Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons

by Ann Rinaldi

First published 1996

Amazon

4.1(157)

Taken from West Africa and enslaved in Boston, Phillis Wheatley is taught to read within the Wheatley household and discovers an exceptional command of poetry. Her writing brings admiration, scrutiny and opportunities denied to most enslaved people, yet every achievement remains entangled with the family that legally owns her.

The novel imagines the intellectual and emotional labour behind Wheatley’s public career, including the examination arranged to authenticate her authorship and the journey to London that enabled publication. It presents literary fame as neither simple rescue nor proof of benevolent slavery, but as a narrow space in which Wheatley struggles to claim her own voice.