"It allows me to interface with students a tad more serious about the imaginative arts. Somehow being in conversation with graduate students helps me to keep my chops going."

TRAGIC STORY

Jackson's latest project is a verse play about Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), a Gambian child enslaved at age 7 and purchased by wealthy Boston merchant John Wheatley. She was taught to read and write, and her 1773 volume, "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published 13 years after "An Evening Thought," a poem printed on Christmas 1760 and written by Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806), a Long Island slave. Plattsburgh State celebrates Black Poetry Day in Hammon's honor.

Jackson was surprised to learn of Wheatley's missing manuscript and thought he would write a novel centering on that.

"She wrote these poems and attempted to sell them as a means of taking care of her and her children when things became really tough. Her husband (John Peters, a free black grocer) was sent to debtor's prison, and she died while he was in prison."

At the time, she worked as a servant in a Boston orphanage. Wheatley was freed from slavery Oct. 18, 1773.

"She caught some disease. Her daughter died, and she died on the same day. It's a pretty tragic story. She was one of America's early literary stars. She was greeted by British gentry. In fact, they were responsible for getting her first book published."

Once hailed by Gen. George Washington, she faded into obscurity after the Revolutionary War. She and her child were buried in an unmarked grave.

"That's a side of Phillis Wheatley we don't hear. We hear about the child prodigy, the young lady stripped of her native culture and her almost Herculean abilities to adapt to this country and learn the language, myths and absorb the Bible and write with a kind of authority that was unheard even for the most educated Boston, male population. She was somewhat of a freakish oddity to Bostonian or New England's cultural and political elite."

Wheatley appeared before a white all-male panel whose members asked her questions about her poetry to authenticate it.

"I'm curious about her last years mainly because there is a story of triumph, of course, in her early years, but there is also tragedy there," Jackson said. "I think we need to explore her life a little more to get at the complexity of literacy, freedom and race in this country."

rcaudell@pressrepublican.com