Obour Tanner

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Obour Tanner
Phillis Wheatley Letter to Obour Tanner, February 7, 1776
BaptisedJuly, 1768
DiedJune 21, 1835
Newport, Rhode Island
Known forCorrespondence with Phillis Wheatley

Obour Tanner, also spelled Abour or Arbour (1750 — June 21, 1835), was an enslaved African woman who lived in Newport, Rhode Island. Tanner was a regular correspondent of poet Phillis Wheatley, and the only correspondent of Wheatley's that was of African descent.[1] Tanner acted as an agent for Wheatley in Newport and made the largest known order of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773.[2]

Early life

James Tanner Slave Auction Advertisement, Newport Mercury, October 17, 1758

Obour Tanner was enslaved by

biographer, John Shields, suggests that perhaps Tanner and Wheatley traveled the Middle Passage together, aboard the same ship in 1761, the Phillis.[5][6]

Author Martha Bacon, writing in 1964, claimed that Tanner met with Harriet Beecher Stowe in her later years and told Beecher Stowe "that she thought she and Phillis had made the journey to America in the same slave ship. Obour also believed that she recognized Phillis when the two met in Newport in the summer of 1770 when Mary Wheatley spent a season in the watering place and brought Phillis with her as maid-companion." According to Michael Monescalchi, Bacon is one of three scholars who claim Wheatley visited Newport in 1770, though none present any evidence.[7]

Literary scholar Babacar M'Bye writes that Wheatley and Tanner used their "brutal separation from their homeland as an urge to create a female community based upon companionship and unity." M'Bye also writes that the "friendship and solidarity that Wheatley and Obour Tanner created out of their shared experience of the Middle Passage reflects a Pan-African philosophy known as the experiential communality of blacks.[8]

Correspondence with Phillis Wheatley

In 1863, six letters from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society by the wife of William Henry Beecher. Mrs. Beecher stated in an accompanying letter that she had received the letters from Tanner herself.[6] No letters from Tanner to Wheatley have ever been discovered.[9]

As

African Diaspora in colonial New England. Evidence suggests that it was through Tanner that Wheatley became aware of the plans made by Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins to send Africans Bristol Yamma and John Quamino as missionaries to West Africa.[8]

Phillis Wheatley Letter to Obour Tanner, February 7, 1776

According to literary scholar Tara Bynum, in her letters to Tanner, Phillis Wheatley "doesn't lament her black skin or her enslavement. She doesn't belabor her sadness over how black she is or is not. Rather, Wheatley's letters ... are decidedly ordinary glimpses into a friendship between women. Wheatley keeps Tanner abreast of her book sales, her bouts of sickness and asthma, her travels to the country and out of the country, even the death of her mistress, Susanna Wheatley."[10]

Later life and death

On November 4, 1790, Obour Tanner married Barra (also spelled Barry) Collins. The ceremony was conducted by the Reverend Samuel Hopkins in the First Congregational Church in Newport.[1]

In 1809, following in the footsteps of the Free African Union Society, which was founded in Newport in 1780, Obour Tanner helped to found the African Female Benevolent Society, a mutual aid society dedicated to literacy education of Black people.[3]

In 1863, Obour Tanner's letters were donated to the Massachusetts Historical Society by the wife of William Henry Beecher. In an accompanying letter, Mrs. Beecher described Tanner in her later years; "She was then a very little, very old, very infirm, very, very black woman, with a great shock of the whitest of wool all over her head. ... She died in the odor of sanctity ... an uncommonly pious, sensible, and intelligent woman, respected and visited by every person in Newport who could appreciate excellence."[6]

Obour Tanner died in Newport on June 21, 1835.[1]

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8203-4664-9. Archived
    from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  2. ISSN 0002-9831. Archived
    from the original on 2018-06-02. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4798-5563-6. Archived
    from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  4. ^ "Just imported from Africa". Newport Mercury. Newport, Rhode Island. October 17, 1758.
  5. ISBN 978-1-57233-712-1. Archived
    from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  6. ^ a b c Historical Society, Massachusetts (1864). Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Massachusetts Historical Society. Archived from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  7. JSTOR 26741179
    .
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-1-60473-352-5. Archived
    from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  9. ISBN 978-0-19-977983-3. Archived
    from the original on 2022-03-06. Retrieved 2022-03-06.
  10. S2CID 162695369
    .
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