Our Nig
Page 24
27 Black, white and yeller!: The schoolchildren’s cry provides the only way that the reader can confidently establish that Seth Shipley is black. Their cries also underline how much skin color is kept to the forefront in Singleton’s community.
28 a large, old fashioned, two-story white house, environed by fruitful acres: See note 2 concerning the resonances that cluster around this idyllic description.
29 John [Bellmont]: A fictionalization of Nehemiah Hayward, Jr. See introduction, this page.
30 Mrs. Bellmont: Also referred to as “Mrs. B.” A fictionalization of Rebecca S. Hayward, née Hutchinson. See introduction, this page.
CHAPTER 3
31 Epigraph: This is taken from Eliza Cook, “The Future.” The lines can be found in The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook, (London: Frederick Warne and Co.; New York: Scribner, Welford and Co., 1870), 187. Eliza Cook (1818–89) was a prolific English sentimental versifier. Wilson’s quotation is slightly inaccurate. The quotation in the 1870 edition reads:
Oh! did we but know of the shadows so nigh,
The world would indeed be a prison of gloom;
All light would be quenched in youth’s eloquent eye,
And the prayer-lisping infant would ask for the tomb.
For if Hope be a star that may lead us astray,
And “deceiveth the heart,” as the aged ones preach;
Yet ’twas Mercy that gave it, to beacon our way,
Though its halo illumes where we never can reach.
The quotation consists of the fourth and fifth stanzas of the poem. Stanza 6 runs: “Though Friendship but flit, like a meteor gleam, / Though it burst, like a moon-lighted bubble of dew; / Though it passes away, like a leaf on a stream, / Yet ’tis bliss while we fancy the vision is true.” These sentiments are particularly appropriate to Frado’s condition in the Bellmont family, since her ostensible “friends” in this family repeatedly fail her.
32 Mary [Bellmont]: A fictionalization of Rebecca S. Hayward; John, a.k.a. Jack Bellmont, is probably a composite fictionalization of Nehemiah Peabody Hayward and Charles S. Hayward. See introduction, this page.
33 the County House: Paupers of whatever age at this time in New Hampshire were lodged in one of a network of county pauper houses. The nearest to Milford at this time was the Hillsborough County Poor Farm in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
34 train up in my way from a child: As Foreman and Pitts point out, “train up in my way from a child,” a twisted paraphrase of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”), emphasizes Mrs. B.’s hypocrisy. Frado will be “trained up” in Mrs. B.’s way rather than the Lord’s.
35 the L chamber: In New England the farmhouses commonly possessed a gabled wing at right angles to the main section, and an attic in this wing’s roof could just about accommodate a small servant’s bedroom: hence its description as “the L chamber.”
36 Mary … had just glided into her teens: That “Mary” had “just glided into her teens” seems to suggest a date of 1833 for Frado’s arrival in the Bellmonts’ household, and by extension, Wilson’s in the Haywards’, assuming that, by “teens,” Wilson means Mary had reached the age of eleven.
37 Frado was called early in the morning: The description that follows of Frado’s duties while still only seven years old (this page) exposes how hard her life was as a farm servant. See our introduction, this page-this page.
38 she should go to school: New Hampshire state law required its communities to provide education for their children.
39 one who looks not on outward appearances: See 1 Samuel 16:7, “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” The kindness of Frado’s teacher is a first reminder that not all of Milford is irremediably racist, and that it had a large and active abolitionist faction. See also note 53.
40 propping her mouth open: Frado’s mouth is propped open wide to prevent her crying out. When a person’s mouth is forced open wide enough, hardly a sound can be made. This technique, along with gagging, is used more than once, and Mrs. B. even threatens at one point to cut off Frado’s tongue (this page). Such propping open assumes a particular iconographic significance in this text, epitomizing the silencing of the black voice and how Wilson overcomes this “O” by resisting the Haywards and, in a climactic act, publishing Our Nig itself, so giving voice to her otherwise silenced suffering, as did the publication of slave narratives.
41 she was never permitted to shield her skin from the sun. She was not many shades darker than Mary now; what a calamity it would be ever to hear the contrast spoken of: A reminder of how contingent interpretations of skin color necessarily must be; Mrs. B. is worried that her slightly dark-skinned daughter will be compared in terms of her skin tone with the light-skinned mulatta, Frado, thereby calling into question, at least implicitly, her daughter’s racial purity.
CHAPTER 4
42 Epigraph: The quotation is taken from Lord Byron’s poem “Childish Recollections.” This can be found in Hours of Idleness: Series of Poems, Original and Translated in The Poetical Works of Lord Byron: Embracing His Suppressed Poems, and a Sketch of His Life (London: John Murray, 1845), 405. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was a famous advocate of liberty, and his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was often quoted by American antislavery writers. Wilson’s quotation from “Childish Recollections” is slightly inaccurate. The quotation in the 1845 edition reads:
Hours of my youth! when, nurtured in my breast,
To love a stranger, friendship made me blest;—
Friendship, the dear peculiar bond of youth,
When every artless bosom throbs with truth;
Untaught by worldly wisdom how to feign,
And check each impulse with prudential reign;
When all we feel our honest souls disclose—
In love to friends, in open hate to foes;
No varnish’d tales the lips of youth repeat,
No dear-bought knowledge purchased by deceit.
This comes from the second stanza. The poem continues: “Hypocrisy, the gift of lengthen’d years, / Matured by age, the garb of prudence wears.” Brought to the mind of those familiar with the poem, this continuation could stand as a barbed and ironic reference to the shortcomings Wilson perceives in “professed abolitionists” (this page).
43 James [Bellmont]: A fictionalization of George Milton Hayward. See introduction, this page.
44 Abby: A fictionalization of Sally Hayward, the sister of Nehemiah Hayward, Jr. See introduction, this page. Though her model, Sally Hayward, had been married, Abby is described as “a maiden sister” to Nehemiah (this page).
45 a professor of religion: This description of Mrs. Bellmont as a “professor of religion” is deeply ironic and helps make the point forcibly that often the antebellum church played a seminal role in supporting not only the practice of slavery in the States but also the racism that underpinned it. See also note 84.
46 Jane [Bellmont]: A fictionalization of Lucretia Hayward. See introduction, this page.
CHAPTER 5
47 Epigraph: This comes from Martin Farquhar Tupper’s “Of Life,” the second section of Proverbial Philosophy in Tupper’s Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850), 192. An English poet, Tupper (1810–89) was famous at the time and his Proverbial Philosophy became a best seller. The lines occur in the poem’s final stanza. Wilson’s quotation contains some minor punctuation differences from this 1850 edition, which reads:
Life is a strange avenue of various trees and flowers;
Lightsome at commencement, but darkening to its end in a distant, massy portal.
It beginneth as a little path, edged with the violet and primrose,
A little path of lawny grass, and soft to tiny feet:
Soon, spring thistles in the way, ….
This final stanza from “Of Life” continues appositely: “Soon, spring thistles in the way, those early griefs
of school, / And fruit trees ranged on either hand show holiday delights: / Anon, the rose and the mimosa hint at sensitive affection, / And vipers hide among the grass, and briers are woven in the hedges.” For those familiar with the poem, this continuation would suggest how the New England pastoral is darkened for Frado by endemic racism.
CHAPTER 6
48 Epigraph: This is taken from Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, “Success Alone Seen,” in Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L., authored and edited by Laman Blanchard (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 261. Landon (1802–38) was a popular English writer at the time. The passage is reproduced as prose (when it should be presented as verse) and is slightly inaccurate. The quotation in the 1841 edition reads:
Hard are life’s early steps; and, but that youth
Is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope,
Men would behold its threshold and despair.
49 Fido became … a more valuable presence than the human beings: This estimation of the dog, Fido, as more valuable to Frado than the human beings around her represents the climax of the ironic Frado/Fido motif, which began in chapter 3 and which suggests that Frado’s life is little better than a dog’s (36–37). See our introduction, this page-this page.
50 There rushed on Mary’s mental vision a picture: The recurrence of essentially novelistic moments of omniscient narration, such as this detailing of Mary’s “mental vision,” militates against viewing the text as an autobiography, rather than as autobiographical.
51 the manifest enjoyment of Mrs. B.: This “manifest enjoyment” exhibited by Mrs. B. when abusing Frado economically yet eloquently intimates how sadism underlay many of the excesses visited upon servants and, above all, slaves.
CHAPTER 7
52 Epigraph: This is taken from Henry Kirke White, “Time: A Poem.” It appears in The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White (London: Bell and Daldy, 1830), 20. The quotation comes from the fourth stanza:
What are our joys but dreams? and what our hopes
But goodly shadows in the summer cloud?
There’s not a wind that blows but bears with it
Some rainbow promise:—not a moment flies
But puts its sickle in the fields of life,
And mows its thousands, with their joys and cares.
53 I feel like grasping time until opinions change, and thousands like her rise into a noble freedom: Here, James’s reflections constitute the text’s most prolonged allusions to abolitionist sentiment in Singleton, the fictionalization of Milford, and New England more generally. Chapter 11 of George A. Ramsdell’s The History of Milford (Concord, N.H.: The Kumsford Press [published by The Town], 1901), tells of the antislavery “Come-Outer” movement’s development in Milford, beginning in December 1842. Certain prominent residents of the town where Harriet E. Wilson grew up organized a series of “come-outer” meetings to enlist the support of the town’s residents in the antislavery cause. These meetings were just one sign of the way that, following passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 in particular, abolitionist sentiments rose to gain ascendancy in the North. Wilson’s point is that such a stance was often attended by hypocrisy.
CHAPTER 8
54 Epigraph: This is taken from Henry Kirke White, “Written in the Prospect of Death,” The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White (London: Bell and Daldy, 1830), 79. White (1785–1806) came from common stock, though he was not quite a peasant poet, and died young, after being taken up by Robert Southey. White became somewhat famous as an archetypal example of the Romantic poet languishing to death from melancholy. Wilson’s quotation from the closing lines of “Written in the Prospect of Death” contains some inaccuracies. In the 1830 edition the lines read:
Now other cares engross me,
And my tired soul with emulative haste,
Looks to its God, and prunes its wings for heaven.
The lines immediately preceding this quote read: “No more of Hope; the wanton vagrant Hope! / I abjure all,”— sentiments that bear directly on Frado’s plight. This was evidently a favorite poem of Wilson’s, as she also quotes from it at the head of chapter 9.
55 Lewis [Bellmont]: A fictionalization of Jonas Hayward. See introduction, this page.
56 Susan: Since “Susan” is a fictionalization of George Hayward’s wife, Nancy Abbot, “Charlie” would seem to be a fictionalization of their daughter, Caroline Frances Hayward (though of a different sex). See introduction, this page.
57 so much indulgence of a dangerous passion: Here Mrs. B.’s sadism openly emerges. See also note 26. There was an established tradition of suggesting that white females could lose all restraint in a dangerous way when placed in control of slaves. Marie St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is of course the preeminent example of this line of thinking. See, for some related considerations, Michelle A. Masse, “When the Personal Doesn’t Become Political,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, vol. 1 (Spring 1999): 154–61.
58 all for white people: One of the more remarkable features of this autobiographical novel is its failure to conform closely to a predominant convention existing in contemporary slave narratives and many other writings by African Americans: that a conversion narrative be centrally incorporated, in which the African American hero reaches Christ (usually through the tutelage of white benefactors). From this point in the novel, where Frado doubts if African Americans have a place in a heaven “all for white people,” through to its end, the text depicts an uneasy alternation in which Frado keeps approaching but, finally, never fully embraces the Church. She is seen to be “serious” but never sloughs off her doubts about what the Church offers to African Americans. This is quite distinct from a conventional, decisive conversion. Given the predominance of the conversion narrative model that Wilson at best half matches, Frado’s constant ambivalence can be seen as quite subversive.
59 Come to Christ … all, young or old, white or black, bond or free: Undoubtedly Wilson heard ministers in Milford, like the Reverend Humphrey Moore (pastor of the Congregationalist church in Milford from 1801–36), preaching an antislavery message, based upon blacks’ and whites’ common humanity. See Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 2004, 88–89. However, as the text ironically goes on to note immediately, “this was the message she longed to hear.” Frado’s oscillations continue as she wrestles with her “veil of doubt and sin” (this page).
60 I’ll beat the money out of her, if I can’t get her worth any other way: Frado appears to be a type of indentured servant, and, therefore, Mrs. B. would normally have received public money from the town of Singleton for her keep until she came of age. This seems likely to be what happened in the case of Wilson herself, as Barbara A. White suggests (White, “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil,” 34), though this is not certain. However, the text here suggests the opposite: that the Bellmonts need to “beat the money out” of Frado to get her “worth.” On the face of it, what seems to be implied is that either the Bellmonts very unusually pay the town for her services (which would seem to be an inversion of normal New England practice, whereby families who accepted paupers into their care were paid by the town), or, more brutally, that, since slavery is abolished in the North and Frado cannot now be sold as a slave for profit, she must work to earn her “value,” which would be lost to the Bellmonts otherwise. A last possibility is that Mrs. B. felt that any money she receives from the town (if at all) is insufficient to cover Frado’s keep and that she was therefore entitled to work Frado as hard as she could. Whatever reading is preferred, this resolution by Mrs. B. once again dramatizes the economic issues lying at the heart of this text. For example, we have just been told Frado’s labor can be of “much profit” (this page).
61 God be merciful to me a sinner: This is taken from Luke 18:13. The lines Wilson quotes are part of a parable:
And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee st
ood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.