Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  More important than the risk of kidnap under the Fugitive Slave Act, “slavery’s shadows” also alludes to the prevalence of racism in the Northern free states, such as New Hampshire. Especially during the three decades leading up to the Civil War, Southerners, forced on the defensive by abolitionists, sought to legitimate slavery’s continuation through a racist argument proposing that African Americans’ color, cranium shape, facial features, and hair texture proved that they were not fully human, or instead were a different or distinct species from human beings of European descent, represented as God’s chosen creation. Proslavery propaganda represented people of African descent as vastly less intelligent than white people, more prone to laziness and violence, and more likely to surrender to base impulses and appetites, especially sexual ones. The seeds of “scientific” racism sown in this way (the science was, of course, pseudo-scientific, based on prejudice and superstition, entirely unfounded in reason or fact, and drawn up to justify a profoundly exploitative economic relationship) ensured that slavery’s shadows would indeed fall across the whole of the United States long after its abolition and well into the twentieth century. Even those who opposed slavery were sometimes swayed, shockingly enough, by arguments for the innate inferiority of persons of African descent. (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of Miss Ophelia’s reluctance to touch Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides one famous example among countless others.)6

  By the time Our Nig was published, just two years before the Civil War began, the abolition movement had been gaining momentum throughout the North for several decades and had spread to popular culture. For example, the Hutchinson Family Singers, a New Hampshire troupe closely connected to Wilson’s birthplace, Milford, toured throughout New England winning widespread acclaim for the songs they performed, portraying their state as freedom loving and opposed to slavery.7 Yet, even as the antislavery cause grew, America’s leading white abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, was forced to expend time and energy trying to excise individual racism from among his followers. The New Hampshire abolitionist Nathaniel Rogers even came to believe that “laws could never eradicate prejudice and racial domination” and that a more fundamental, more perfect revolution than America’s War of Independence was needed.8 What Rogers had seen in Canaan, New Hampshire, in 1835, where an attempt to desegregate Noyes Academy was greeted with violent resistance by the local community, no doubt informed his opinion about the deep-rooted nature of racial prejudice in American society and what it might take to eradicate it, both on an institutional and a behavioral level.9

  Our Nig therefore has good reason to allude to racism as “slavery’s shadows” in the North, but it also establishes the novel’s central theme: exposing the many ways in which Frado experiences anti-black racism at the hands of Northern whites and the ways in which race and class were inextricably intertwined in antebellum America, North and South. Our Nig takes up this theme in an unusual way, since its accent falls on abuse by white females (adapting Frederick Douglass’s dramatic observation in his 1845 slave narrative that slavery turned many female slave owners into racists and sadists, even those initially reared in the North). Among the Bellmonts, during Frado’s period of indenture, two of its females, Mary and Mrs. Bellmont, are depicted as the physically cruel ones. After she leaves them, another Northern white woman, Mrs. Hoggs, ignoring how feeble Frado has become after her years of mistreatment, reports her as a malingerer to the town’s authorities. Yet, though some of the other Bellmonts have abolitionist sympathies, they do nothing to put an end to Frado’s sufferings, which continue until she leaves their house. However much James Bellmont tells her that his “mother’s views were by no means general” and assures her that she is not “friendless, and utterly despised” but instead “might hope for better things in the future” (this page), he does nothing to intervene, and soon she is once again being “whipped with a rawhide” (this page). James’s brother, Jack, provides more sympathy, but no protection either.

  Indeed, the lack of effective counters to racism in the “free” North is another key theme of the book. In chapter 1, the narrator ruminates ironically on the supposedly “degraded” condition of Mag Smith, Frado’s white mother, because of her decision to marry an African American: “You can philosophize, gentle reader, upon the impropriety of such unions, and preach dozens of sermons on the evils of amalgamation.… Poor Mag. She had sundered another bond which held her to her fellows. She had descended another step down the ladder of infamy” (this page). Mag Smith’s decision to marry a black man leads her inexorably toward a state of social death in white society, precisely because of widespread Northern prejudices against what was then, called amalgamation. Nevertheless, Wilson refrains from representing Frado’s parents’ liaison sentimentally. Instead, she reveals that the motivations for this marriage are, at best, deeply fraught and problematic, especially those of Frado’s father, Jim, whose unrelenting desire to have a white lover she represents as perverse. Even if Jim’s motivations are dubious, however, by sarcastically introducing the idea that “amalgamation,” the nineteenth-century’s term of choice for interracial sexual relations between whites and blacks, was “evil,” Wilson challenges her readers to push back against a core argument of Southern apologists for slavery.

  At the same time, Wilson—writing quite boldly about the nature of the attraction between her protagonist’s father and mother—shows that sexual desire between black men and white women was inevitably informed and shaped by unequal power relations. Frado’s father’s determination to have sexual relations with a white woman at all costs is blind, irrational, all consuming, and indiscriminate. Jim, “the kind hearted African” whose surname we never learn (thus underscoring his allegorical status in the text) is a deeply damaged victim. Given the state of race relations in America in 1859, the year of John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry and just two years before the start of the Civil War, Wilson is formulating a very “politically incorrect” auto-critique that would not endear her to black or white abolitionists. She is saying that if one thinks that the pernicious effects of “slavery’s shadows” cause white Northerners alone to act perversely, then think again: they can also cause black men and women to act perversely. This is an astonishingly honest and frank confession for any black writer to be making in antebellum America. And this is not the novel’s only politically incorrect theme; it also harbors other surprising sentiments about Northern white attitudes toward free blacks.

  As Our Nig highlights Northern racist attitudes toward black people and the institution of slavery, it also insistently demonstrates that sanctimonious denunciations of Southerners by Northerners were hypocritical at best. But by doing this the book ran the risk of replicating in part the arguments of proslavery advocates. Northerners, proslavery advocates often claimed, treated their servants (especially their black servants) worse than slaves, coldly calculating that there was no economic advantage in keeping them healthy, since they could be easily replaced by other workers at no cost, for “free.”10 Superficially, Our Nig seems to support this, for Mrs. Bellmont seems to behave according to this calculation. She argues she must “beat the money out of” Frado since she “can’t get her worth any other way” (this page). Southerners also claimed that the very structure of the master-slave relation fostered intimate personal relations, leading in some cases to filial ties and deep affection, while Northerners, on the other hand, had no such intimacies with black people and instead often felt mere revulsion. Once again, Our Nig seems to support this contention. The narrator of Our Nig at one point exclaims, in her most impassioned outburst in the book, that even many antislavery Northerners were as repulsed by African Americans as the most deeply racist Southern slaveholders. Those who “didn’t want slaves at the South,” she cries out, didn’t want “niggers in their own homes, North” either: “Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next one; awful!” (this page).

  The vehemence of Our Nig’s denuncia
tions of Northern racism and hypocrisy, combined with the use of the word “Nig” in its title, might therefore conceivably have led some readers to assume that Wilson’s book was intended to function as proslavery propaganda, or that it may even have been composed by an anonymous Southern white writer, probably male. It is a bit of a stretch, but if anyone understood it in this way, Our Nig could have been interpreted as an inversion of the slave narratives, showing by implication that living within the institution of slavery might in some ways be preferable to being a free black person in the North.11

  Yet to arrive at such an understanding as this would have been a poor misreading. Wilson’s point is that economic exploitation exacerbates and breeds racism in the free North just as it does in the slave South. Our Nig portrays the lot of the Northern farm servant—a worker employed both in the farmhouse and in the fields—as exhausting and debilitating. Then it seamlessly connects the racist treatment of blacks— North and South, slave and free—as two faces of the same phenomenon. But the novel offers no support for Southern apologists’ proslavery motives when attacking Northern exploitation of blacks. Instead the book squarely confronts two related, dangerously destructive problems: first, the anti-black racism upon which the enslavement and oppression of African Americans rests, and second, the intricate relation between anti-black racism and economic exploitation—even, or especially, the exploitation of the black worker who is not a slave but is ostensibly free. Our Nig offers, then, a Northern counternarrative, in which an attractive, lively, and intelligent girl and young woman, no matter how ground down by the behavior racism condones, resists its psychological consequences to the bitter end, gaining her voice in the process.

  By now it has become apparent that, though at the start of the book Harriet Wilson insists that Frado’s mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, had been “wholly imbued with southern principles” (this page), the book goes on to confront head-on the comfortable assumption by Northern abolitionists that being opposed to slavery is, in itself, somehow morally sufficient to free one of complicity in the existence of slavery or the oppression of free blacks in the North. Our Nig instead exposes how slavery depends upon racist attitudes that deny African Americans—even those who are not slaves—both their common humanity with white people and their most basic rights. Slavery’s shadows, in other words, fall even on the economic exploitation of free black workers and—by extension—white workers, too. Wilson’s story implicates white Northerners as either adopting or condoning the principles of Southern racism or at best being complicit in them through sins of omission (akin to the Bellmont males’ general passivity). Similarly, the New England town in which Frado lives, although called Singleton, is in fact deeply divided over the issue of slavery—making it, in a heavy irony, more of a double-town. Just as James Bellmont assures Frado of support in terms demonstrating he is familiar with abolitionist rhetoric, while his mother is an open racist, so Singleton harbors both a schoolteacher who leaps to Frado’s defense when she is bullied by young racists in the school playground and such racists as Mrs. Hoggs, prejudicially inclined to identify African Americans as idle wasters. Singleton certainly offers a “two-story.” But one of Wilson’s boldest moves, perhaps, is the transformation of the young black house servant, maliciously called Our Nig, overworked at will, into the narrator who confrontationally adopts as her nom de plume that very term of disparagement. By doing so, Wilson lays bare how the dehumanizing racism that obtains in the North pervades all its institutions, even its abolitionist institutions, so that she can only be identified as “Our Nig.” This message would have been very difficult for most white Northern readers to stomach.

  The book’s title page, in line with the title pages of slave narratives that repeatedly assert that the tale that follows is “authentic,” true to the life of the slave who wrote or narrated it (as a “narrative of the life …”), announces that the novel contains autobiographical “sketches from the life.” Yet Wilson’s book is very far from being an autobiography, and to attempt to see it as this is to ignore the conventions of both genres. Wilson’s obvious intention is to create a character whose life seems to have been largely based upon her own, but she is certainly not limited to or confined by it. In fact, we know so very little about the life of Harriet Wilson when she was still Harriet Adams that it is extraordinarily difficult to know how much of Frado’s life reflects Wilson’s experience and how much is the product of her imagination. And we shall never know. To attempt to transform this novel into an autobiography, unfortunately, is to trivialize or minimize the full import of Wilson’s original contribution to African American and American literature.12 Rather, Our Nig is first and foremost a fiction. It is written in the third person and its protagonist is called Alfrado Smith, not Harriet Wilson. Similarly, Wilson has chosen some of the names of her novel’s characters and the name of the town they live in for their symbolic import: Mrs. Hoggs behaves like a pig, the divided town in which Frado is abused is called Singleton, and the Bellmonts, who are hardly to be looked up to, carry a name suggesting they possess “beauty” and “high” status, which is fully belied by Mrs. B.’s and Mary’s vicious vindictiveness. In actuality the Bell[e]mo[u]nts are a family that stand as bellwethers of a destructive racial order that would stubbornly outlast the institution of slavery.

  While Wilson’s condemnation of racism and its deadly accompaniments is clear enough, what remains less clear is the identity of Wilson herself. The historical record is very thin (as is so very often the case when dealing with African American lives in the nineteenth century). For example, we remain unsure of her parents’ identities, and even determining that she was a mulatta depends to a surprising degree upon the 1880 census (see appendix 3), in which she was first recorded as white, only to have this identification crossed out and the entry “Mu[latta]” substituted. This alteration suggests that Wilson was initially taken to be white by the census taker and therefore she was probably quite light skinned. But her precise skin color remains uncertain. Our point is that Wilson takes factual episodes in her own life for use as a resource upon which to construct a fictional life for her novel’s protagonist, Frado, and it is all too easy for us as readers to be lured into taking as fact what she wrote as fiction beyond the point where it is reasonable to do so, simply because so little is known about her. Wilson is not Frado, and she may not even exactly correspond to the woman described in the pseudony-mously written testimonials.

  As our research makes clear, Our Nig, like so many first novels, builds its plot upon a hybrid mix of events, some of which we know Wilson experienced and some that she invented or changed—events that she could not possibly have experienced (such as the details of Frado’s parents’ courtship, to choose just one example)—switching deftly between the two. For example, she reduces the size of the family with whom she had lived when fictionalizing them as the Bellmonts. Reading Our Nig as a novel, as it surely should be, rather than as an autobiography, reveals how deeply indebted it is formally not only to the slave narrative but also, far more substantially, to the most popular fictional genre of the time, the sentimental novel, which commonly tells the story of a poor, abandoned child in a mode laced with gothic overtones.13

  One subgenre of such sentimental fiction, the novel of “sorrows and trials,”14 portrays a girl orphaned or separated from her parents falling under the control of an exploitative or abusive tormentor, usually female, and successfully escaping, sometimes by making her own way but more commonly by coming under another’s protection, usually that of a sympathetic male. Obviously, the storyline of Our Nig closely follows this plot trajectory, but it also significantly recasts it.15

  For example, Mag’s desertion of Frado at the opening of the story is atypical of the “sorrows and trials” genre, where parental death is the most common cause of separation. (As we have seen, Mag’s decision to marry two black men has led to another sort of death, a “death” defined by alienation, her own social death.) In marked contrast, Frado’s mother
and her second black husband resolve to desert Frado because of the couple’s poverty, since they can neither afford nor want the burden of looking after two children. Frado’s penury is also much starker and longer lasting than the transitory poverty typically found in sentimental novels. Furthermore, “sorrows and trials” protagonists are nowhere near so badly treated as Frado is in Our Nig.

  Even more tellingly, Our Nig’s ending is completely atypical. “Sorrows and trials” novels recount their heroines’ journeys toward a comparatively comfortable or even affluent station in life. This typically results from a near-magical chain of coincidences, such as a surprising inheritance or an advantageous marriage, which delivers the waif to a “land of happy endings.”16 Frado’s story, by comparison, does not end happily. She may have successfully left behind Mrs. Bellmont’s tyranny, but her debilitating hardships continue.

  Yet the most striking contrast concerns the infliction of physical violence. Abuse is Frado’s customary lot: as we have seen, she suffers great cruelty at the hands of Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary.17 Violence on this scale is quite foreign to “sorrows and trials” novels. Indeed, though drawing upon this subgenre of the sentimental novel, Our Nig, in these signal ways, demonstrates how black fiction, even from its beginnings, departs in both form and content from the norms of white female (or male) fiction, in order to expose a quite different kind of body politics.

  The question that haunts both Frado and Wilson’s readers is this: What kind of resistance can Frado offer? At a climactic moment (reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s famous confrontation with the overseer, Mr. Gore) faced with the threat of yet another unfair attack by Mrs. B., Frado picks up a stick from the woodpile and raises it: “ ‘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” (this page). Later, Frado recalls this moment as her “victory at the wood-pile” (this page). Frado senses that she can in a limited way shape her own future. Yet this moment is also deeply compromised, for we are almost immediately told that the whippings at the hands of Mrs. B. continue, even if they do become fewer in number, unlike the relationship that ensued after Frederick Douglass wrestled Mr. Gore to a draw.