essence to Elle. I have been to over a thousand live musical events. I haven’t paid for music since I was twenty-five. I didn’t just edit a magazine that relentlessly covered Death Row Records. I knew boys who are in San Quentin State Prison as we speak. On death row. Boys who have been there since before Natalie Cole played the Paramount that night. I knew girls who rode and, in the crossfire, died.

I didn’t have my BA or MFA in hand until I was in my late thirties. Like so many of us, I bounced between achievement and self-stigmatizing sadness. Imposter syndrome and impulsive bravery. I’ve lost months at a time, even years or more, to rigorously planned self-sabotage, and the ensuing self-beatdowns.

I’ve loved and supported men who loved and resented me. I knew too much. Talked too much. I had a golden touch. My life was easy. Why wasn’t I thinner? You quietly ain’t shit. Please come back. You make me feel like less of a man. You’re the only one I really respect. You don’t need me. You’re going to die alone.

I was fortified by songs like Erykah Badu’s Next Lifetime, Mary J. Blige’s Seven Days, and Janet Jackson’s I Get Lonely. When Badu sings (and co-writes), See, it ain’t nothing wrong with dreaming, she’s talking about a guy she longs for. She’s also, in this most luminous of her songs, naming the whole of my creative life. I’m weeping right now, reading this aloud to my husband of sixteen years. It can still seem like I’m doing too much when I talk about myself. When more truly, I am rarely doing enough. Shine Bright is the name of this book. It is also a mission statement, and a command.

Ten cents a word, Lee Hildebrand said when I finally called him back, asking about a fee. It was 1988. His voice left no room for negotiation.

I turned up the volume on Cole’s second album, 1976’s Natalie.

I was on my way.

PROLOGUE

Phillis the Precursor

It’s not the way it should be / And heaven knows / It’s not the way it could be

—FROM 1978’S HEAVEN KNOWS, CO-WRITTEN AND RECORDED BY DONNA SUMMER

A kidnapped child stands on Boston’s Beach Street Wharf. The girl is eight, nearly nude, and has just stepped from a small Massachusetts slave ship called The Phillis. Some recall the child as seven. In any case, she is half-covered in a piece of dirty carpet. This is July 1761, fifteen years before the American Revolution.

I have imagined this girl so many times. My sixth-grade teacher told me about Phillis Wheatley, this child who was responsible for herself. A victim not allowed to be a victim. I used to dream about Phillis as a girl when I was a girl. When I dream of her now, she’s an adult. I know it’s Phillis because she arrives in profile, in her bonnet, like in the famous etching. And even though I never see the whole woman, I know I’m a part of her story. The essence of Phillis is strong in American music. I hear echoes of her voice streaming from speakers more than 250 years after she was born.

Phillis is a first. She’s the model. The archetype of Black woman genius. A singer, with all that title conjures. And a composer of song. I relate to her lack of protection. And loneliness. Her survival instincts. Her belief, under grim circumstances, in love, and in herself. Phillis’s urge to perform truths before the masses—to be seen and heard—is as familiar as a sister’s scent. She literally keeps me up at night. And I know Phillis sees me.

—

Originally packed with ninety-five humans—Ghanaian, Gambian, Senegalese, Fula, and Muslim are among the descriptors—The Phillis arrived with seventy-five. Timothy Fitch of Massachusetts sold the sickly child to tailor John Wheatley, as a gift for his wife. Susanna Wheatley was mourning the death of a daughter about the same age.

The new baby slave is assigned light work. She is taught English and Latin and, as she gets older, is given, among other materials, a Bible and a book of poems by Alexander Pope. Blessed is he who expects nothing, this girl might well have read, with resignation and resistance, for he shall never be disappointed. The girl slave is referred to over the centuries as precocious. Well.

She carried for her short life the name of the vessel that transported her unprotected self across the Atlantic, a ship on which 21 percent of the cargo died of smallpox, fevers, suffocation, bloody infections of the intestines, exhaustion, and who knows what-all violent and sadistic else. They frequently sing, said a mate who sailed on four voyages to Africa in the 1760s and ’70s. Lamentations. Communications. The men and the women answering each other. But what is the subject of their songs I cannot say.

Phillis Wheatley was basically a second grader on a sea basket of Middle Passage horrors. So perhaps trauma contributed to her sass. Or maybe her precociousness was in response to the casual cruelty of being named after the vessel of her terrors. As to her writing, John Wheatley said in a letter, her own curiosity led her to it. Little wonder.

In 1773, the year Sarah Sally Hemings was born into slavery on Thomas Jefferson’s slave-run Virginia tobacco farm, Bostonian Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is published in London. Slaves in Massachusetts were beginning to individually petition the colony’s General Court for freedom—or, in the case of a slave known to history as Felix, to pose the end of slavery altogether. We have no Property, Felix wrote. No Wives. No Children. We have no City. No Country. But we have a Father in Heaven, and we are determined.

It’s no surprise, then, that even with a hard press from John and Susanna, Boston publishers refused to print the slave Phillis Wheatley’s work. And regardless of Felix’s efforts, there were still ninety-two years until emancipation. Generations. Harriet Tubman’s grandparents were likely not yet born.

Yet the slender book, a kind of greatest hits of work Phillis had published in Massachusetts newspapers, is a huge success. The book features a pristine drawing of Phillis in a stylish bonnet and wide-collared day dress, sitting at a round desk. She has a book, a quill, an inkwell, and paper, and she looks thoughtfully into the distance.

The image is that of an artist and intellect. Even with the caption Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston, the illustration is radical, and elegant. What was known as society, in both England and the American colonies, loved Phillis Wheatley’s work. A young and graceful Black girl who spoke truths in the language of her oppressors.

Imagination! who can sing thy force? This is what the young slave was writing, and performing in parlors and at fashionable salons. Or who describe the swiftness of thy course? Swift indeed. By the age of twenty, Phillis’s childhood frailty had become a chronic asthmatic condition. She was sent with the Wheatley’s son Nathaniel, Phillis’s young master, to London. Her trip back across the Atlantic was partly for her health—sea air had been prescribed by Susanna. With regard to her work, the trip was to be promotional. With regard to her quarters, and the slave-to-master relationship with Nathaniel, little is known.

On her literary award tour, Phillis arrives in London a year after the Somerset v. Stewart decision declared that slave owners could not legally compel their slaves to return to the colonies. And the thirteen in America—working their way toward a Tea Party in Phillis’s adopted hometown—were getting restless. All this had to be on her mind as she performed her poetry among London’s literate classes. She is fêted. She is lifted—by her work and perseverance and Blackness—to success. One of the very first of what will become the religiously chronicled and revered firsts of African American history, Phillis Wheatley is the first published African American poet in America. In London, her legal status is decried by progressive whites and free Blacks alike: A genius in bondage.

A slave in fact. Phillis was in Europe living the kind of temporary freedom from slave-based American Blackness that would be experienced by so many Black American artists in the coming centuries. Included among her creative progeny would be the singer and songwriter Donna Summer. Summer fled Black Boston’s gospel circuit for Germany on the promise of performing in a rock opera. Two hundred years after Phillis, in the 1970s, Summer felt the same need to leave in order to find freedom—the Me Decade was not meant for the Black Me. Even in the wake of the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, Black pop performers were rarely allowed narcissistic introspection and badassery, let alone unabashed individualism, until a decade later, in hip hop.

—

This motherless child, Phillis, reportedly had one memory of her mother in Ghana/Gambia/Senegal. It was of water being poured over her, as if in a bath, or a ceremony. Perhaps this image was a dream, a notion. Surely it was a lifeline.

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung / Whence flow these wishes for the common good / By feeling hearts alone best understood / I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat.

For six weeks in London, while it may well have felt like the fish were jumping, being owned by her traveling companion had to curdle her soul.

Even as she tore from one appointment to the next, through filthy London with its theaters and hot air balloons—London with crowds so thick that maybe she could just…blend. How might Phillis have dreamt of losing herself among the servants and pickpockets and sales boys, among the pig carcasses, and silk shops. What if, she may have wondered, if I could just stay here, and be me.

She might have—she would have—left behind the biblical influences and the yoke of Alexander Pope had she her life, however terrifying, as her own. In every human breast, Phillis wrote in a letter, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance. These were slave days, though, even in England.

And in Boston, Susanna was ill. Phillis returned to the colonies earlier than scheduled. The colonies were also about to be at war with the Crown. By some reports, Phillis negotiated for her freedom before she returned to the American colonies. Some say it had long been planned for Phillis to be given her freedom on the death of her senior owners.

In any case, Phillis secures her freedom from the Wheatleys upon Susanna’s death, and begins work as a seamstress. In 1778, Phillis marries the handsome and educated John Peters—a man described as a lawyer, a physician, and most often as a free Black grocer. He is also described, as if he were white and free, as being unable to settle in any vocation.

What vocations were available to John Peters? The job of a Black person in that era was to be a slave. Anything else was criminal. Not much is known about his and Phillis’s courtship, but that there was one, and that it led to marriage is a kind of miracle. What is known is that the couple lived in great poverty. It is often reported that Peters deserted Phillis when she was pregnant with their third child. Their other two children had died in infancy.

Other historians make an important distinction: that Peters was just as