Was that copy of “Poems on Various Subjects” printed in London, shipped to Massachusetts, purchased there and sent back to Britain for binding with “The Grave”? That is also part of the mystery. He speculated that the binding was done in Britain. He said an earlier owner had “Poems on Various Subjects” bound with another short book, “The Grave,” by the Scottish preacher and poet Robert Blair. But Adams, who died in 1987 after a long tenure as a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, left no information about how or where he acquired the Wheatley book, Sutherland said. Sutherland said it was acquired in the 1940s by Raymond Adams, a founder and the first president of the Thoreau Society, which is headquartered at Henry David Thoreau’s birthplace in Concord, Mass. The mystery is what happened for the next 170 or so years to the first-edition copy that Bonhams is selling. Wheatley was freed in 1773, the same year in which “Poems on Various Subjects” was published in Britain. “It speaks to issues that are relevant to this day, from race to the idea of who control the narrative, who tells the story.” “The book is important as the nexus of American culture and identity,” Sutherland said. She had 28 more ready to go when she was 18, and a countess in Britain who supported abolitionist causes did what Susanna Wheatley had not been able to do in the colonies: find a publisher. Remarkably, said Darren Sutherland, a senior specialist in fine books and manuscripts at Bonhams, the Wheatleys gave her an education, and by the time she was a teenager, her poems had been published in several New England newspapers. She was so frail that during the voyage, the captain had worried that she would die before she could be sold, according to a descendant of the family whose surname she took after they had “procured her for a trifle.” She disembarked with no clothes, swaddled in a dirty rug. Wheatley’s first name came from the ship that brought her to America when she was 7 years old. As my colleague Jennifer Schuessler wrote in March, Waldstreicher put Wheatley “smack in the middle of the raging debate over the relationship between the American Revolution and slavery.” It also “became an antislavery argument,” according to the biography, “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” by David Waldstreicher, who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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