Offering Nothing Phillis Hammond and "The Bitter Effects of Sin"

This essay considers a previously unknown Massachusetts broadside from 1751, composed by an unknown author on the execution of Phillis Hammond, an African American teenager convicted of murder. Resisting any impulse to treat the broadside as an authoritative historical document about a black subject, I instead- following Saidiya Hartman, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and others-attempt to find a meaningful way to address what the author finds both alarming and vexing, namely Hammond's refusal to participate in the cycle of confession and repentance fundamental to the genre of the execution narrative. Placing her within her historical context, this essay attempts to take up that refusal, arguing for the possibility of recuperating what she might know, while also acknowledging the problems with attributing meaning to her action.