The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters With the Founding Fathers.

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Basic Civitas Books, April 2003 $18.95, ISBN 0-465-02729-6

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wears a number of hats as a scholar, but none as impressively and consistently astonishing as that of a "literary detective or archeologist," particularly as it pertains to illuminating the significance of black women writers. Gates has been a tireless and imaginative excavator, providing the "missing pages of black history"--whether applying correctives to the omission of African American female authors of 19th-century slave narratives to the canon, recovering Harriet Wilson's Our Nig from the literary cemetery, or authenticating The Bondwoman's Narrative.

His latest project, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, continues this pursuit, though the short book is less a work of discovery than one of context, showing the poet's seminal role in the emergence of African American literature. Gates's treatise on Wheatley, which stems from his 2002 Jefferson Lecture, also soundly repudiates Thomas Jefferson's hostile indictment of her creativity and his notion that black Americans were not "capable of tracing or comprehending the investigations of Euclid."

Gates is by no means the first to explore Wheatley's ambivalent poetry or challenge Jefferson's conclusions. Several notable scholars, from James Weldon Johnson to Alice Walker, have weighed in on her couplets to either praise or to dismiss. Jefferson has long been taken to task for his racist remarks and practice, most eloquently by Benjamin Banneker, whom Gates fails to cite among his critics.

What Gates does that is remarkably new is the conflation of Wheatley and Jefferson, and how they, in their differences, helped to mold the black literary tradition. The Harvard professor opens his discourse with a dramatic setting where Wheatley, who at eight years of age was an African captive and who by 17 had mastered English, is before a panel of inquisitors to prove she is the author of a disputed passel of poems. Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the Reverend Samuel Mather and John Hancock were among the 18 men who sat in judgment of Wheatley's work that fall day in 1772.

"Essentially" Gates writes, "she was auditioning for the humanity of the entire African people." It was a splendid and successful audition, but she would have to go to England to get her book in print. Then the venerable Jefferson entered with his caustic denunciations. "Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry," Jefferson began in his assessment of Wheatley's poetry.

"Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but not poetry ... their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whatley (sic); but it could not produce a poet." Thus Jefferson, Gates retorts, saw Wheatley as merely a product of religion "of mindless repetition and imitation, without being the product of intellect, of reflection."

For the next several enlightening pages, Gates, in both a pithy and persuasive style, offers a litany of learned responses to Jefferson's critique, which, on the whole, had more to do with the refutation of his racial comments than with defending Wheatley's poetry. Add to this so-called founding father's relationship with Sally Hemings, and Jefferson's at traction is virtually guaranteed for generations. "If Wheatley stood for anything, it was the creed that culture was, could be, the equal possession of all humanity," Gates concludes.

Herb Boyd is a writer and anthologist who lives in Harlem.