Never mind that controversial, beginning line of her poem “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land . . .” Wheatley is much more than that. She proved something to white people about us: that we could read and think and write—and damn it, we could feel, no matter what the racists believed. We already knew those things about ourselves. I’m pretty positive about that, but during her time, philosophers were arranging the “nations” with Africans at the bottom, while other Europeans measured black people’s skulls alongside those of orangutans to determine if the two species were kissing cousins.
