Letters Lost and Found: Silences in the Early American Archive – Bradley Dubos

What can we ever truly know about early American lives when their stories are entangled with, in Sherri Cummings’s words, an “apathetic, biased archive”? Researching the “quotidian lives” of African women and girls in the early Atlantic world, Sherri asks challenging questions about lived experience that go beyond the colonial archive’s ability to answer. Both Sherri and Michael Monescalchi also reflect on the necessity of reading “around” the subjects they research: their relational networks, political contexts, and the laws and social forces that shaped what was possible for them to write, say, and do.

How can researchers pursue these goals—reading for both context and for experience—given the limitations of the early American archive? How do we represent archival silences in ways that call attention to the systems of power that produced such silences without allowing those systems to overtake the story?

One possible answer, I think, is to respond to the archive creatively, on a personal and affective level that defies the archive’s apathy. What if scholars thought more imaginatively about—perhaps even in certain cases celebrated—the things we can’t find or see within the archive?

Figure 1. This portrait of the Mohegan/Brothertown leader Reverend Samson Occom is based on a lost painting by Mason Chamberlain. The portrait was completed between 1766 and 1768 while Occom was on a preaching tour of Great Britain. Jonathan Spilsbury (after Mason Chamberlain). “Samson Occom,” 1768, Mezzotint. National Portrait Gallery, London.

I’m thinking here of poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, whose own archival research informed The Age of Phillis (2020), a breathtaking collection that, among other things, performs a poetic recovery of some of Wheatley’s nonextant correspondence. Three of those “lost letters” are between Wheatley and Mohegan/Brothertown minister Samson Occom (a correspondence noted in Michael’s post).

“Lost Letter #2: Phillis Wheatley, Boston, to Samson Occom, London,” begins:

Dear Most Reverend Sir:
In the name of our Benevolent Savior
Jesus Christ, I bring you tall greetings.
I have never sat with an Indian before.

[i write as i am instructed the white
lady’s hand patting my shoulder]

My mistress says your people are savages,
that I should pray for your tarnished souls.
She says that once I was a savage, too.

[i hurt for my yaay and baay and oh
the mornings of ablutions and millet]¹

Jeffers’s italicized, bracketed stanzas hint at a subversive doubleness: perhaps a shift between words and thoughts, or between public and private voices. They might indicate sentiments left unspoken but mutually understood—or hidden meanings deciphered from the words on the page, made legible through the lens of their shared experiences. However we interpret them, Jeffers is using form to illustrate the precautions both writers had to take when voicing their emotions and beliefs in eighteenth-century New England. These segments of the poem express solidarity between Black and Indigenous peoples and an awareness that their struggles against racism and dispossession are linked.

Did Wheatley’s first letter to Occom resemble this poem? It is impossible to say. But as Jeffers’s poem suggests, perhaps it is less useful to think of the archival gaps and silences in Wheatley and Occom’s friendship as evidence of letters “lost” than it is to think of letters hidden or ideas shared discreetly. That would change the narrative from one of loss to one of triumph—of covert communications and radical intellectual exchange tucked away from settler ears and eyes. Jeffers, then, models one way for scholars to think more deeply about what they do not find in the archive (and why they don’t find it) while also demonstrating how contemporary poetry can draw attention to connections between Black and Indigenous experience by deliberately refusing the categories and systems of classification used by colonial archives to organize, contain, and isolate.