![]() ![]() As was customary at the time, she was given the surname of the family to whom she was in bondage. ![]() John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor and merchant of Boston bought the little girl from the slave market to be a personal servant to his wife, Susanna. Later, she was described as “a slender, frail female child, supposed to have been about seven years old at the time, from the circumstances of shedding her front teeth.” She arrived on a schooner, The Phillis, undoubtedly the source of her name. She was kidnapped as part of the slave trade as a young child and brought to North America, where she arrived on July 11, 1761. Phillis Wheatley (ca 1753 – December 5, 1784), born in Senegal/Gambia, Africa, was the first African-American poet and one of the first women to be published in colonial America. ![]()
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