Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  LADIES’ AID PARLORS—The Spiritualist Progressive School was attended on Sunday last by a goodly number of children, all of whom took an active interest in the lessons, as well as what was said to them. Mr. Street’s talk about their Lesson Sheet or Paper formed a pleasing feature and held the attention of the pupils to the subject. Dr. Richardson favored us with an interesting speech, and was followed by Mrs. M.J. Folsom and Mrs. H. E. Wilson. All who have the interest of the school at heart, and wish to become charter members, will please meet at the residence of Mrs. Wilson, 15 Village street, next Friday evening at 8 o’clock. We hope to hear from many old workers who have expressed a wish to help us. MRS HATTIE E. WILSON

  LADIES’ AID PARLORS—The Progressive school held a very interesting session last Sunday. All expressed themselves much pleased with the exercises, which consisted of singing, a short march, and a lesson from our paper. The question, “What does Spiritualism Teach?” was responded to by nearly every scholar. A lesson in vocal music and one on elocution were given, with which all were very much pleased. After a few recitations from the children, we listened to a few able remarks from Father Locke. The school will hold an Easter Festival this afternoon and evening of the 24th, and we hope our friends will help us to make it a success. Next Sunday the particulars will be given and tickets for sale. HATTIE E. WILSON

  LADIES’ AID PARLORS—The Progressive School is fast increasing in numbers. Last Sunday the lessons, in which all were deeply interested, occupied all the time, giving no opportunity for recitations or speeches. This week the second issue of The Temple Within will appear. Next Saturday the children will hold an Easter Festival in this place. The children meet in the afternoon for social recreation and supper. In the evening a public entertainment will be given. Admission: adults, ten cents; children not belonging to the school, five cents. All interested in the school, and wishing to become members of the association, are invited to meet in the residence of Miss Hartwell, no. 24 Dover street, Friday evening, March 23d, at eight o’clock.

  MRS. HATTIE E. WILSON Boston, March 18th, 1883.49

  This was the last entry in the Banner to be penned by Wilson. The next, which announced the success of the Easter festival and called another meeting at the “room” of Mrs. Maggie J. Folsom, No. 2 Hamilton Place, room 6, was signed by “Albert A. Lord, Secretary.” Lord was to write such notices from then on until November 1883.50

  What occurred to usher in this change of authorship is not clear. The most obvious explanation is that, as the school grew, Wilson was kept busy by the demands of overseeing its success and so delegated the task of submitting copy to the Banner to the secretary of the “Association” that the Banner noted had been established to run the school in March 1883.51 However, the position of Wilson in this association was never defined, and as the school’s history unfolds in the Banner, it becomes clear that Wilson’s role was less central than might be expected, given the part she played in the school’s founding. This sidelining may again be connected to her racial identity, which may have created a problem if she proposed to run a school for children in a predominantly white social movement (though her gender certainly played a role, too). By September 1883 the “President” of the school was named as J. C. Street, and in October 1883 he became its “conductor.” His resignation from this position, however, followed soon after, occurring at a “regular business meeting” described in the Banner on November 10. Since Albert A. Lord never wrote another notice about the school, he seems to have left at about the same time.

  Within two months, reports about the school’s activities stopped appearing in the Banner.52 The last mention of the Progressive School in its pages was in April 1884, when, at a “Lyceum Union Anniversary” in Paine Hall, where one of her former havens, the Progressive Lyceum No. 1, met each week, Hattie Wilson, “aided by her good controls,” ended her address as follows: “May harmony ever exist between the two schools represented here today. Allow me to thank you, on behalf of the officers and members of the Progressive School, for your cordial invitation and warm reception.”53 These words seem to be an effort at bridge building, possibly hinting at a more general desire within the movement at that time to unify the Boston lyceums, as the meeting’s very name (a “Lyceum Union”) implies. Wilson’s school, nevertheless, seems to have ceased to operate soon after this. Possibly the meeting indicated that, in a contracting market (by 1884, Civil War memories were fading), the spiritualist lyceums recognized that some retrenchment was essential.

  In total, Wilson wrote slightly more than one thousand words about her school in the Banner—that is to say, about 2 percent of the total number of words that have been identified as written by her.54 The specific entries are as much advertisements as they are school reports. However, they can serve as a reminder that Frado’s school attendance in Singleton was one of the few positive experiences depicted in Our Nig. Wilson’s commitment to teaching at spiritualist schools can be related back to her portrayal of Frado’s fulfilling educational experiences (assuming their depiction to be autobiographical). Wilson’s decision to name her spiritualist children’s gathering a “school” rather than a “lyceum” (as such institutions were customarily called) may also be an allusion to her relatively fond memories of her own schooldays.

  More likely, however, the name she chose was intended to distinguish her “school” from other spiritualist “lyceums.” Once Wilson stopped writing the reports and Lord took over, the reports became briefer, but part of one in particular bears quoting: “LADIES’ AID PARLORS … The Progressive School was visited last Sunday by several of our friends from [the Children’s Progressive] Lyceum No. 1 [and this led to] a few remarks from Mr. Alonzo Danforth as to the proper teaching of children in a school of this kind.”55 This kind of monitoring (as it appears to be) is unprecedented—at least in the reports of the Banner concerning Boston spiritual lyceum activities—and suggests how daring Wilson’s move had been in setting up her unconventionally titled progressive school.

  Wilson also seems to have run her school in an atypical fashion. She departed from the norms chiefly by introducing into her school her teaching aid, The Temple Within, which she describes variously as her school’s “newspaper” or “lesson sheet.” Calling it a lesson sheet perhaps implies that Wilson desired to provide an education beyond the general “Sunday school” style induction into spiritualist beliefs offered by other lyceums. The Banner had not previously mentioned any such newspapers or lesson sheets being used in the lyceum system, though in 1893 they were to be taken up by the Children’s Progressive Lyceum No. I.56 Despite apparently introducing such an innovation, Wilson was quickly superseded as the leader of the school, though still recognized by the school as “our best friend and worker.” Wilson’s school was also apparently set apart from other schools by its lack of regimentation, or division into conventionally named groups, and its avoidance of the predilection for “Banner Marches” and other formal pageants that characterized other lyceums. Apart from the mention of one “march,” none of these activities ever appeared in the Banner’s reporting of her school.57

  Possibly more damaging, in terms of stirring up resistance to its existence, was the way Wilson’s school, like the Shawmut Lyceum where she had worked before, took the atypical step of allowing mediums under spiritual control to work with its children. When leading the children in the Progressive School, Wilson herself sometimes worked “under control of one of her Indian guides,” and on at least one occasion provided “several proofs of the presence of loved ones gone before” during a session.58 Introducing her “Indian guides” into her lyceum in this way seems to have been quite unusual for the lyceum movement, presumably because the spirits introduced by the mediums might say or do inappropriate things (so that the medium could thereby excite interest in the manifestations he or she produced). Assuming that the Banner reports are a reliable guide in this respect, only the Shawmut otherwise went down this road, and Wilson would certainly have been aware of th
is. Pertinently, in a welcoming speech to a spiritualist luminary visiting Boston, Wilson observed that she “had been called to do the work of spirits inspiring her organism for long years, and knew by sad experience the effects sometimes wrought … because of … daring to speak the words which the spirit-world demanded.”59

  These unconventional, even risky boundary-crossing propensities may have lain behind Wilson’s apparent demotion in her school’s hierarchy as well as her earlier restless moves from site to site within Boston’s spiritualist community. These migrations may have been enforced rather than voluntary, as she sought (or followed) congenial allies ready to share her approach to lyceum teaching.

  Wilson’s greater liberalism—even her radicalism—is alluded to, perhaps, in a message delivered to the Progressive Lyceum No. 1 by the very well respected and prominent Boston spiritualist Mrs. Maggie Folsom in January 1884. Folsom, one of Wilson’s mentors who was likely to have been instrumental in helping her set up her own school,60 obliquely requested greater tolerance from the Children’s Progressive Lyceum No. 1. She expresses a “deep … interest in the work progressing so finely under the motherly care of our good friend, Mrs. Hattie Wilson, at the Ladies’ Aid Parlors” while also “always … cherish[ing] a love for the ‘Old Mother Lyceum’ [i.e., Lyceum No. 1].” The Banner’s report about Folsom then continues, “and so we occasionally hear [Folsom’s] voice in defense of the right, in appeals to us to be true to our spirit guides, the old workers who march with us from Sunday to Sunday, whose spirit forms she could so distinctly see.”61 Here it seems that Folsom (or at least the person reporting her words) wishes to secure a rapprochement between the two Boston lyceums, while also intimating that, for her, like Wilson, séances should have a place in the lyceum system. Yet soon after Folsom uttered her diplomatic and carefully coded words, urging more inter-lyceum communion, the “LYCEUM UNION” event occurred that marked Wilson’s school’s last recorded appearance.62 What followed is virtually a full and final withdrawal of Wilson from active lyceum involvement; the Banner only rarely mentions her again. She may have simply been too controversial a figure to fit in as the lyceum movement consolidated.63

  Spiritualist Aftermaths and Issues

  In total, Wilson’s involvement with lyceum teaching lasted many more years than her brief platform-speaking career and waned in tandem with the decline of the lyceum system.64 As she grew older and faded from the limelight (her death in 1900, for example, went unremarked in the Banner), Wilson returned to the running of trance medium sessions in her apartments. As late as 1898 the Banner carried a notice that “Mrs. Hattie E. Wilson, 9 Pelham street, Boston, holds circles at 7.45 P.M.,” though the time had long since passed when the Banner regularly carried information about her (even including her current Boston address).65

  There are several reasons for Wilson’s decline from relative prominence over the decades. Firstly, spiritualism itself contracted, as the Civil War and its death toll faded from the public’s consciousness. In 1896 the leading spiritualist speaker, Moses Hull, lamented this contraction, for example.66 This perhaps helps account for Wilson’s apparent loss of public speaking engagements over the decades, though for a time this was made up by her Boston lyceum involvements.

  As significant was the rise in popularity of other types of spiritualism beyond Wilson’s forte of “trance speaking.” These changes caused Wilson, as early as July 1868, to ramp up her act, advertising herself as a “Lecturer and Unconscious Trance Physician” (our emphasis). By May 29, 1869, Wilson was claiming: “Chronic diseases treated with great success. Herb packs and manipulations included in the mode of treatment.”67 It is hard to believe that Wilson could cure “chronic diseases,” but her audacity is as nothing compared to others’ claims, accompanying the rise of so-called test mediumships. These “tests” in the postwar period involved increasingly spectacular physical manifestations of the spirit world. The more spectacular these tests, the more the “test” medium thrived. As the Banner noted as early as March 1870, “There seems to be a greater demand than ever all over the country for test mediums.” By September 10 the tone had become drier: “Tests seem … to be in the ascendancy.”68 Yet the message is clear: “test” spiritualism increasingly attracted the headlines. As Wilson did not attempt to compete with these “test” mediums, her fortunes necessarily must have waned. (In 1881 one of her sessions is pointedly described as an “old-fashioned healing and developing circle.”)69

  As the twentieth century approached, Wilson’s reduced mobility as she aged would have further contributed to her decline. Her final appearance in the “Platform Lecturers” column in 1898 mentions only her availability for visits to her house and lists no outside engagements.70

  Wilson’s embrace of spiritualism was, we suggest, always problematic, particularly as her claims concerning her powers became more ambitious over time, though she never quite represented herself as a full-fledged “test” medium. This escalation of her spiritual powers is evident in her comments at the Haverhill gathering of the Massachusetts Spiritualist Convention on October 22 and 23, 1870. On the final day, her “deeply interesting remarks, based upon her experience as a medium, affirming the permanence of the relation between parents and children, although death might apparently divide them,” suggest how spiritualism offered supportive consolation to the bereaved and why it proved so popular to Americans grieving their Civil War losses. It is important to acknowledge spiritualism’s positive and constructive cultural aspects. Though dominated by white males, spiritualism also provided a means for women and members of nonwhite ethnic groups (Native Americans and African Americans in particular) to gain a public platform and even aspire to professional status. Wilson herself late in life took the title “Dr. Hattie Wilson” on occasion.71

  Spiritualism, nevertheless, even in the nineteenth century, was regarded as controversial, as the Banner’s repeated and continual defenses of the institution’s probity suggest. In 1866, for example, in an article in the Banner entitled “Mr. Gaylord on Spiritualism,” the Rev. N. M. Gaylord declared: “As regards physical manifestations, he did not believe in them … and as regards trance mediums, it was a puzzle to find how they could talk by the hour what seemed to him a mess of twaddle.” Almost fourteen years later, faced with constant attacks highlighting “FRAUDULENT MEDIUMS,” the Banner advises that “a passive condition on the part of the sitter” was “essential” to a successful session and that too much skepticism could, as it were, generate fraud (this idea is advanced without any hint of irony).72 Spiritualism as a movement, and the Banner as an important organ of this movement, could not avoid addressing such constant allegations of fakery and fraudulence. For example, it prominently featured a rebuttal of a Boston Post attack, in an article self-explanatorily entitled “The Recent ‘Exposure’ of Physical Mediumship in Mercantile Hall.” Even the Fox sisters’ series of “Rochester rappings,” the founding phenomena of “Modern Spiritualism,” were revealed on October 21, 1888, by the Foxes themselves to have been faked by the two girls loudly cracking their finger and toe joints.73

  Spiritualism certainly had its shady side. The advertisements in the Banner bear testimony to this, offering not only relatively harmless remedies, such as those promised by “Hasheesh Candy,” but also, more disturbingly, “antidote[s] to cancer,” “Winchester’s Asiatic Cholera drops … an infallible remedy for Asiatic Malignant Cholera,” and “Dr. Storer’s Nutritive Compound,” claiming to be a remedy for “Scrofula … Syphilis, Tuberculosis, Consumption, Ulceration of the Liver, … Ring Worm, Rheumatism.”74 (Storer regularly shared platforms in Boston with Wilson.) Advertisements making outlandish claims for ineffective treatments appeared alongside more benign promises to disguise graying hair (“Ring’s Vegetable Ambrosia for Gray Hair”).75 Wilson, we recall, had carved out a living of sorts by making and bottling a kind of hair treatment in the late 1850s in northwestern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Her entrée into spiritualism, then, may have come
about through her prior engagement with its patent medicinal hinterland. “Allida” tells us that Wilson’s treatment did not simply color hair but could “restore” it to its original color. Wilson’s advertisements placed in newspapers around New England went even further, effectively promising to cure baldness.76

  Our concern with spiritualism’s ethics color how we read the account of the main contribution Wilson made to the Haverhill convention, back in 1870:

  Mrs. Hattie E. (Wilson) Robinson [she remarried in 1870] formerly Hattie Wilson, gave a narrative of her development as a medium, by which she had been brought into acquaintance with her father in spirit-life, who was her almost constant companion. He had told her, in detail, the circumstances of her early life, and upon inquiry of the persons named by him, still living … found them correct in every particular. Although opposing to becoming a medium at first, and disbelieving in the purported origin of the power that controlled her, yet she was finally convinced by seeing an old school-mate, who was dead several years, standing by her bedside, who conversed with her as naturally as those who appear about her in the material world. Doubting, to her is impossible, and has been for many years; and when your spiritual sensibilities are opened, you will know the spirit-world is not afar off, in space, but here in our midst; and that spirits are not bodiless beings, but with us in our homes. [Notice the slide from this second-person interlude into first-person address.] Spiritualism has aroused me from my indifference and given me an interest in life—to be something and do something for others. Her entire story was deeply affecting, and won implicit confidence in its truth, by the simple natural manner in which all its details were presented.77

  This idealistic account, though consistent with mainstream spiritualist sentimentalism, and chiming with nonconformist beliefs in useful works as a mark of divinity,78 is somewhat undercut by our knowledge that Wilson’s engagement with spiritualism always involved making a living as well, as evidenced by her charging admission for the séances she provided to the Shawmut Lyceum’s sewing circle and the fees paid by charter members of her 1883 school. More important, however, her Haverhill address brings Wilson to the threshold of test mediumship. Her claims to authenticity are supported by “tests” of the evidence—the words of her father relayed from the spirit world and the materiality of her dead schoolmate, seen “standing by her bedside.”79