Phillis Wheatley (1753 - 5 December 1784) was the first African-American writer to publish a book in the United States. Her Poems on Various Subjects was published in 1773, two years before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, and is seen as one of the earliest examples of African-American genre literature.
Born in what would become Senegal, later settled in what would become Gambia, she was captured and enslaved when she was seven years old. She was taken to America around 1760.

In Boston, the slave traders put it up for sale:
-She's seven years old! She'll make a good mare!
Many hands felt her, naked.

Eventually John and Susannah Wheatley of Boston, Massachusetts bought her and educated her. It was a merchant family who made sure that the intellectually gifted girl received a good education, including studies in Latin, Greek, mythology and history. She would soon master English, with her first poem published around 1767 at the age of 13, in the Newport Mercury.
Fue llamada Phillips, porque así se llamaba el barco que la trajo, y Wheatley, por ser el apellido de los compradores.

At the age of thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author.

At the age of twenty, Wheatley had to defend her literary ability in the courts. She was examined by a group of Boston intellectuals, including John Erving, the Reverend Charles Chauncey, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, and his lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver. She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some passages from the Bible, and she also had to swear that the poems she had written were not plagiarised. From a chair, she gave her long examination, until the court accepted her: she was a woman, she was black, she was a slave, but she was a poet.

They concluded that she was the author of the poems ascribed to her and signed a certificate which was published in the preface to her book of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published at Aldgate, London in 1773.

This was the first recognition in the history of the United States of intellectual equality between blacks and whites. A fact that seems insignificant nowadays, but which at the time was a revelation, and the spark that gave rise to a multitude of demands that asked for nothing more than something that fell under its own weight, the recognition of the same rights that, as a person, corresponded to them.
George Washington admired her poetry, even referring to it as her "great poetic genius". And if it was often characterised by its Christian content, it is because she was converted to this faith through John and Susannah Wheatley, her purchasers.

Phillis became a well-known writer. She travelled to England in 1773 with Nathaniel Wheatley and there she met a number of notables such as Benjamin Franklin, the Earl of Darthmouth and the Lord Mayor of London. In addition, he received a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost, Smollett's translation of Don Quixote, and Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon and famous abolitionist missionary, showed her support for him to continue publishing poems. That same year Phillis Wheatley returned to America, where she bought her freedom and published Poems of a Various Subjects, Religion and Moral.

After the death of John and Susannah Wheatley, Phillis married a black freedman named John Peters. After her husband deserted her, she performed domestic chores as a servant. Neither hard work nor her artistic ability would bring her prosperity, leading to her early death at the age of 31, poverty-stricken, and the death of her third child a few hours later.
Many of her poems are dedicated to famous personalities. She rarely mentions his own situation in the poems he writes. One of the few that deal with slavery is "About being brought from Africa to America":

About being brought from Africa to America

It was grace that brought me from my pagan land,
taught my ignorant soul to understand
that there is a God, that there is a Saviour too:
Once I neither sought nor knew of redemption.
Some view our dark race with a disdainful eye,
«Its colour is a diabolical landmark.»
Remember, Christians, blacks, as much as Cain,
They can be refined, and join the angelic train.

Imagination

Imagination! Who could sing of your might?
And who would describe the speed of your career?
Soaring through the air to find the radiant abode,
The empyrean palace of the thundering God,
On your wings we outstrip the wind,
And we left the rolling universe behind.
From star to star the mental eye wanders,
It measures the heavens and travels the upper regions;
There in a panorama we embrace the magnificent whole,
Or with new worlds we astonish the infinite soul.
Her poems are a continuous ode to death, which was ultimately where she placed her hopes for true freedom and a better world.

Behold your brother with the dead!
From slavery freed, the exultant spirit flies.
Smile in the grave, and soothe the raging pain.
In the most open regions fixes your longing gaze

Stories like this show that our genius is not restricted to our origin, where we are born, and that regardless of the difficulties we go through, or thanks to them, the millennial being within us springs forth, subtly evidencing the reality of reincarnation.

She was a woman, she was black, she was a slave, but she was a poet…