The Age of Phillis. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      Absent, scholar’s gaze.

LOST LETTER #2: PHILLIS WHEATLEY, BOSTON, TO SAMSON OCCOM, LONDON

       March 10, 1766

      Dear Most Reverend Sir:

      In the name of our Benevolent Savior

      Jesus Christ, I bring you tall greetings.

      I have never sat with an Indian before.

       [i write as i am instructed the white

       lady’s hand patting my shoulder]

      My mistress says your people are savages,

      that I should pray for your tarnished souls.

      She says that once I was a savage, too.

       [i hurt for my yaay and baay and oh

       the mornings of ablutions and millet]

      Mistress says that beasts in my homeland

      might have devoured me, before God’s mercy—

      I enclose my unworthy verse,

      and I pray for your heathen brethren.

      Prayer makes my mistress very happy.

       [the white lady tells me i am lucky

       i was saved from my parents

       who prayed to carvings and beads

       she says my yaay and baay are pagans

       though i am allowed to keep loving them

       do you pray for your playmates are they yet

       alive i do not know where mine were taken

       on that day i am reminded to forget]

      Your humble servant,

      Phillis

LOST LETTER #3: SAMSON OCCOM, LONDON, TO PHILLIS WHEATLEY, BOSTON

       August 24, 1766

      Dear Little Miss Phillis:

      I was happy to receive the kind

      favors of your letter and poem,

      across this wide water that God created.

       [child you are no more savage than me

       and what i am is a hungry prayer]

      I teach my young ones from Exodus,

      that God can be an angry man

      and vengeful to the disobedient.

       [i teach them to hunt and fish in case renewed

       times come i teach them to carve upon

       the birch the stories of our ancient line

       one of my daughters is near your age i worry

       about her she knows the words to our people’s

       songs longs to sing in the day but her mother

       and i stay her tongue we do not wish danger]

      Remember that strict submission

      is the watchword of any Christian girl.

      Stay mild and consider your masters’ rules.

      An Unworthy Servant of Christ,

      Samson Occom

SUSANNAH WHEATLEY TENDS TO PHILLIS IN HER ASTHMATIC SUFFERING

       Boston, January 1767

      When you own a child,

      can you treat her the same?

      I don’t mean when you birth her,

      when you share a well of blood.—

      This is a complicated space.

      There is slavery here.

      There is maternity here.

      There is a high and a low

      that will last centuries.

      Every speck floating in this room

      must be considered.

      I don’t want to simplify

      what is breathing—

      choking—

      in this room, though there are those

      of you who will demand that I do.

      Either way I choose, I’m going

      to lose somebody.

      I want to be human,

      to assume that because Susannah

      had three offspring who died as children—

      the details gone

      about coughs that clattered

      on, rashes that scattered across

      necks or chests,

      air that did not expel,

      never exhaled to cool tongues—

      that Susannah would be desperate

      to cling to a new little girl.

      Her need to care, her fear,

      would rise into Psalms.

      When Phillis’s face

      was not her mirror,

      would that have mattered?

      When water did not drench

      Phillis’s hair, but lifted it high

      into kinks,

      would that have mattered?

СКАЧАТЬ