An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

consciousness, and to a considerable extent in behavior, for a lifetime.” 24
While she adopted a “Black” identity, in part because of the circumstance of
her enslavement, she surely never gave up every component of her African
identity, even as she was kidnapped and enslaved at an early age.
When Wheatley died, she was gravely ill. Perhaps she never really
reached her true potential. As Alice Walker contends, “Had she been white,
[she] would have easily been considered the intellectual superior of all the
women and most of the men in the society of her day.” 25 Wheatley was not
only an African genius, but an Indigenous genius who, because of
enslavement, was never able to really delve into the meaning of what it
meant to be an Indigenous person in her poetry. It makes me wonder, what
if she could remember her homeland, her customs and traditions? How
would that have impacted her poetry? We will never know.
LUCY TERRY PRINCE
If Phillis Wheatley is the OG Indigenous African poet who came of age
during the American Revolution, Lucy Terry Prince is the first one to
rewrite the origins of Black poetry without a pen. Lucy Terry was
kidnapped from West Africa when she was a young girl and brought to
Rhode Island around 1730. She was purchased by Ebenezer Wells to be a
house servant for his wife, Abigail Wells. From an early age, Terry learned
from Abigail Wells how to read and write.
In 1756, Abijah Prince, Terry’s love interest, purchased her freedom
from the Wells. Shortly thereafter, they married. Abijah Prince, a free Black
man, had come to Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1746; he would go onto
serve in the French and Indian War. They met in that year, but he did not
want to marry her until after he purchased her freedom. They would go on
to have six children. 26
When she was about twenty-two years old and living in Deerfield with
her owners, she heard of the murder of two white families on August 25,
1746. In an incident serving as precursor to the French and Indian War
between Great Britain and France (also called the Seven Years’ War), which
included Indigenous nations fighting on both sides, a group of Indigenous
peoples attacked the families. It is not known why, but it was likely
retaliation for encroachment, or at least for some other killing that those
settlers had carried out.