VINTAGE BOOKS EDITIONS, MAY 1983, APRIL 2002, AUGUST 2011
Introduction and Notes copyright © 2011 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Richard J. Ellis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in 1859 by G. C. Rand & Avery, Boston. A second edition of the work was published in somewhat different form simultaneously in hardcover by Random House, Inc., and in softcover by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1983. A third edition of the work was published in somewhat different form by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition published by Vintage Books as:
Wilson, H. E. (Harriet E.), 1808-ca. 1870.
Our nig: or, sketches from the life of a free black, in a two-story white house, North.
Bibliography: p.
eISBN: 978-0-307-73933-9
I. Gates, Henry Louis. II. Title.
III. Title: Sketches from the life of a free black.
PS3334.W39O9 1983 813′.3 82–49197
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
This edition of
Our Nig
is dedicated in memory of
Pauline Augusta Coleman Gates (1916–1987)
and
Henry Louis Gates, Sr. (1913–2010)
Acknowledgments
Without the support and encouragement of John W. Blassingame, professor of history at Yale University and chairman of the Program of Afro-American Studies, I would not have been able to verify Harriet E. Wilson’s identity in 1982. When one seemingly solid lead would fail, Blassingame suggested others. Only with the enthusiasm generated by our daily discussions about Our Nig was I able to persist in my search for this black woman writer. Blassingame’s intelligent advice and his generosity are models of scholarly magnanimity, especially for his younger colleagues. This book, in many ways, is John’s book.
David A. Curtis, director of research for the Yale Black Periodical Fiction Project, devoted several weeks in September and October 1982 to archival research in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, research that helped me to confirm and supplement the initial facts about Harriet E. Wilson I had gathered in the summer of 1982. David Curtis’s contribution to the rediscovery of Our Nig is major.
Excellent research assistants who participated in this project include John W. Blassingame, Jr., Donna Dennis, Alexandra Gleysteen, and Timothy Kirscher. For their invaluable assistance I would also like to thank expressly: Jeanne Wells, Olivia Iannicelli, Lisa Fetchko, Irma Johnson, Paul Johnson, Mike Saperstein, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Clarke, Olufemi Euba, Richard Powell, C. peter Ripley, Nina Baym, Barbara Johnson, Kimberly W. Benston, Jean Fagan Yellin, Robert Farris Thompson, Mr. Wilfred A. Leduc, Mrs. Helen Draper, Mrs. Nancy Schooley, Mrs. Eugene W. Leach, Sr., Elizabeth Alexander, Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, Denise Hurd, Mrs. Helen Leahy, Rev. David L. Clarke, and Robert Curran. Thirty-five students in my Yale College seminar Black Women and Their Fictions combed through forty periodicals, published between 1859 and 1861, for any mention whatsoever of the book or its author.
William French, of the University Place Bookshop, introduced me to Our Nig and to the controversy among booksellers about its authorship. An NEH Chairman’s Grant, a research grant from the Menil Foundation, and a Prize Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation facilitated my research. Carl Brandt, my literary agent, offered astute advice regarding the publication of the second edition of Our Nig. Steven Kezerian, associate director of public information at Yale University, helped generate national press coverage of the resurrection of Our Nig and introduced the project to Leslie Bennetts of The New York Times, whose sensitive article spread the word about the significance of Mrs. Harriet E. Wilson’s pioneering novel.
When I published the first Random House edition, I thanked Accelerated Indexing Systems, a project of major scope for scholars in all fields who found themselves dependent upon public documents for verification of their subjects. AIS, I wrote in the acknowledgments to my first Random House edition, could well aid in the rescue of other literary figures from oblivion. Now, almost thirty years later, the digital revolution has made the sort of research that I conducted to find Harriet Wilson so much more convenient, because millions of public documents (such as census records, birth, marriage, and death certificates, tax records, entire runs of newspapers, etc.) are available online. Ancestry.com and Archives.com, among many others, make these records accessible in seconds, whereas thirty years ago, locating these same documents took weeks and months and was, accordingly, very expensive. The Internet has begun to revolutionize emerging fields such as African American studies, and more “lost” authors and their texts will be discovered as scholars avail themselves of these tools to knowledge, just as R. J. Ellis and I have done to complete further research about Mrs. Wilson and her text.
Erroll McDonald, my friend and classmate at Yale and my editor at Random House, made possible the publication of the first Random House edition of Our Nig in 1983. Gwendolyn Williams and Mariner Carroll typed various drafts of the manuscript of the first Random House edition.
For this new edition of Our Nig, R. J. Ellis and I would like to recognize our editor Keith Goldsmith, Amy Ryan, Tina Bennett, Bennett Ashley, Vera Grant, Joel Dreyfuss, Sheryl Salomon, Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington, Donald Yacovone, Marcus Halevi, Amy Gosdanian, Joanne Kendall; Barbara A. White, Gabrielle Foreman, Reginald Pitts, and Kathy Flynn for their discoveries that supplemented my initial research about Harriet Wilson’s life and times; Hollis Robbins, Shirley Sun, the genealogists Johni Cerny and Megan Smolenyak; David Lambert, the reference librarian at the New England Genealogical Society; Jeanne Flaherty of the Mount Wollaston Cemetery, Quincy, Massachusetts; Fatin Abbas; Karen Jackson; Art Bryan and Deborah Spratt of the Wadleigh Memorial Library, Milford, NH; Polly S. Cote and Janice Adams of Milford Historical Society; Peggy Langell, Milford town clerk; Paula Laine and Rev. Dr. Sheila Rubdi of the First Congregational Church, Milford; Bill Copley and David Smolen of the New Hampshire Historical Society; Kimberly Reynolds, Roberta Zonghi, Eugene Zepp, and William Faucon of the Boston Public Library; Mary Warnement and Pat Boulos of the Boston Athenaeum; Dominic Whitehead and the other staff at the John Rylands Research Library, Manchester, UK.
Sharon Adams and our children, Maggie and Liza, inspired my search to locate the identity of the author of this curious book in the first place, kept me in a civil, hopeful mood on those days when Harriet E. Wilson seemed to have no past at all. Angela De Leon provided great comfort and support as I continued over the past decade to pursue facts about Mrs. Wilson’s life after the death of her son, and the fate of her seminal novel, which now—twenty-eight years later—is a central part of the canon of nineteenth-century American and African American literature. R. J. Ellis’s enthusiasm and our shared passion for Mrs. Wilson and Our Nig, along with his superlative research and analytical skills, made the editing of this new edition of the novel a delight in every way.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
December 10, 2010
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and R. J. Ellis
Preface, Harriet E. Wilson
The Text
Appendix: Letters
“Allida”
Margaretta Thorn
C.D.S.
Appendix 1: Harriet Wilson’s Career as a Spiritualist
Appendix 2: Hatt
ie E. Wilson in the Banner of Light and Spiritual Scientist
Appendix 3: Documents from Harriet Wilson’s Life in Boston
Appendix 4: A Note on the Penguin Edition
Notes to the Text compiled by R. J. Ellis with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David A. Curtis, and Lisa Rivo
Chronology of Harriet E. Adams Wilson compiled by R. J. Ellis
Select Bibliography
Introduction
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and R. J. Ellis
I can say with much pleasure that when the Regenerator was first applied to my own hair it was very gray, and falling from my head, and my scalp was in a very unhealthy state; but upon a few applications I discovered a decided change, and soon my hair assumed its original color and health of youth.
—Mrs. H. E. Wilson, Nashua, N.H.1
Harriet E. Adams Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) is the first novel written and published in English by an African American woman writer. The story Wilson tells is profoundly moving and seemingly straightforward. But this straightforwardness is deceptive: the novel, taking as its unusual focus the fate of a Northern mulatta, Alfrado (or Frado) Smith, explores in unique detail the contested position of free blacks in antebellum America, and specifically the plight of female free blacks, at what was a highly problematic time in America’s racial history.
Frado is deserted as a young girl by Mag Smith, her white mother, following the death of her African American father, Jim, “a kind-hearted African,” and Mag’s subsequent marriage to Jim’s friend, Seth Shipley. The Shipleys cannot cope financially and decide to move away, resolving to leave Frado behind. They deposit Frado at the home of a white New England farming family, the Bellmonts. There she becomes their farm servant, treated harshly and derogatorily nicknamed “Our Nig.” Two members of this family, Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter, Mary, sadistically mistreat Frado. The males of the Bellmont household and a maiden aunt, Aunt Abby voice their support for her and sometimes even attempt to protect her but fail to assist her in any meaningful way, for lack of will and courage.
The novel depicts Frado’s progress in learning to defend herself from this harsh treatment by fighting back with words and actions and finding her voice. After years of mistreatment, Frado completes her period of service and is allowed to leave. Wilson sketchily outlines Frado’s subsequent fortunes in two closing chapters, in which she meets a young black man, Samuel, quickly marries him, and has a child. He soon deserts her, after confessing to her that he is passing himself off as a fugitive slave in order to profit from the abolitionist lecture circuit. Left behind in New England, Frado does obtain some financial support, including public charity, but always lives in dire poverty. This destitution and her declining health (precipitated by Mrs. Bellmont’s sustained physical abuse) eventually force her to leave her child in foster care as she struggles to survive.
Alongside Frado’s story, we learn details of the Bellmont family’s own problems, generated most often by Mrs. B.’s meanness. But the novel’s plot focuses principally on Frado’s sufferings and her uncertain progress toward embracing Christianity. Three pseudonymous testimonials at the end of the book emphasize the Christian context of the tale and urge its authenticity, while an author’s preface explains that she is publishing her story to rescue herself and her child from destitution. One of the testimonials further reveals that the author and her child have been reduced to drawing upon public relief. Published in 1859, Our Nig offers, through this simple story, a very rare thing indeed: a sustained representation of the life of an antebellum free black female, born and bred in New England and working as a farm servant. As Alice Walker observed in 1983 in a comment published on the dust jacket of the first Random House edition edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the novel is of “enormous significance” because it represents “heretofore unexamined experience.” It is one of the very first full-length books written by an African American who was not a slave; it stands as a hallmark of literary history as the first novel published by an African American woman in the United States; and it subtly combines compelling storytelling with unflinching indictments of Northern anti-black racism.
Harriet Wilson seems to have published Our Nig herself (though likely with some assistance from unknown patrons), which makes its composition highly unusual: very few African American writers at this time could have taken such a step, an extraordinary one for an impoverished person of any race. The book’s survival was to prove precarious for more than a hundred years, since, after one apparently very limited print run,2 it remained almost unnoticed until 1983, when Henry Louis Gates, Jr., established the identity and race of its author, recovered its history, and published the first new edition since 1859. His research revealed definitively that the book was a novel written by an African American female, thereby attracting for the first time concerted attention to Harriet E. Adams Wilson, her text, its place in literary history, and what it contributes to our understanding of the history of racism in antebellum America.3
This definitive new edition, a century and a half after Harriet Wilson published the first edition, carefully lays out the ways in which the author’s life helps illuminate the themes and concerns of her novel. In particular, for the first time, we examine in detail Wilson’s extensive commitment to and engagement with the profession of spiritualism as she struggled to make a living for herself after she published her novel. We then bring these biographical matters to bear on the composition of Our Nig.4 By tracing in considerable detail just how difficult it was for her to carve out a place within Boston’s spiritualist circles following the Civil War, we have established the extent of Harriet Wilson’s astonishing achievements over the course of her unusual life.
Opening one of the few extant copies of the 1859 edition of Our Nig is a profoundly moving experience. The book was well produced, albeit with an unprepossessing board binding. Its spine contains the simplest information: the bald, disconcerting title Our Nig (accompanied by a colophon), but inside the title page adds a long and complex subtitle, followed by the obviously pseudonymous author’s name. Nothing published before 1859 by any other black author could possibly prepare the reader for the unusual wording:
OUR NIG;
OR,
Sketches from the Life of a Free Black,
IN A TWO-STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH.
SHOWING THAT SLAVERY’S SHADOWS FALL EVEN THERE.
BY “OUR NIG.”
The wording “Sketches from the Life … by ‘Our Nig’ ” of course reminds us of the subtitles of other narratives by African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative, which carries a subtitle informing us it was “Written by Himself,” or Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published just two years after Harriet Wilson’s novel appeared. But Our Nig’s subtitle also establishes that it is written not by a slave, but by a “Free Black” living in the North. The title page as well as the novel itself undermine all expectations that anything like a conventional slave narrative is on offer. Wilson does not usher in a story about a daring dash to freedom from the South to the North, along a road paved by literacy, as Frederick Douglass famously asserted. Instead Frado remains trapped by the hardships imposed by widespread Northern racism. In the preface the author tells us she is “forced” to write her book as an “experiment which shall aid me in supporting myself and my child” (this page). What lies before us indeed turns out to be an experiment; a unified fiction informed by the genres of the sentimental novel, the gothic autobiography, the slave narrative, and realism.
Our Nig’s subtitle, by announcing that it is written by a “Free Black,” in itself at once establishes the book as unusual, for very few texts had been published before this time by black authors who had not formerly been slaves. Appearing in 1859, Our Nig is predated by only a few works of fiction by black writers, including: Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Stave (1853); William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel (1853); Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857)
, and Martin R. Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America (the first part serialized in The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the remainder in the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper between 1861 and 1862). Whereas the theme of most of these works of fiction was slavery, Frank Webb depicted the lives of free African Americans in the North, just as Wilson would two years later. (Curiously enough, another black woman writer, Maria F. dos Reis, published a novel entitled Ursula in Brazil, also in 1859.)
Our Nig’s subtitle further surprises when it notes that, though slavery had been abolished in the North, nevertheless “Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There.” Very few writers before Wilson had chosen to focus on the way that slavery could blight the lives of free African Americans in the North. The “shadows” of slavery to which Wilson refers consist, on the one hand, of anti-black racism, of which Wilson’s novel is a surprisingly bold and unflinching critique. But the subtitle also refers to the shadows cast on all black people’s lives by the Fugitive Slave Act. Passed in 1850 at the behest of Southern slaveholders, the act facilitated the recapture of runaway slaves in the North, although slavery had already been abolished there, state by state. The law controversially compelled Northerners, including abolitionists and free blacks, to stand by impotently as African Americans were seized by slave catchers and returned to their “owners” in the South. The act made it illegal to intervene or offer any assistance to a fugitive. It also provided Northern magistrates with a financial incentive to accept that African Americans brought before them by slave catchers were indeed escaped slaves, thus encouraging the capricious seizure of free African Americans. Such kidnappings were not rare.5 Slavery’s long shadows thus fell on all African Americans in the North, including Frado, Harriet Wilson’s protagonist. At one point near her book’s end she reports that Frado is “watched by kidnappers” and adds that “traps” were “slyly laid by the vicious to ensnare her” (this page). Described in the novel as “beautiful” (this page), Frado would have been highly desirable prey for lascivious slave owners, since female mixed-race slaves generally commanded the highest prices in Southern slave auctions.
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