Phillis Wheatley. Her actual name was and is not known.
Her story starts around the age of seven when she was just a child in Africa somewhere between what is now Senegal and Gambia, she was cruelly abducted. Like Joseph, God used the evil done to her for his glory.
A 7 year old child abducted and on a slave ship must have experienced unimaginable terror and the distress at knowing she will never see her mum again would have been suffering unknowable.
She was purchased by the Wheatley family and unusually for a servant girl they educated her in Latin and Greek.
In her own time she enjoyed writing poems glorifying God (I would highly reccomend reading them) and in a notable one she praises the revivalist preacher George Whitefield. She also kept in contact with many revivalist preachers.
Phillis Wheatley was finally emancipated in 1778 and she married a fellow freed slave, John Peters. Happily ever after? Shall I misquote Jeremiah 29:11?
No. Both Phillis and her husband suffered with ill health, low income and poor work, leading to the death of two of their infant children.
The situation above only worsened and her husband got sent to jail for debt, forcing her to work as a scully maid for a boarding house.
At the age of 31 Phillis died- alone, uncared for and 'reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe'. She was buried with her last child, who also died.
I can only imagine what was going through Phillis's mind on her deathbed- memories of her mum singing to her as a child in Africa? The day she was kidnapped at 7 by wicked slave traders? Her time in America? Her imprisoned husband? Her children who she lost at their young age? Her journey from Africa to living with a wealthy American family, to ultimately dying in poverty in a foreign land, never to return to Africa on this earth?
One thing we know on her death, despite the poor state of her body, she is now in eternal bliss, worshipping the God she loved so much and if the new earth mirrors this one (but in a perfected state) I can imagine her setting foot at the place where she was abducted, but now praising God for the glory of the new earth and the fact she will no longer suffer again.
