Oh my dear friend... I'm so glad you're here with me again. After our time with Hans Denck, I've been thinking about what it means to speak truth when the world isn't quite ready to hear it. Denck believed the inner light could reach anyone---that divine truth didn't require permission from authorities or institutions to find a willing heart. He trusted something quiet and persistent, something that worked beneath the surface of power.
Today I want to show you another voice that emerged when almost no one believed it could. Not a theologian or a reformer, but a young woman whose very existence asked questions the world around her desperately wanted to avoid. She didn't argue. She didn't petition. She simply wrote---with such undeniable skill that even those who wanted to dismiss her had to pause and reconsider what they thought they knew about human capacity.
Her name was Phillis Wheatley, and she carried a light forward through one of history's darkest corridors. Come walk with me.
I remember standing in that room in Boston, watching eighteen distinguished men arrange themselves around a young Black woman who had been summoned to prove she was human enough to write poetry.
It was 1772, and the air felt heavy with something more than summer heat. These were not minor figures---the governor of Massachusetts sat among them, along with ministers, magistrates, and John Hancock himself. They had gathered for an examination, though they would have called it a verification. Phillis Wheatley, barely twenty years old, stood before them with a manuscript of poems bearing her name.
The question they needed answered: Could she really have written them?
It seems almost absurd now, doesn't it? Gathering the most powerful men in Boston to interrogate a young woman about whether her mind was capable of composing verse. But the absurdity reveals the stakes. If she had written these poems---with their classical references, their elegant couplets, their engagement with Milton and Pope and Homer---then something fundamental about their world was wrong.
I watched her face as they questioned her. There was no defiance in her expression, but there was something quietly steady. She had lived her entire American life proving she could do what others insisted was impossible. This was simply another afternoon of the same work.
They asked their questions. She answered. And when it was done, they signed a document attesting that yes, she had written the poems. Yes, her mind had done this.
What they didn't understand---what they couldn't have understood---was that in that moment, they were also signing something else. A testament that would outlive all of them. Proof that would wait patiently in history's archive until the world was ready to read it properly.
Phillis Wheatley was born around 1753 in West Africa---likely in present-day Gambia or Senegal, though we'll never know for certain. She remembered the sunrise. Years later, she would write of her mother pouring out water to greet the morning, a small detail that survived the Middle Passage when almost everything else was taken from her.
She was seven, maybe eight years old, when she was captured and forced onto a slave ship called the Phillis. When she arrived in Boston Harbor in 1761, she was so frail and small that buyers passed her over. John Wheatley, a prosperous tailor, purchased her as a personal servant for his wife Susanna---a child whose baby teeth were still falling out, wrapped in a scrap of dirty carpet against the summer cold.
They named her after the ship that had stolen her.
What happened next was unusual, though not out of kindness in any simple sense. Susanna Wheatley noticed the child's quick intelligence and decided to educate her---perhaps as a curiosity, perhaps out of genuine affection, perhaps both. Within sixteen months, Phillis was reading the Bible fluently. Within a few years, she was reading Latin, studying astronomy and geography, and writing poetry in the neoclassical style fashionable among Boston's educated elite.
At twelve, she published her first poem in a Newport newspaper. At fourteen, she wrote an elegy for the famous preacher George Whitefield that was reprinted throughout the colonies and in London. By her late teens, she had enough poems for a collection, but no American publisher would touch them. How could a book of poetry by an enslaved Black woman be authentic? Who would believe it?
So in 1773, she traveled to London with the Wheatleys' son, where her manuscript was examined, verified, and published as "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral." British aristocrats received her with genuine curiosity. She met with the Lord Mayor of London. She was invited to meet King George III, though she returned to Boston before the meeting could take place---Susanna Wheatley had fallen ill and called her home.
Shortly after her return, she was granted her freedom. Not because of her talent, exactly, but because the Wheatleys were aging and the household was changing. Freedom came just in time for her to face a harder truth: in the new American republic being born around her, there was no place for a free Black woman poet.
She married John Peters, a free Black man who struggled to find steady work in a society that offered freed people almost no opportunities. She bore three children; none survived infancy. She worked as a servant in a boarding house. Her husband was imprisoned for debt. She died in December 1780, just before her thirty-first birthday, in a cold room in Boston, her last child dying hours later beside her.
Almost all her papers were lost. The world she had written for barely noticed when she left it.
But the poems remained.
The examination in Boston wasn't really about poetry. It was about whether the entire structure of colonial society could stand.
You see, slavery in the American colonies rested on a specific theological and philosophical claim: that Black people were fundamentally different in nature, lacking the rational and spiritual capacities that made Europeans fully human. It wasn't enough to simply take people's freedom through force---the system needed a moral justification, a story it could tell itself. And that story required Black people to be incapable of the very things that defined humanity: reason, imagination, moral discernment, communion with the divine.
Phillis Wheatley's poems shattered that story simply by existing.
When she wrote in perfect heroic couplets, when she referenced Virgil and Homer with ease, when she explored theological questions with sophistication and nuance---she wasn't just demonstrating skill. She was creating a crisis. Because if one enslaved African girl could do this, then the entire justification collapsed. Either she was an impossible exception that proved the rule, or the rule itself was a lie.
I watched how carefully she navigated this impossible position. She praised Christianity for bringing her to "redemption"---a claim that must have tasted like ashes even as she wrote it, knowing what that redemption had cost. She wrote elegies for the children of her enslavers with genuine feeling. She adopted every convention of polite society, every classical form, every acceptable sentiment.
But within those constraints, she spoke. In her poem to the Earl of Dartmouth, she wrote of "seeming cruel fate" that snatched her from Africa's "fancy'd happy seat"---seeming cruel, she said, leaving open the question of whether that cruelty was real or only appeared so. In her poem to George Washington, she praised liberty while herself remaining enslaved, creating a tension her readers couldn't quite ignore.
She understood something profound: she couldn't argue for her humanity directly. The very act of arguing would be dismissed as impossible. So instead, she demonstrated. She proved. She created evidence that couldn't be explained away, even when people desperately wanted to.
The spiritual meaning at the time was this: she made it impossible to claim ignorance. Anyone who read her work had to confront a choice---either acknowledge the lie at the heart of slavery, or perform increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics to explain her away.
Most chose the gymnastics. But the poems remained, patient and irrefutable, waiting.
You know what strikes me most about Phillis, looking back across all these years? She wasn't trying to change the world. She was just insisting on being seen as fully human---and that insistence, quiet as it was, created something permanent.
I've watched this pattern before. People who plant seeds they'll never see grow. Torchbearers in the dark, as you might say. Phillis was one of them.
Her contribution wasn't a new theology or a reform movement. It was simpler and somehow more profound: she created proof of concept. She demonstrated that intellectual brilliance, spiritual depth, and artistic excellence had nothing to do with skin color or circumstances of birth. This seems obvious to you now, I know. But in her time, it was a crack in the foundation of an entire worldview.
Think about what her poems did just by existing in libraries, sitting quietly on shelves. When abolitionists argued decades later that enslaved people deserved freedom because they were fully human, they had evidence. When educators insisted that Black children should have access to learning, they could point to what one young woman had achieved despite every barrier. When writers and artists in later generations faced skepticism about their abilities, Phillis had already answered that question in 1773.
She gave the future something it desperately needed: language to imagine justice that didn't yet exist.
I saw this same pattern with others, you know. Jarena Lee, carrying her call to preach when the church wouldn't officially recognize it. Countless voices from the margins who spoke anyway, who wrote anyway, who created anyway---not because they would see the harvest, but because the seeds mattered.
What Phillis added to the world's spiritual imagination was this: proof that human capacity cannot be contained by human cruelty. That brilliance emerges wherever it's given even the smallest opening. That one voice, speaking with excellence and dignity, can create echoes across centuries.
Her poems sat in those libraries like time capsules, waiting for a world that could finally read them properly. And here's what moves me---they're still doing that work. Still quietly insisting. Still making certain arguments impossible to avoid.
She didn't need to shout. She just needed to be undeniable.
Here's something I want you to notice about the world you live in, my friend. When you encounter a brilliant mind---in literature, in science, in leadership, in art---you don't automatically wonder if that brilliance is possible based on the person's skin color or background. That question doesn't even occur to you, does it? It feels absurd, offensive even, to suggest human capacity works that way.
That's Phillis's inheritance. That certainty you carry---that intellectual and spiritual excellence can emerge from anyone---didn't fall from the sky. It was proven, painstakingly, by people who insisted on being undeniable even when the world told them they couldn't exist.
You stand on foundations you didn't have to build yourself. When questions arise today about whose voices belong in literature, whose perspectives matter in academia, whose leadership is legitimate---the ground has already shifted beneath those questions. We're not arguing anymore about whether it's possible. We're negotiating why it's taking so long for institutions to catch up with what we already know to be true.
And that gap---between what we know and what our systems embody---that's where the work continues.
I watch this tension unfold in ways Phillis would recognize. Talented people still navigating spaces that weren't built for them. Still proving competence that should be assumed. Still working twice as hard for half the recognition, as the saying goes. Schools where teacher expectations still shift based on a child's name or appearance. Publishing houses where "diverse voices" are treated as specialty markets rather than simply voices. Workplaces where authority is questioned in ways it wouldn't be for someone else.
This isn't failure, you understand. This is the ongoing work of justice---aligning institutions with truths already proven. Phillis showed it was possible. Now we're still building the world that honors what she demonstrated.
Her method matters too, I think. She worked within systems that constrained her, used the very forms and language of those who enslaved her, navigated impossible positions with grace and strategy. She didn't wait for permission to speak, but she was careful about how she spoke. She transformed things from inside structures that weren't designed for her transformation.
Anyone working in institutions not built for them understands this tension. The question isn't whether to engage with imperfect systems---it's how to maintain integrity while being strategic, how to work for change without waiting for the world to grant permission first. Phillis's example shows it can be done. That excellence itself becomes a form of resistance. That proving rather than arguing sometimes opens doors that rhetoric alone cannot.
And here's what moves me most: she planted seeds knowing she'd never see the harvest. She died in poverty and obscurity, her poems gathering dust in libraries while the nation she'd written for barely noticed her passing. She had every reason to believe her work wouldn't matter.
But justice moves across generations, not within them. The frustration you feel about incomplete progress---about systems still not matching what you know to be true---that frustration is itself evidence of her legacy. You can see the gap because torchbearers like Phillis created the language to name it. You expect better because she proved better was possible.
The moral vocabulary you use, the assumptions you carry about human dignity and potential, the way you recognize injustice when you see it---none of that emerged from nowhere. It was built, word by word, proof by proof, by people who carried light forward even when the darkness seemed absolute.
Justice is still rising, still unfolding. The work continues. But it continues on foundations she helped lay, in a world that can finally read her poems the way she meant them to be read---not as curiosities, but as simple truth.
I wonder sometimes what it would have meant to Phillis to know that her poems would still be read centuries later. That students would study her work not as historical curiosity but as literature that matters. That her name would be spoken with respect in places she could never have entered in her lifetime.
She couldn't have known. She died believing her work had largely failed, her influence nearly spent. And yet she wrote anyway. She polished every line. She chose every word with care. She maintained her excellence even when the world questioned her right to exist.
What does that kind of faith look like in your own life, I wonder?
Not the faith that demands immediate results or visible success. But the quieter faith that says: this work matters even if I never see why. This excellence is worth maintaining even if no one applauds. This light is worth carrying even if the path ahead stays dark.
I think about the people in your world who are doing Phillis's work right now. The ones proving rather than arguing. The ones maintaining dignity in spaces that question their legitimacy. The ones planting seeds they may never see grow. They're carrying torches too, you know. And someday---maybe long after they're gone---someone will stand in the light they made possible and wonder at how bright the world has become.
Look for them. Honor them. And when you can, be one of them.
Because this is how justice actually moves through the world---not through grand pronouncements or sudden revolutions, but through steady people doing excellent work in impossible circumstances, trusting that the light they carry will matter even if they never see where it leads.
Phillis showed us that. And her light is still burning.
Next time, I want to introduce you to someone who also carried a torch through impossible circumstances. His name was Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Indigenous Peruvian man who spent decades creating an extraordinary chronicle---over a thousand pages of text and drawings documenting his people's world, their suffering under colonial rule, and their vision for justice. He wrote it all for the King of Spain, poured his heart into every page, and sent it across the ocean.
The king never read it.
It sat forgotten in a Danish library for three hundred years.
But oh, my friend, what that forgotten chronicle would eventually mean for the world...
Until then, remember Phillis. Remember that seeds planted in darkness can still grow toward light. Remember that excellence maintained in the face of doubt is its own form of resistance. And remember that the work you do today---even when it feels small, even when no one seems to notice---might be exactly the light someone needs a century from now.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.