Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  Our research has revealed the source of her hostility: in her early life, Harriet Wilson had been fully exposed to the radical ups and conservative downs of New England Congregational religious life. When living in Milford and when allowed to by Mrs. Hayward, she almost certainly attended the town’s Congregational church. This was the Haywards’ church, as shown by church records from 1805 onward.47 Debates about slavery gripped this church’s history almost from its inception, for soon after the Reverend Humphrey Moore became its minister in 1802, he openly embraced the antislavery cause. His growing militancy in this regard may have led to his removal from his official appointment as Milford’s overall town minister in 1832. He remained the minister of Milford’s Congregational church, however, until 1836, and it is likely that Wilson heard him preach against slavery. Perhaps she also overheard discussions as to why he lost the town ministry. What can be said for sure is that his commitment to abolition soon led Moore into politics, and finally to election to the New Hampshire House of Representatives (in 1840) and then the state senate (in 1841). Moore’s replacement as Congregational minister, the Reverend John W. Salter, likely was not a vigorous antislavery advocate; the congregation split over his appointment and he finally departed, followed by an interregnum when no minister could be agreed upon. Salter’s successor, Abner B. Warner (1839–46), was strongly antislavery, though his replacement, Lycurgus P. Kimball (1847–49), probably was not—and, like Salter, he did not last long. When Ephraim N. Hidden replaced Kimball, antislavery sentiments took center stage strongly once more, and a number of anti-slavery motions were passed by his church.48

  It is possible that Hidden’s open commitment to abolition provides the reason why Harriet E. Adams chose him to perform her marriage to Thomas Wilson in 1851, returning to Milford (probably from Massachusetts) for the occasion. More important is that Wilson, both as a youngster and a teenager, would have listened to the changing views on slavery emanating from her church’s pulpit as one minister gave way to the next. She came to realize at a tender age that whites varied widely, even wildly, in their attitudes to African Americans. This is reflected in the contrasting literary creations, on the one hand, of Mrs. Bellmont, who despite describing herself as a “professor of religion” is a vicious racist and, on the other hand, of her sons, who use abolitionist language when voicing their “disapprov[al] of oppression in all its forms” (this page).

  By enduring such oscillations of white opinion as well as behavior, Frado understands that she must conduct her life circumspectly. This lesson has plainly been learned by Wilson as a spiritualist in Boston. She frequently engaged in mainstream spiritualist activities, attending camp meetings, working in the lyceums, and becoming involved with new plans, such as the idea of founding a permanent “temple” devoted to spiritualism in Boston.49 Indeed she was elected to an organization called the American Spiritual Institute (ASI), a new conservative organization of “Spiritualists who do not believe in radicalism, free love, and other so-called theories of this sect.” Yet Wilson was by no means consistently conservative. In 1873 she had appeared on the same platform as the leading exponent of free love, Victoria C. Woodhull, and spoke at an 1874 meeting of the National Spiritualist Association, organized by the infamous Woodhull for “all Spiritualists, materialists, free-thinkers, free-religionists, socialists and infidels.” This meeting had been vituperatively attacked and was described in the Spiritual Scientist as “not accurately represent[ing] the conservative and respectable Spiritualists.”50 Plainly, Wilson had to negotiate a tricky, narrow path among the Boston spiritualists, preserving her mainstream reputation (she was an energetic networker) while also always desiring to express her more radical impulses, even while recognizing that to do so might bring down opprobrium all too easily upon her head (as when the spiritualist lyceum she seems to have set up on her own initiative was inspected somewhat censoriously by members of Boston’s oldest, “mother” lyceum in 1883).51 Possibly dissatisfaction with such oppression is what lies behind the “grievances at the treatment she received from Boston Spiritualists” to which she gave vent at the 1874 meeting of the National Spiritualist Association.52

  Wilson’s career as a spiritualist faded from visibility in her old age and her end seems not to have been a wholly happy one. She passed away, after an illness of two months, in July 1900, from “inanition incident upon old age” at the home of Mrs. Catherine C. Cobb, 93 Washington Street in Quincy, Massachusetts, as indicated by her death certificate (see appendix 2). Why she was staying with Mrs. Cobb and her son, Walter, and how long she had been living there both remain unclear. Her death certificate gives her residential address as 9 Pelham Street, Boston, which had been her address since at least 1897, also during 1898, and perhaps during the early part of her terminal illness as well; certainly she was still active in Boston in 1899.53 Her occupation is listed on her Quincy death certificate as nurse, and since Catherine Cobb’s husband, Silas, had recently passed away, it has been suggested that Wilson may have nursed him. Just as possible, however, is the suggestion that Catherine Cobb took Wilson into her home as Wilson’s health deteriorated. That Wilson is buried in the Cobbs’ family grave lot in Mount Wollaston Cemetery certainly suggests a degree of intimacy beyond that likely to have been established by a relatively short period serving as the Cobb family’s nurse, though the way her name appears on the back of the family grave’s granite memorial preserves a symbolic distance. What can be said is that, either as a nurse still working though over seventy years of age (the death certificate gives her age as seventy-five) or as the subject of the Cobbs’ charity, her career had not ended on a particularly successful note.54 Cobb family lore narrates how she ended up in poverty and how Walter Cobb arranged to have her buried (see appendix 3, this page-this page). This family lore also held her to be a Native American. It is not likely that Wilson was attempting to pass; she had consistently acknowledged herself to be colored (though sometimes taken to be white). More likely this family story was corrupted in transmission down the years and can be taken as evidence that her connection with the Cobb family stemmed from her work as a medium mostly communing with Native American spirit guides. It seems possible that one of the Cobb family, such as Catherine Cobb, was a spiritualist who used Wilson as a medium, valuing her intimacy with “Indian guides” (though this is speculative).55 There is however an irony in the way the Cobbs’ act of charity has been misremembered in a way incidentally emphasizing Wilson’s complicity in processes of spiritualist stereotyping. Spiritualist “Indian guides” were almost without exception stock caricatures.

  For all her endeavors, the coping, resourceful, radically inclined but cautious spiritualist Hattie Wilson that emerges in Boston could contrive no way of securing the enduring success her obvious abilities suggest she deserved. She seems to have ended up impoverished, dependent on the Cobbs’ charity, and buried at their expense. They most probably inserted the notices about her death in the newspapers (see appendix 3), while the Banner of Light did not note her passing at all.

  In Our Nig Wilson portrays a fictional protagonist sharing not only some of the qualities that, after she leaves the Haywards, Wilson displays in Nashua and Boston, but also the same inability to evade the inescapably punishing consequences of racism. Frado (like Wilson, later), well aware of the constraints acting upon her, represses her restlessness and rebelliousness in order to avoid further punishment. Throughout Frado restrains herself, yet throughout she cannot achieve either safety or a sufficiency through her hard work, instead finding herself beaten or reduced to poverty time and again. The marriage Frado enters into becomes yet another trap, removing her from her temporary refuge in W—– and yoking her to an unsupportive husband who exposes his family to penury.

  But, above all, violence looms over Frado. Unlike abolitionist slave narratives, where violence by white men against black women, with its intimations of sexual abuse, is used to evoke a mixture of voyeurism and moral abhorrence, Frado’s narrative instea
d displays a different kind of gothic horror: sadistic punishment at the hands of Northern white women, illuminating the disease of racism from a disturbing new perspective. Frado’s chief tormentor, Mrs. B., exhibits “manifest enjoyment” after beating her (this page). But it is Wilson’s angle of attack that shocks. She describes Mrs. B. as “spicing the toil with ‘words that burn,’ and frequent blows on her head” (this page). The term “spicing” piercingly highlights Mrs. B.’s brutal home economics with her servant—a recipe of abuse aimed at humiliating Frado and extracting more labor. The image of Mrs. B. “spicing” Frado’s toils with blows as well as words exposes Mrs. B.’s recipe as one of cruel abuse using the key ingredients of racism and sadism.

  Our Nig’s realistic depiction of domestic and farm labor and their attendant racism and sexism56 uncovers how layers of public prejudice shape, constrain, and deform private lives in the domestic sphere. Beyond this, it addresses a burning issue of its time, the vulnerable position of the growing number of free blacks in antebellum American society. But it also carries the reader much further, to the very core of the dilemmas and contradictions generated by anti-black sentiment delivering proscribed messages that, it can be argued, America is still reluctant to hear, entwined as these are with issues of class and economic exploitation: “Just think how much profit she was to us last summer. We had no work hired out; she did the work of two girls,” boasts Mrs. B. “And got the whippings for two with it!” retorts her husband (this page).

  Our Nig offers a chilling portrait of life in the antebellum North for free blacks. It reminds the reader of racism’s privations, even as Wilson uses the preface and the final three testimonials to mitigate the full horror of the novel’s message. Just as in her later life Wilson blunted her protest by primarily speaking out through spirit mediums about her mistreatment by Boston spiritualists in 1874,57 so Our Nig must often be oblique in its reminders of the awful, enduring consequences of discrimination on the basis of color.

  This excoriating depiction prevents Wilson’s text from fitting into any generic pattern within the forms of the novel available to her. Our Nig could not conform to the pattern of white sentimental novels, whose sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings did not match Wilson’s experience of constant struggle. Nor could the book conform to the pattern of conventional bildungsromans, which end with their protagonists’ (slightly uneasy) social integration. No such integration is available to Frado. She always remains a vulnerable figure, her precarious status the consequence of pervasive racism. This is Harriet E. Wilson’s key message in Our Nig, a pioneering novel that remains most compelling today, a novel that, since its rediscovery and publication almost thirty years ago, has rightly been welcomed into the canon of African American, American, and women’s literature.

  NOTES

  1. “Use Mrs. Wilson’s Hair Regenerator and Hair Dressing,” Methodist Quarterly Review 42, ed. D. D. Whedon (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1860), 714.

  2. See Gardner, “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister.’ ” A few further copies of Our Nig have been discovered since Gardner wrote his article, but these seem to confirm his hypothesis that she herself sold her book locally. See note 32.

  3. See, for example, the works of Frances Smith Foster, Elizabeth J. West, Cynthia J. Davis, Julia Stern, Barbara A. White, and R. J. Ellis in the bibliography.

  4. See appendix 1.

  5. See, for example, the accounts collected together in William Still, The Underground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872).

  6. See William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist: A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).

  7. “Song of Our Mountain Home” (1850): “Among our free hills / Are hearts true and brave, / The air of our mountains / Ne’er breathed on a slave.” See Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 15 et seq.

  8. Nathaniel Rogers, quoted in Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 119.

  9. See, for example, Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 53; Sterling Stuckey, “A Last Stern Struggle: Henry Highland Garnet and Liberation Theory,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 132.

  10. For the argument that slavery was advantageous to African Americans, see George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris, 1857).

  11. Examples of this sort of propaganda are known as anti-Uncle Tom’s Cabins. See, for example, Mary Henderson Eastman, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852) and John W. Page, Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia and Uncle Tom without One in Boston (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1853).

  12. We here take issue with the arguments of such critics as William L. Andrews and Barbara A. White.

  13. See the discussion of the “overplot” of nineteenth-century women’s fiction in Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction: A Guide to the Novels by and about Women in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

  14. The phrase comes from Maria Cummins, The Lamplighter (New York: A. L. Burt, 1854), 47. See Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 70.

  15. The close correlations that exist can be driven home by comparing Our Nig to the opening of one of the most famous of these sentimental novels, Maria Cummins’s best-selling The Lamplighter (1854). Frado in Our Nig is deserted by her mother; is taken in and harshly treated by a female; sleeps in a mean attic room; is given a dog by a well-meaning, sympathetic man; resists her female tormentor by picking up a stick of wood to scare her off; and leaves to experience destitution and kindness at the hands of strangers. Very similarly, Gerty in The Lamplighter loses her mother; is taken in and harshly treated by a female; sleeps in a mean attic room; is given a kitten by a well-meaning, sympathetic man; resists her female tormentor by striking her with a stick of wood; and leaves to experience destitution and kindness at the hands of strangers. Such similarities must make us ever cautious about assuming that Frado’s experiences in the Bellmont family are directly autobiographical.

  16. Baym, Women’s Fiction, 11.

  17. See Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 82–83.

  18. It seems most likely that any debts to seduction narrative motifs and the captivity narrative come to Wilson at secondhand from her reading of slave narratives and sentimental literature. Byway of white editors’ interventions within the slave narrative tradition, we would further suggest, a dialogic exchange operates between the “sorrows and trials” tradition and the slave narrative genre. Wilson takes over this dialogue for her own ends.

  19. See Joan M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Women Working on the Land (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1986), 41–42.

  20. See Herbert Aptheker’s analysis in “The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement,” Science and Society 5, no. 2 (Spring 1941): 148–72; 128.

  21. See Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), x et seq.

  22. See, for example, Peter A. Dorsey, “De-authorising Slavery: Realism in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Brown’s Clotel,” English Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1994): 257–88. Such practices are most probably compounded by that African tradition within which stories are owned communally. See William L. Andrews, “Preface,” in Three Classic African American Novels, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Mentor, 1990), 7–21.

  23. Nancy Prince, A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince, Written by Herself, 2nd ed., (Boston: Published by the Author, 1853), 3.

  24. Ibid., 11.

  25. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds, 41–42.

  26. The death and marriage records for Hattie E. Wilson discovered by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts (and discussed in their edition of Our Nig [New York: Penguin, 2009]) record Wilson’s maiden name as Green, though all early records suggest
it was Adams. No Adams and no Greens have so far been traced in the census or town records that could reasonably be taken to be Harriet Wilson’s parents.

  27. See George Ramsdell, History of Milford (Concord, N.H.: The Rumford Press, 1901), 75, and White, “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil,” n. 9.

  28. See White, “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil,” 29, 35–37; Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 54–56, 88–89.

  29. For competing accounts, see Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 28, and Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts, 2005, xiv-xv.

  30. “Who Wants a Good Head of Hair? Mrs. Wilson’s Hair Regenerator,” Farmer’s Cabinet (January 15, 1859): 4.

  31. The work of P. Gabrielle Foreman and Katherine Flynn proved this. See Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts, 2009 ix-x, xlii.

  32. The fact that inscribed copies of Our Nig, with one exception, bear the names of people who lived in the Milford area (see Gardner, “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister,’ ” 226–46) suggests that the book was being sold locally, and maybe even door-to-door. A copy that came to light in 2009, for example, bears the inscription “Gove,” which would seem to refer to Jacob Gove, a town moderator in Milford and “earnest advocate of … antislavery principles, who moved there in circa 1850” (see Ramsdell, History of Milford, chap. 15). Our thanks to Megan Smolenyak for her research.