Yet I’m waiting for someone to write a more emotionally charged book about Wheatley, one that would take into account her pre-American existence. Although she was a little girl when she arrived in Boston, and although the Wheatleys were “kind” to her, she did have African birth parents. Her life did not begin in America or with slavery. She had a free lineage that did not include the Wheatleys. If nothing else, a treatment of precolonial West African history, along with the eighteenth-century culture of that region, would be an appropriate and respectful introduction to Wheatley’s life in
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