Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley

A Questionable Perspective of a Black Poet

When I first saw the title of this book, I was very eager to read it. But after I completed it two days later, disgust had replaced my previous emotion. Ms. Rinaldi tells an intriguing and fascinating tale of the Black/African poet Phillis Wheatley who survived the Middle Passage and sugar coated enslavement. Yet, she creates a romantic longing that Phillis has for one of her captors, Nathaniel Wheatley. Yes, Ms. Rinaldi does point out the awkwardness Phillis felt in a white world, but she is morphing the emotions Phillis must have truly felt about being enslaved. People may blamethe emotions Phillis has in the book on Stockholm Syndrome, but that is thwarted by the clearly bitter tone of Ms. Wheatley in poems like "On Being Brought From Africa to America". Most of Rinaldi's book is historically accurate, yet there is a very fine line between historical fiction and deforming history.