Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  Such a claim is difficult to swallow, as is the way Wilson becomes known as a medium able to contact Native American spirits. During her Boston career she developed as her regular spirit guides several “Indian guides” that “control[led]” her and enabled her to give “proofs of the presence of loved ones gone before.” Native Americans were often reduced in spiritualist circles to caricature or stereo type—involving not a little racism in its celebration of bucolic “noble savagery” á la Rousseau: “The Red Man as He Was … Judge Flandran gave descriptions of the scalp dance, the medicine dance, moon’s day and kissing day. And he concluded by saying that there is ever an interest in wild animals, but in wild men it is greatly enhanced.” W.J. Colville spoke of how “the Indian of two hundred and fifty years ago” was “very different from the so-called brute of today.… [A] peaceful and orderly people if maltreated for centuries can develop into well-nigh fiends.”80 Given such sentimental and nostalgic framing, “Indian guides” from the spirit world became so popular that an “Indian Peace Council” was convened, attended, ironically, mostly by white mediums, and in 1894 the annual spiritualist camp meeting at Onset Grove saw the establishment of “The Wigwam,” full of “Indian bric-a-brac” and featuring representations of such spirit guides as “Rolling Thunder, Eagle Eye, Gray Eagle, White Swan, [and] Eagle Wing.”81 Wilson, by providing “proofs of the presence of loved ones” dictated to her by one of her many Native American spirit guides, comes very close to becoming a practicing “test” medium.

  The chief problem thrown up by this Haverhill address, however, is Wilson’s claim that her father appeared before her and told her the details of her early life. She claimed in 1868 that she had only been a laborer in the ranks of spiritualism for seven years, implying that her first spiritual encounters postdate Our Nig’s composition. Consistent with this, Our Nig makes no suggestion that Frado possesses any abilities as a medium. Though in her book’s closing paragraph she compares herself to Joseph, reader of dreams in the pharaoh’s prison, she also states that, quite unlike a spiritualist medium, she can only “track” the Bellmonts until the point that they pass “beyond mortal vision” (this page). Nor does Our Nig suggest that Frado came to know about the details of her early life by way of a spiritual appearance to her of her deceased father. This may call into question Hattie E. Wilson’s truthfulness at Haverhill, unless, that is, we accept that the “autobiographical” account found in Our Nig is a flawed fiction, and the “truth” only revealed to her later, by her father’s spirit.82

  Wilson’s turn to spiritualism might therefore be linked to Frado’s long association with trickery and deceit, described in Our Nig. Frado’s husband, a “professed fugitive” passing himself off as an escaped slave, is an exemplar of how one can contrive a living and earn acceptance in the community through deception. (Mrs. Bellmont’s hypocritical professions of religion also come to mind.) “Our Nig’s”/Wilson’s career selling a patent hair treatment (claimed by Wilson to be a regenerator: “IT IS NO HUMBUG! TRY IT AND SEE!”) is another example.83 As a young child, Frado shows a propensity to play “sly” tricks (such as filling her teacher’s desk with cigar smoke so that it appears to be on fire this page). Last, the bedbound Frado is suspected of being a deceitful malingerer by Mrs. Hoggs (this page). All this might suggest that Frado, Wilson’s fictional (autobiographical) creation, realizes the advantages of self-invention as long as it is well acted out.

  If one accepts that Wilson was a charlatan to some extent, then this opens up the possibility that, when writing her life story in Our Nig, she embellished the details of her life, drawing on and fictionalizing the popular slave narrative genre to sensationalize her tale, perhaps even by overstating the maltreatment she experienced in the Bellmont farmhouse. Like the melodramatic opening account of Mag’s seduction, such sensationalization would have rendered her book potentially more marketable, and we know by her own admission she sought to make money from her book for herself and her child. This line of argument cannot be incontrovertibly dismissed.

  Yet we do not embrace it. The book’s depiction of Frado’s mistreatment, and particularly the way she is silenced by propping her mouth open so wide she cannot cry out, is presented with restraint, not sensationalizing hyperbole. Nor does Wilson as a medium advance fully down the path of test mediumship, where the real money lay in spiritualist circles (if also the greatest risk of exposure, which would have been fatal to the career of a colored medium). Most likely Wilson was neither simply a manipulative fake nor truly communing with material manifestations of the spirit world that live among us. Rather, she is guilty of some manipulation but does have honestly held spiritualist convictions, which mean that, setting aside her claim to treat chronic diseases successfully, there is some legitimacy in her advertisements’ claims: “HATTIE E. WILSON, Trance Physician, has taken rooms at 27 Carver street. Chronic diseases treated with great success. Herb packs and manipulations included in the mode of treatment.”84 Wilson may well have had expertise in herb packs and manipulations that provided some relief of medical symptoms.

  We suggest that Wilson’s most likely motivation for embracing spiritualism can be found a long way back in her life: in the death of her son, George,85 while she was, apparently, engaged in developing her hair treatment enterprise. (Probably after her son’s death, she set up a kind of business partnership with Henry P. Wilson and G. J. Tewksbury of Manchester, while she worked out of Nashua.)86 Setting aside one possible but unpalatable explanation—namely that Wilson abandoned her child to secure for herself a profitable livelihood87—a much better way of understanding this sequence of events is to focus on how Wilson more probably had to work unremittingly to eke out a very modest independent income, leaving her son behind for all or much of the time88 while perhaps she sold her “hair regenerator” door-to-door, it is understandable that she could have been consumed by an excessive sense of guilt over her son’s death and not surprising that she turned to spiritualism to assuage it.

  Wilson’s turn to spiritualism becomes in part psychologically explicable. Maltreated by her own mother, abandoned to the cruelties of a kind of indentured servitude in a house not unlike the Bellmonts’, and guilt racked over leaving her child in care and his subsequent death, she may indeed have had visionary reveries that led her into a career in spiritualism. Founded in part on belief, this career would also have been fundamentally shaped by the hostile, generally racist society rendered vividly in her novel, Our Nig.89

  NOTES

  1. “Spiritualist Meetings,” Banner of Light (hereafter cited as BL) XXI, no. 8 (May 18, 1867): 8; “Spiritualist Convention,” BL XXI, no. 13 (June 15, 1867): 3.

  2. This is the first indication in the Banner of Light that Wilson’s engagement with spiritualism will come to center on the children’s Sunday lyceums set up by spiritualists in Boston.

  3. BL XXI, no. 15 (July 29, 1867): 8; “Second Great Spiritualist Camp Meeting at Pierpont Grove … August 29th [to] Sept. 1st, BL XXI, no. 26 (September 14, 1867): 5; BL XXII, no. 5 (October 19, 1865): 8.

  4. BL XX, no. 16 (February 16, 1867): 4; BL XX, no. 25 (March 2, 1867): 8; BL XX, no. 21 (February 9, 1867): 7; BL XXI, no. 12 (June 1, 1867): 5. An alternative sponsor is Isaiah C. Ray. See pages vii and xiv of this edition’s appendices.

  5. “The State Agent’s Report,” BL XXII, no. 20 (February 2, 1868): 1.

  6. BL XXIII, no. 11 (May 30, 1868): 11; BL XXII, no. 20 (February 2, 1868): 2.

  7. The Banner similarly espoused these causes. See, for example: “Drunkard, Stop!” BL XVII, no. 22 (August 19, 1865): 7. “The Master and the Slave,” BL XII, no. 16 (January 10, 1863): 8, which speaks of “the curse of slavery”; “Women’s Suffrage Convention” (a supportive announcement of the meeting), BL LI, no. 10 (May 27, 1882): 7. The Banner also always embraced the idea that women could play prominent roles as spiritualist organizers and speakers. Furthermore the Banner’s regular, free listings of “Spiritualist Lecturers” consistently show that well over one-
third of such lecturers were female.

  8. Anon., “Spiritual Camp Meeting at Cape Cod,” BL XXIII, no. 22 (August 15, 1868): 4.

  9. Hattie E. Wilson, [no title], BL XXIV, no. 4 (October 10, 1868): 4. Apart from Our Nig and the notices she wrote in the Banner about her school, these seem to be the only words known to have been penned by Wilson, other than the wording of her various advertisements. This makes the sentiments she expresses here particularly significant.

  10. See Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America (Boston: Beacon Books, 1989).

  11. Jay Chaapel, BL LIV, no. 20 (February 2, 1884): 5.

  12. “MRS HATTIE WILSON,” BL XXIII, no. 21 (August 8, 1868): 5.

  13. “Movements of Lecturers and Mediums,” BL XXIV, no. 25 (March 6, 1869): 4; “Marlboro’, Mass.,” BL XXIV, no. 12 (December 5, 1868): 4.

  14. “Massachusetts Spiritual Convention at Haverhill,” BL XXVIII, no. 8 (November 12, 1870): 2. Wilson is called “Robinson” here because she remarried in September 1870.

  15. BL XXIV, no. 4 (October 10, 1868): 4.

  16. Avery large proportion, circa 42 percent, of those killed in the Civil War were never identified. See Susan-Mary Grant, “Patriot Graves: American National Identity and the Civil War Dead,” American Nineteenth Century History 5, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 95–96.

  17. “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XXVII, no. 16 (July 2, 1870): 5; “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XXX, no. 1 (September 16, 1871): 3; “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XX, no. 5 (October 21, 1871): 5; “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XXX, no. 11 (November 25, 1871): 8.

  18. See, for example, “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XXX, no. 26 (March 9, 1872): 8; “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” BL XXXII, no. 1 (September 14, 1872): 5.

  19. “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” “Temple Hall,” BL XXXII, no. 26 (March 29, 1873): 5; “Spiritualist Lyceums and Lectures,” “Temple Hall,” and “Eliot Hall,” BL XXXII, no. 26 (April 5, 1873): 5.

  20. Just after this Lyceum moved to John A. Andrew Hall from Eliot Hall. See BL XXXIII, no. 23 (September 6, 1873): 8.

  21. The Temple Hall lyceum at this same time re-formed as the Children’s Independent Lyceum Association, BL XXXIII, no. 23 (September 6, 1873): 8. This may have had something to do with her switch.

  22. BL XXXIV, no. 12 (December 20, 1873): 8; see also “Children’s Lyceums,” BL XVII, no. 15 (July 1, 1865): 4. See Geoffrey K. Nelson, Spiritualism and Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 11.

  23. See Conductor Hatch’s address, Paine Hall, as recorded in BL LIII, no. 6 (April 28, 1883): 1.

  24. BL XXV, no. 22 (August 29, 1874): 5.

  25. “Spiritualist Lectures and Lyceums,” BL XXXV, no. 24 (September 12, 1874): 5; “Spiritualist Lectures and Lyceums,” BL XXXV, no. 21 (August 29, 1874): 5; BL XXXIV, no. 22, (February 28, 1874): 4.

  26. See Bridget Bennett, Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth Century American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5–6.

  27. “Twenty-Sixth Anniversary [of Modern Spiritualism] … at New Fraternity and the Parker Memorial,” BL XXXV, no. 2 (April 11, 1874): 1; “Spiritualist Lectures and Lyceums,” BL XXXV, no. 17 (July 25, 1874): 4; “Silver Lake Camp Meeting,” BL XXXV, no. 18 (August 1, 1874): 4.

  28. BL XXXV, no. 26 (September 26, 1874): 8; “Freeloveism,” Religio-Philosophical Journal XVII, no. 4 (October 10, 1874): 6. Victoria Woodhull’s dramatic impact upon the politics of sexuality are explored by Molly McGarry, “Spectral Sexualities: Nineteenth Century Spiritualism, Moral Panics, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Laws,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 8–29. Woodhull’s radical interventions helped galvanize Anthony Comstock to draw up his postal bill—the Comstock Act, passed in 1873. See ibid., 9–10. Woodhull was part of a larger, controversial movement in radical spiritualist circles advocating “Free Loveism,” one opposed by others within spiritualism. For a contemporary account of all this, see Emma Hardinge Britten, Nineteenth Century Miracles; or, Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth (New York: William Britten), 427–29. See also Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 368–77.

  29. BL XXXV, no. 26 (September 26, 1874): 8.

  30. BL XXI, no. 26 (September 14, 1867): 5.

  31. See Spiritual Scientist II, no. 5 (April 8, 1875): 58; II, no. 14 (June 10, 1875): 166; and III, no. 3 (September 23, 1875): 34.

  32. BL XXXVIII, no. 26 (March 25, 1876): 4; “The Twenty-Eighth Anniversary of the Advent of Modern Spiritualism; Commemorative Exercises at Paine Hall, Boston; … The 31st March, 1876,” BL XXXIX, no. 1 (April 8, 1876): 8.

  33. “Gathering at Highland Lake Grove,” BL XXXIX, no. 26 (September 23, 1876): 3.

  34. “Spiritual Meetings in Boston … Amory Hall Meetings,” BL XLV, no. 5 (April 26, 1879): 5; “Spiritual Meetings in Boston … Amory Hall Meetings,” BL XLV, no. 8 (May 17, 1879): 5; BL XLV, no. 9 (May 24, 1879): 5; BL XLVI, no. 14 (December 27, 1879): 8. A Love of a Bonnet can be described as a ten-page play satirizing vanity written for amateur productions. Perhaps this is given away by the fact it features only female characters. See George M. Baker, A Love of a Bonnet: A Farce in One Act for Female Characters Only (Boston: George M. Baker, 1872). Somewhat better known is H. Elliott McBride’s Courtship under Difficulties, also a one-act play, made into a silent film in 1898 by James Williamson. See H. Elliott McBride, Courtship under Difficulties, Oliver Optic’s Magazine, 3, no. 238 (May 1873): 343–52.

  35. James B. Hatch b. circa 1851 and “known wherever Spiritualism is heard” (Mary T. Longley, Teachings and Illustrations as They Emanate from the Spirit World [Chicago: The Progressive Thinker Publishing House, 1908], 5) was a clerk and gas fitter in his weekday occupations. This can remind us how spiritualism was remarkably cosmopolitan in its progressive makeup. Our thanks to Rhonda McClure and the New England Historic Genealogical Society for this and other information.

  36. See BL XLVI, no. 4 (October 18, 1879): 5.

  37. See BL XLV, no. 12 (June 14, 1879): 5; BL XLV, no. 25 (September 13, 1879): 5; BL XLVI, no. 4 (October 18, 1879): 5; BL XLVI, no. 26 (March 20, 1880): 1; BL XLVII, no. 1 (March 27, 1880): 1; BL XLVII, no. 2 (April 3, 1880): 1; BL XXVII, no. 3 (April 10, 1880): 8; BL XLVII, no. 4 (April 17, 1880): 2, quoting the words of “Mrs. Shelhamer.”

  38. “The Thirty Third Anniversary in Boston,” BL XLIX, no. 1 (March 26, 1881): 5; “The Spiritual Easter,” BL XLIX, no. S (April 9, 1881): 1; “The Thirty Third Anniversary,” ibid., 4; “Children’s Progressive Lyceum No. 1,” ibid., 8; “The Spiritual Easter,” ibid., 1.

  39. “PAINE HALL,” BL XLIX, no. 8 (May 14, 1881): 5 (our italics).

  40. BL XLIX, no. 4 (June 11, 1881): 8; ibid., 12; “NEW ERA HALL … Shawmut Spiritual Lyceum,” BL XLIX, no. 22 (August 20, 1881): 5.

  41. Mrs. Carlisle Ireland, quoted in BL XLVII, no. 7 (October 30, 1880): 8. Moore argues that mediums were “extremely reluctant to accept personal responsibility … the spirits … controlled … [and] forced their wills into compliance.” R. Lawrence Moore, “The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 203.

  42. BL L, no. 16 (January 7, 1882): 12 BL LI, no. 4 (April 15, 1882): 7; BL LII, no. 6 (October 18, 1882): 7; LII, no. 8 (November 11, 1882): 7; BL LII, no. 12 (December 16, 1882): 5; BL LII, no. 14 (December 23, 1882): 5.

  43. BL LI, no. 26 (September 26, 1882): 7. Such evidence of disharmony within the lyceum movement virtually never emerged in the Banner, so its appearance here suggests a considerable rift. In this respect it is surprising that Maud E. Lord now emerges as a very prominent player in the Shawmut, while very soon her husband will become the secretary to the Progressive School set up by Wilson in February 1883.

  44. BL L, no. 14 (December 24, 1881): 10; BL L, no. 15 (December 31, 1881): 10.

  45. See BL LI, no. 7 (May 6, 1882): 12. />
  46. BL L, no. 16 (January 7, 1882): 12. Moore observes that one sign of a medium’s receptivity was taken to be “a light complexion” (Moore, “Spiritualist Medium,” 215).

  47. BL LII, no. 21 (February 10, 1883): 5. Possibly, a reception that Wilson held at her home in January 1883 had been intended to lay down preparation for the establishment of her school; if so, the Banner made no mention of it in its report of the occasion. See BL LII, no. 18 (January 20, 1883): 5.

  48. BL LII, no. 26 (March 17, 1883): 5.

  49. BL LII, no. 22 (February 17, 1883): 5; BL LII, no. 23 (February 24, 1883): 5; BL LII, no. 24 (March 3, 1883): 5; BL LII, no. 25 (March 10,1883): 8; BL LII, no. 26 (March 17,1883): 8; BL LIII, no. 1 (March 24, 1883): 8.

  50. BL LIII, no. 2 (March 31, 1883): 8; BL LIV, no. 8 (November 10, 1883): 8. Lord was the husband of Maud E. Lord, who had in late 1882 been heavily involved with the Shawmut. A splintering from the Shawmut seems to have occurred.

  51. BL LIII, no. 1 (March 24, 1883): 8.

  52. BL LIV, no.4 (October 13, 1883): 5; BL LIV, no. 8 (November 10, 1883): 8. The last dedicated notice about the Progressive School appeared in January 1884—a notice signed only by the initial “G.” See BL LIV, no. 16 (January 5, 1884): 8. It is never made explicitly clear at any time what Wilson’s position in the school was. J. C. Street seems to have emerged very quickly into prominence in the spiritualist lyceum movement, following a visit to the Banner offices, reported in BL LI, no. 2 (June 3, 1882): 7, which converted him to the cause.