Greetings, fellow literature-lovers! I owe today's segment to a news item excerpted last month in Black Kos' Tuesday Chile on recent scholarship about a writer I'd never even heard of, Harriet Wilson. Unknown until her work was rediscovered in the 1980s (more on this below), Wilson bears the distinction of being the first published black novelist in this country (more on this, too!)
Naturally I couldn't let this opportunity go... I picked up a copy of Wilson's novel (or rather read it online, courtesy of Indiana University's excellent database) and thought it'd be a great way to re-launch this poor old defunct literature series.
So join me below for an exploration of the 1859 novel Our Nig, Wilson's fascinating account of one black woman's life in the pre-Civil War North.
Harriet Wilson was born in New Hampshire in 1857, daughter of a mixed-race marriage, orphaned young, and raised as an indentured servant in an abusive household. Details on her life are about as sketchy as we might expect: records were especially spotty in the 19th century for people of color. But by the time of her death in 1900, Wilson was a published author, head of her own school, a businesswoman with her products advertised in the New York Times, an in-demand lecturer, and an all-around firebrand.
We owe much of her rediscovery to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who also co-authored with R. J. Ellis the excellent The Root article that was excerpted in Tuesday's Chile. Gates's scholarship on Wilson has been invaluable, and led to a flurry of activity around her life and work, including a biography by Ellis and a 2007 collection of essays Harriet Wilson's New England: Race, Writing, and Region.
As Gates and Ellis say, "The more we discover about Harriet E. Wilson... the more startling her life becomes." From the article:
We know of her radical propensities from her participation in a "National Mass Meeting of Radicals, Socialists, Infidels, Materialists, Free Religionists and Free Thinkers" in 1874. In her speech at that meeting, Wilson spoke on behalf of the rights of women and on the superiority of education in the lyceums, agreeing with a motion advocating that "the instincts of true womanhood are against bearing children for the State, and handing them over to its cares, whilst it so stupidly ignores the best modes of moral and spiritual culture" -- a reference to the feeling of many radical Spiritualists that a Spiritualist lyceum education was better than any education provided by the state.
Her 1837 novel Our Nig bears the specific distinction of having been the first published novel by a black author in this country: that is, we're not counting unpublished works (like Hannah Crafts' yet undated The Bondwoman's Narrative, likely 1850s) or works published abroad (like William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel, published in England). Still, this is no minor distinction: while Our Nig may have 'disappeared' in the meantime, testimony by her contemporaries indicate that it had a limited but important impact.
Even if it were a complete failure (spoiler: it isn't!) Our Nig would be a milestone in American literature. Wilson fuses conventions of sentimental literature, autobiography, religious Bildungsroman, a critique of Northern 'piety', and an ending that directly implicates the reader in the story. It's all-in-all a fascinating work and a happy rediscovery.
Let's tackle the novel itself:
OUR NIG;
OR,
Sketches from the Life of a free Black,
IN A TWO-STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH.
SHOWING THAT SLAVERY'S SHADOWS FALL EVEN THERE.
On its title page, Wilson announces the major themes of her book, with the appropriately genre-ambiguous "sketches" replacing clearer markers of fiction ("a novel") or nonfiction ("an autobiography"). Scholars are still divided over how we should classify Our Nig, given that its contours are so clearly autobiographical and its eventual purpose so surprising.
I side with those who consider it a novel: Wilson doesn't just mask her story through the fictional protagonist Frado, but the style of storytelling owes so much more to sentimentalist fiction than to memoir, or autobiography, or anything less clearly 'fictional'.
Despite being a stand-in for the author, Frado herself is a cipher. Wilson's narrative voice is not omniscient, so most of our time spent with Frado is watching her receive praise or punishment from the white people around her. As she grows up an unwilling servant in the Bellmont household, Frado endures regular beatings and abuse from her mistress while finding comfort and protection in various corners. Eventually she comes of age and finds the world outside just as harsh and unforgiving: even the former slave, now abolitionist speaker she marries turns out to be a fraud who's taking advantage of the movement.
Frado's story is one of perseverance in a world where no one wants or expects her to survive. As the wicked Mrs. Bellmont sarcastically notes, "you know these niggers are just like black snakes; you can't kill them. If she wasn't tough she would have been killed long ago." Where sickness knocks off the white characters with astonishing regularity, Frado survives extended bouts with it, and physical abuse, and betrayal.
For the most part Frado survives simply by refusing to bow down: her passive strength carries her through. In one particularly striking exception, Frado realizes that she does not have to accept the physical abuse she's suffered at the hands of her mistress:
[Frado] was sent for wood, and not returning as soon as Mrs. B. calculated, she followed her, and, snatching from the pile a stick, raised it over her.
"Stop!" shouted Frado, "strike me, and I'll never work a mite more for you;" and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.
By this unexpected demonstration, her mistress, in amazement, dropped her weapon, desisting from her purpose of chastisement. Frado walked towards the house, her mistress following with the wood she herself was sent after. She did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assaults. Her triumph in seeing her enter the door with her burden, repaid her for much of her former suffering.
Sadly, this kind of independence offers Frado only a temporary reprieve. Life for a free woman of color in the 1850s doesn't offer any easy solutions.
The Heroine
The title Our Nig comes laced with acid: it's a dismissive term that Jack Bellmont expects his sister will use when referring to Frado... and it ends up sticking. More broadly, it carries hints of Wilson's critique of the allegedly anti-slavery north: a free black woman is still just "our nig" as far as polite society is concerned.
Though Frado is mostly passive to the events around her, there are flashes of an independent, unconventional personality seething under her skin. In one of the novel's most striking moments, she makes no effort to hide her glee at the sudden death of the Bellmont daughter, who'd been one of her chief tormentors, as if it were a "thanksgiving": "S'posen she goes to hell, she'll be as black as I am." Even the narrator is surprised, calling her attitudes "not at all acceptable to the pious, sympathetic dame; but she could not evade them." Ha!
Flashes like this are too rare, but one of the best comes when the Bellmont sons request that Frado join them at the dinner table instead of her usual dining spot in the kitchen (polite company, and all that.)
Frado seated herself in her mistress' chair, and was just reaching for a clean dessert plate which was on the table, when her mistress entered.
"Put that plate down; you shall not have a clean one; eat from mine," continued she. Nig hesitated. To eat after James, his wife or Jack, would have been pleasant; but to be commanded to do what was disagreeable by her mistress, because it was disagreeable, was trying. Quickly looking about, she took the plate, called [the dog] Fido to wash it, which he did to the best of his ability; then, wiping her knife and fork on the cloth, she proceeded to eat her dinner.
Funny enough, but the reactions are telling. Mrs. Bellmont storms out of the room in a rage, unable to beat Frado in front of her more tolerant children (she does it later, when no one is looking.) The boys, her protectors, can't keep from laughing - and they toss her a silver dollar as if she were a performer: ""There, take that; 'twas worth paying for."
Otherwise Frado endures her beatings silently, unable to be abandoned by the only family she knows. She makes one attempt at running away, only to end up alone a swampy wilderness.
Here I should note the most amazing thing about the book: its ending. Once Frado is free of her servitude the plot speeds up, and she bounces around trying to earn money, battle lifelong sickness, and find some kind of stability in her life. Through speediness and deliberate vagueness, Wilson strips away the details and makes Frado into an Everywoman:
So much toil as was necessary to sustain Frado, was more than she could endure. As soon as her babe could be nourished without his mother, she left him in charge of a Mrs. Capon, and procured an agency, hoping to recruit her health, and gain an easier livelihood for herself and child. This afforded her better maintenance than she had yet found. She passed into the various towns of the State she lived in, then into Massachusetts. Strange were some of her adventures. Watched by kidnappers, maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn't want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North. Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next one; awful!
Traps slyly laid by the vicious to ensnare her, she resolutely avoided. In one of her tours, Providence favored her with a friend who, pitying her cheerless lot, kindly provided her with a valuable recipe, from which she might herself manufacture a useful article for her maintenance. This proved a more agreeable, and an easier way of sustenance.
This is no longer the story of Frado, a girl raised in the Bellmont household, but of any free black woman living in the North. Note especially that Wilson doesn't specify what it is that Frado 'manufactures' to sustain herself. Instead, Wilson makes this about you, and how you respond to the black Everywoman you see:
And thus, to the present time, may you see her busily employed in preparing her merchandise; then sallying forth to encounter many frowns, but some kind friends and purchasers. Nothing turns her from her steadfast purpose of elevating herself. Reposing on God, she has thus far journeyed securely. Still an invalid, she asks your sympathy, gentle reader. Refuse not, because some part of her history is unknown, save by the Omniscient God. Enough has been unrolled to demand your sympathy and aid.
These passages are for me what elevate the whole work beyond the conventional semi-autobiographical novel. Appeals to the reader's pieties aren't uncommon in sentimental literature, but the astounding and unexpected collapsing of the fictional and autobiographical, of the narrative and the polemic, and the abstract universality clashing with the specifics of biography, turn the ending into something not merely literary but spiritual.
This book is really about you.
Whose God?
One of the most fascinating aspects of Our Nig is its direct attack on religious hypocrisy. Wilson shows the contradictions of the Bellmont family's beliefs, simultaneously wanting to instill in Frado a proper Christian ethic while showing annoyance when she wants to read the Bible; hearing that God saves "all, young or old, white or black, bond or free" while refusing to allow her to attend church "except to drive others there"; and worst of all, a hierarchy of heaven in which good black souls should consider themselves blessed to occupy a tier far below their white fellows. At its best, Wilson's critique has the force of a well-placed punch to the gut:
"If I do, I get whipped," sobbed the child. "They won't believe what I say. Oh, I wish I had my mother back; then I should not be kicked and whipped so. Who made me so?"
"God," answered James.
"Did God make you?"
"Yes."
"Who made Aunt Abby?"
"God."
"Who made your mother?"
"God."
"Did the same God that made her make me?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, I don't like him."
This, in 1859! We can already recognize in these passages the independent-minded nature of Wilson's spirituality; it should be no surprise to learn that she eventually became a religious figure (and a controversial one, at that) herself. According to Gates and Ellis, Wilson emerged after the Civil War as an outspoken Spiritualist, and was driven by the hypocrisies of that movement to form her own school. Wilson fought a continuous battle against other movement leaders who, given the attitudes toward black folk in their own writings, were likely not sympathetic to her efforts.
In his biography of Wilson, Ellis notes with surprise the conflict between "the step-by-step progressions of a (post-Puritan) nineteenth-century sentimental conversion narrative" on the one hand, and the outspoken doubts and hypocrisies that threaten to scuttle it on the other. That this tension remains largely unresolved only makes the novel that much more fascinating.
Gender, and the role of women
"The child does as much work as a woman ought to; and just see how she is kicked about!"
"Why do you have it so, John?" asked his sister.
"How am I to help it? Women rule the earth, and all in it."
Thus the kind but passive Mr. Bellmont explains why he allows his wife to mistreat Frado so violently: it's a woman's world, and we men are just visitors.
One of the most surprising aspects of Our Nig are its gender politics: with the exception of the protagonist, Wilson divides her central characters along unexpected lines. The men include Frado's self-sacrificing father, the kindly Mr. Bellmont, the protective Jack, and the wise James. The women include Frado's selfish mother Mag, the cruel Mrs. Bellmont, and the selfish Mary. With the exception of peripheral characters, nearly all the central women are wicked, the central men are all good. Only Jane, the invalid, brings some form of feminine kindness to the nuclear Bellmont family.
There's no doubt that Wilson's own biography explains some of these divisions: abandoned by her mother and mistreated by her mistress, she apparently found more protection from the men around her than the women.
And there are other characters in the margins who challenge this: Mr. Bellmont's sister Abby is kind, as is James' wife Susan and the schoolmistress who protects Frado from the other children's taunts; on the male side, Frado's husband turns out to be a fraud. But these are all incidental to the central plot, where the evil "vixen nature" of the women contrasts with the men-as-protectors.
This doesn't shield the men from criticism entirely. Our Nig's most problematic character is Mr. Bellmont, frequently described as "kindly" but entirely unwilling to intervene on Frado's behalf against the rage of his wife. He gives advice to Frado on the sly but never prevents his wife from raising her hand against the defenseless girl. He is, more than anyone else in the book, the enduring symbol of weak liberal piety.
Further Reading
I haven't even begun to dig into all the fascinating issues at play in Our Nig, like its trenchant critique of class politics, its sharp jabs at the abolitionist movement, and its enjoyable if somewhat conventional narrative asides. It's a short novel, not likely to enter the canon of great classics but nonetheless worth rediscovering.
If you want to read more about Wilson and her novel, the best place to start is Ellis' biography, which shows how deeply Wilson used material from her own life in creating the fictional world of Frado and the Bellmonts. Harriet Wilson's New England is more scholarly but includes some great pieces of historical context, from Wilson's own attempts to sell Our Nig to the broader institution of indentured servitude.
There's also a small but useful website, The Harriet Wilson Project, which includes biographical information and news and events related to Wilson studies.
And of course, you can read the book itself. There are lots of editions out there, and I'd especially seek out any that includes an introductory essay by Gates. If you want to read it online but don't like the Indiana version above, the University of Virginia has an HTML version here. I used this version for excerpts in the diary.
Happy reading!