Our Nig

by Harriet E. Wilson

  Furthermore, Frado’s resistance is not entirely her own idea but is to some extent sanctioned by Mr. Bellmont, who has just told her that she should avoid whippings. However, he then goes on to add this can only be when “she was sure she did not deserve” them, because she “cannot endure beating as once [she] could” (this page) due to her poor health. Only after this mealy-mouthed support is offered does Frado find the resolve to stand up to Mrs. B. Yet offering any physical resistance, she knows, could lead to severe retribution, even more dire than her current suffering. So Frado’s response is in part carefully calculated: she “stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.” Frado at this point is not only experiencing “free and independent thoughts” but is also making manifest such thoughts, as communicated by her body language. Yet her aim is additionally to fend off the need to act, since she knows of the consequent dangers if she does.

  Our Nig exhibits its greatest complexity at such moments. Up to this point Frado has often appeared in a series of tableaux, bound and gagged or with her mouth propped open. Made forcibly silent by her mistress, she is often laid out supine upon the floor, a victim of unchecked white power, as unassailable as that of any slave master’s. (Frado will also be victimized by a black male as well, her husband, Thomas Wilson.) Wilson depicts Frado by the woodpile, however, in language that links her to—but does not secure her—full political resistance. The inclusiveness of the word “one” suggests how Frado’s actions mark Wilson’s claim for all black people, slave and free, to the Enlightenment promise of universal rights. But these human rights turn out to be far from readily available to someone in her position: Frado’s posture is one of defiance, but she is only acting out, not taking action. She can only stand “like one [with] free and independent thoughts” and she can “feel” no more than their “stirrings.” So, although she establishes some measure of independence following her woodpile exchange with Mrs. Bellmont, she still must also return to the farmhouse, resume her servitude, and receive further beatings. She recognizes her dilemma quite explicitly as her resolve encounters an insuperable impasse, leaving her literally with nowhere to go: “She decided to … remain to do as well as she could; to assert her rights when trampled upon, to return once more to her meeting in the evening, which had been prohibited. She had learned how to conquer; she would not abuse that power. But had she not better run away? Where?” (this page).

  In part, then, as was the case with Douglass, Frado’s assertion of “power” generates new thoughts, especially thoughts about running away, in language suggestive of the determined or desperate slave, whose only recourse is to escape. (Two years after the novel was published, Harriet Jacobs would take up a similar theme in her characterization of herself as Linda Brent in her slave narrative.) Yet what she in fact does is seek the advice of Aunt Abby, herself a member of the Bellmont family. As Frado puts it, “She had never been from the place far enough to decide what course to take”—and the words “far enough” refer to both literal geographical space and metaphorical mental space. Wilson depicts Frado in the process of altering her mind while weighing consequences.

  Frado’s thoughts now take another, safer track, as she determines to defy Mrs. B. by going back to the church meetings that Mrs. B. had forbidden her to attend. To achieve a measure of freedom, she must put herself under another form of authority: not Aunt Abby’s nor Mr. Bellmont’s, but religious authority. The narrator, as well as Frado, ruminates ironically upon her state of grace—will she go to heaven?—as if Frado’s progress toward becoming a good Christian follows the conventional path of a conversion narrative. This preoccupation places Our Nig in direct affinity with the sentimental novel, which conventionally depicted its female protagonists coming to a realization (led by their theological mentors) of what constitutes true Christian belief. But Our Nig again deviates decisively from any such model, since Frado remains shockingly ambivalent about what Christianity can offer. This is, quite simply, deeply unconventional.

  Frado often approaches but then retreats from becoming “serious” about religion (this page), as when, early on, James Bellmont explains to her that God is her Maker. This prompts her to ask who, then, made Mrs. B.? When told that God also made her mistress, Frado replies, “Well, then, I don’t like him.” Frado’s sacrilege in this exchange is defused somewhat by the comedy invoked when she offers her reasoning for her feelings about God: “Because he made her white, and me black. Why didn’t he make us both white?” (this page). Nonetheless, Frado has erected a formidable barrier between herself and her Maker, between her agnosticism and true belief. Aunt Abby encourages her spiritual progress by taking her to church, where Frado enjoys singing hymns (this page). However, in conversation with Aunt Abby, Frado manipulatively feigns naïveté. For example, when Frado celebrates the departure of the hated Mary Bellmont for Baltimore and Abby remonstrates, urging Frado to recall how “our good Minister told us … about doing good to those who hate us,” Frado’s saucy reply is that by helping pack Mary’s bags she has done “good” (this page–this page).

  It comes as little surprise, then, after James Bellmont’s death, that we are told that any belief Frado has in a “future existence” (this page) is undercut by her conclusion that heaven is “all for white people” (rather like the reserved pews and segregated sections in many “integrated” Northern churches at this time) and so she must be “unfit” to go there (this page–this page). Frado’s chief motive for becoming more “serious” about religion seems to be, as her pastor realizes, to get nearer to the departed James. In response, Mrs. Bellmont, unhappy with this development, whatever its grounds, opposes her church attendance. So Frado again abandons her belief: “her mistress was a professor of religion; was she going to heaven? then she did not wish to go” (this page). Frado’s loud celebration of Mary’s death underlines her disgust at the Bellmonts’ racism and, by extension, her disillusionment with their kind of Christianity. Ultimately, however, and again ironically, Frado finds one redeeming aspect of Christian belief: the existence of hell, in which a person as evil as Mary Bellmont would finally receive her just deserts: “S’posen she goes to hell, she’ll be black as I am. Wouldn’t mistress be mad to see her a nigger!” (this page). Only hell’s fire could grant Frado and Mary the most ironic form of equality: eternal torment. Wilson’s joke here startles readers today; we can only imagine the reaction of her contemporaries a century and a half ago. She was most certainly crossing over into sacrilege.

  Soon Frado is deriving her “soul’s refreshment” from schoolbooks, not the Bible (this page), confirming how far she is from a conventional state of grace. Nonetheless, as the book draws to a close, having left the Bellmonts and become dependent on other people’s charity, she becomes more pious once again. Indeed, a Bible is now described as “her greatest treasure” (this page). Concluding her story with the conventional claim that she “repose[s] in God” (this page) would have been a requirement not only if Frado wished to remain an acceptable recipient of Singleton’s charity, but also for Wilson and her son to continue to receive Milford’s poor relief and for Wilson to secure the “patronage” for which she appeals in the novel’s preface (which, after all, is why, as she so plainly tells us, she wrote her novel in the first place).

  Yet, despite this apparently devout ending, notes of prevarication linger. Very near the novel’s end, for example, we are told that Frado lived with a woman who taught her “the value of useful books” and that together they read aloud “deeds historic and names renowned” while “a devout Christian exterior invited confidence from the … neighbors”—an extraordinarily unconventional reflection (124; our emphasis). The testimonials that follow a few pages later therefore seem an essential addition. Laden with Christian sentiments, they vouch for her final status as a good Christian and would seem to wish to mitigate the vein of apostasy that has gone before. And in these three principal ways—by depicting a protagonist who suffers sustained violent attacks, wh
o does not live happily ever after, and who does not progress to become a securely moored Christian believer—Harriet Wilson, if she did not exactly create a new subgenre of the sentimental novel, at the very least introduces a stunning innovation. And this is one more crucial legacy she offers as a novelist.

  One further departure from the norms of the contemporary white sentimental novel exemplifies how Wilson transforms the genre: the treatment of the relationship between Frado and her pet dog, Fido. As a mark of Jack Bellmont’s sympathy, he presents Frado with a dog just after she has been cruelly whipped by Mrs. B. Yet this sympathy does not translate into any preventive action by Jack. The text marks this irony: Jack “resolved to do what he could to protect her from Mary and his mother. He bought her a dog” (this page). Rather than taking on a protective role himself, he ineffectually delegates it to a pet instead. Frado herself will continue to be treated like a dog, whatever the feelings of Jack, Mr. Bellmont, or, later, James. Lest the reader miss this metaphorical connection, Frado names her dog Fido, creating a Frado/Fido allegorical leitmotif. After Mrs. B. indulges her “vixen nature” by way of “a few blows on Nig,” Fido becomes the “confidant of Frado. She told him her grief as though he were human” (this page–this page). Frado is enduring a dog’s life in the Bellmont household, yet it is the female Bellmonts who are the more carnivorous: their inhuman devouring of Frado’s childhood makes them resemble a pair of vicious dogs. The Fido/Frado motif climaxes in the scene where Frado refuses to eat from a plate used by her mistress until Fido has licked it clean (this page). This calculated insult, aimed at her cruel white mistress, ironically recapitulates Frado’s own social situation. Instead of being offered help by her white “allies,” Frado receives guilt money, tossed to her by Jack for her mistreatment and her minor act of resistance (this page). By creating this association between an exploited black woman and her pet dog, Wilson economically intimates that it is less than human to regard another human as less than human.

  In this last example, we can glimpse something of Wilson’s strategy as a writer: how she borrows from the sentimental novel’s tropes and plot structures—and from captivity and seduction narratives.18 Her adaptation is carefully calculated and profoundly revisionist. She doesn’t borrow from genres as much as transform them. Wilson has taken the conventional sentimental trope of a waif’s ownership of a pet (a recurrent motif in women’s novels’ plotlines) and transformed it into a complex reflection on Frado’s position as a dehumanized farm servant in contrast to that of a Southern slave. It has to be said in passing that Wilson has now shown herself to be very well read, and this perhaps underlines how far she was from being simply the downtrodden waif her book depicts in 1859.

  Our Nig graphically establishes by way of its sweeping transformations of the sentimental novel genre that the “inalienable rights” of “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” alluded to on its title page are at best only partly realized for “free” blacks. While this was most dramatically apparent in the case of African Americans like Frado, the novel is also a fictional representation of the common practice of indenturing indigent youths, whether black or white, in New England.19 The novel also shows how “slavery’s shadows” fall on Northern labor more generally—beyond invocations of “wage slavery,” a phrase concealing fundamental differences between Southern slavery and labor practices in a rapidly industrializing North. Equating wage labor and chattel slavery risks lending credence to those who supported slavery by arguing that slavery could and should constitute a salutary condition for all working people when compared to the suffering of uncared-for wage laborers.20 However, failing to attack the idea that wage labor is unproblematically “free labor” ignores the coercive and dehumanizing abuses of an unregulated labor market.21 Wilson’s novel has to negotiate the tightrope that results. Frado’s particular position, as an indigent servant who is neither slave nor free, also dramatizes the near-seamless gradations between slave labor and wage labor. Wilson’s narrative is one of the earliest explorations of the lives of “free laborers” and in particular the life of farm servants and their peculiarly vulnerable position in the labor market, which all too often translated into forms of debt peonage. The sheer drudgery endured by Frado offers, quite rarely in antebellum American (and British) fiction, an insight into the hardships of rural labor.

  Perhaps the sole precursor in this regard is the black female writer Nancy Prince. It seems likely Wilson was aware of Prince’s work and borrowed from her (a technique commonly adopted by antislavery writers).22 Our Nig’s Preface closely echoes the sentiments found in the 1853 Preface to the second edition of Prince’s autobiography, A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince.

  Nancy Prince: My object is not a vain desire to appear before the public, but by [my narrative’s] sale I hope to obtain the means to supply my necessities. There are many benevolent societies for the support of Widows, but I am desirous not to avail myself of them, so long as I can support myself by my own endeavors. Infirmities are come upon me, which induce me to solicit the patronage of my friends and the public, on the sale of this work. Not wishing to throw myself on them, I take this method to help myself, as health and strength are gone.23

  Harriet E. Wilson: In offering to the public the following pages the writer confesses her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens.… Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.… I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren universally for patronage, hoping that they will not condemn this attempt of their sister to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful band of supporters. (this page)

  Prince is an apt precursor, because her short catalogue of work as a free black child servant in the North also foreshadows that of Frado:

  Prince: I had to prepare for the wash; soap the clothes and put them into the steamer, set the kettle of water boiling, and then close in the steam, and let the pipe into the steam box.… At two o’clock on the [next] morning … the bell was rung for me to get up; but that was not all, they said I was too slow, and the washing was not done well; I had to leave the tub to tend the door and wait on the family.…

  Hard labor and unkindness was too much for me; in three months my health and strength were gone.24

  Wilson: Her first work was to feed the hens … any departure from this rule to be punished by a whipping. She was then … to drive the cows to pasture.… Upon her return she was allowed to eat her breakfast.… This over, she was placed on a cricket to wash the common dishes; she was to be in waiting always to bring wood and chips, to run hither and thither from room to room.

  A large amount of dish-washing … followed dinner. Then the same after tea and going after the cows finished her first day’s work. The same routine followed day after day, with slight variation; adding a little more work. (this page)

  Such allusions to other African American writers reinforces Wilson’s claim that the “inalienable rights” of “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are partial and relative for all African Americans—slaves and “free” blacks alike.25 However, Wilson’s vulnerable position also means she must always be circumspect: her narrative strategy necessarily entails some self-censorship, a rhetorical feature her text shares with a number of slave narratives, such as Harriet Jacobs’s. In Our Nig she writes, “I do not pretend to divulge every transaction which the unprejudiced would declare unfavourable in comparison with the treatment of legal bondmen; I have purposely omitted that which would provoke most shame in our good anti-slavery friends” (this page). She draws back from laying everything bare, lest proslavery arguments about the awfulness of “wage slavery” are granted too much legitimacy. Yet Frado’s particular position, first as a kind of indentured servant who is neither a “legal bond[wo]man” nor a wage laborer, and later as a subject required to work under Milford’s harsh poor laws, dramatizes how the grad
ations between slave labor and wage labor, far from delineating a black-and-white division (“slave” vs. “free”) instead reveal that dehumanizing exploitation can emerge in many different permutations, complicated, as she insists throughout the text, by anti-black racism.

  • • •

  Though Our Nig owes complex debts to its literary forebears, in particular the sentimental tradition, when Wilson asserts, “I do not pretend to divulge every transaction,” she also reminds the reader of the autobiographical elements of her book. Wilson’s discussion of “her own life” in the preface (this page) raises the question of how far Our Nig should be read as autobiographical.

  First, the book’s title page announces that the author and the main protagonist are one and the same: Our Nig by “Our Nig.” The subtitle confirms this: “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.” Then there are the titles of the first three chapters: “Mag Smith, My Mother,” “My Father’s Death,” and “A New Home for Me.” These chapter headings suggest the story was originally conceived as a first-person narrative.