Though the early years of Phillis Wheatley’s life are well-established, the details of her life after she became Phillis Peters upon her marriage to John Peters, a free Black shopkeeper in Boston, have been more difficult to discern. In this conversation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. will discuss with Cornelia Dayton her groundbreaking article, recently published in the New England Quarterly, which uses a cache of Essex County legal papers to shed light on this period of Wheatley Peters’s life. |
