Furthermore, since Gates’s authentication of Harriet Adams Wilson’s identity as an African American woman and the author of the novel (including the recovery of her marriage license and the death certificate of her son by the researcher David A. Curtis, with the assistance of the librarian Mrs. Eugene W. Leach, Sr.), several scholars have made dramatic discoveries about Wilson’s life after 1860, and about the identity of the characters Mrs. Wilson fictionalizes in her text. No doubt the most important of these were P. Gabrielle Foreman’s and Reginald Pitts’s recovery of Wilson’s life between the Civil War and the turn of the century, especially her work as a spiritual medium, and Kathy Flynn’s research on her career as an entrepreneur producing and marketing hair treatments. (Professor Foreman graciously gave Professor Gates one of the rare surviving bottles of Mrs. Wilson’s hair product; see figure on page xlvi). Barbara A. White’s role was also transformative, when she established that the Bellmont family is the fictional counterpart of the Haywards, in whose household Wilson served her period of harsh indenture. Additionally, R. J. Ellis’s research presented in this edition establishes the details of her connections with the Congregational church in Milford, her time on Milford’s pauper list, and for the first time the full extent of her fascinating career as a spiritualist in Boston. When Gates undertook his quest to establish Wilson’s identity in the early eighties the Internet had not been invented. Now, online searches, especially in databases of newspapers, make this sort of research much more efficient, and Wilson scholarship has profited enormously from this technical innovation.
The result of the work of these scholars leaves no doubt that Harriet Wilson was a black woman, born in New Hampshire, who undertook the audacious act of writing a novel both to testify to her particular experiences of racism in a slave-free state in the North and to generate sufficient funds to provide a secure living for herself and her son. Sales of her self-published novel were never going to fulfill the author’s desire for economic self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, the text she produced against the greatest odds stands as a testament to the fact that, within the African American literary tradition, the will to freedom manifested itself—for former slaves and free Northern black people alike—as the will to write, the will to establish one’s identity through writing about one’s self as a thinking, feeling human being, even or especially if that meant creating new forms of imaginative literature to do so. This is another of Harriet Wilson’s important legacies.
Harriet E. Wilson seems to have been born and brought up in the historical model for Our Nig’s Singleton, the town of Milford, New Hampshire, from the late 1820s onward. Her maiden name was Adams (as clearly recorded in the 1850 U.S. census and on her first marriage certificate).26 She probably was born or lived as a youngster in the household of Timothy Blanchard, a cooper living in Milford in the Shed[d] farmhouse (as it was generally known at the time). She seems to have been deserted in Milford by her mother around seven years of age, for she likely is the free colored female living with the Hayward family in Milford at the time of the 1840 census. The details of the Hayward family and their history mirror in most respects those of the Bellmonts. Even the farm they owned on the cliffs above the Souhegan River resembles that of their fictional counterparts. Though the Bellmont family in Our Nig is smaller than that of the Haywards (see the Hayward family tree, this page), this is one of Wilson’s several fictionalizations of her lived experiences, in order to simplify the narrative. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that Wilson lived with the Hayward family as a farm servant (one who works both in the farmhouse and the fields), under circumstances resembling those of Frado. It is likely, though not certain, that she was indentured (“bound out”) to them by Milford’s town council (the town’s records here are incomplete).27
Detail from 1854 map of Milford, New Hampshire, showing the locations of Nehemiah Hayward’s farmhouse where Wilson worked and the Shed[d] farmhouse close by, where she was possibly born and probably raised. (Courtesy of Milford Historical Society.)
The Haywards, who were relatively prominent, had connections with the foremost abolitionists in the town, including their pastor, the Reverend Humphrey Moore, and with the Hutchinson Family Singers (to whom they became related by marriage).28 James Bellmont’s comforting of Frado in Our Nig echoes antislavery sentiments: “In our part of the country there were thousands upon thousands who favored the elevation of her race, disapproving of oppression in all its forms” (this page). Wilson’s experiences with the abolitionists in Milford are undoubtedly the source of Frado’s bitterness about the hypocrisy she encounters in Singleton and within the Bellmont family. Nothing certain, however, can be gleaned about Wilson’s physical treatment behind the doors of the Hayward farmhouse.
The next documentary record is her appearance in the report by Milford’s overseers of the poor for the year April 1849—March 1850, which suggests that she left the Haywards’ farm sometime after 1840 and before April 1849, possibly upon reaching the age of eighteen. By 1849–50 she had been reduced to penury; she appears in the 1850 census as Harriet Adams—the same name that later appears on her marriage license—lodged with the Samuel Boyles family, and in the town’s records for 1850–51 as a “pauper not on the farm.” The next identifying document records her marriage to Thomas Wilson, on October 6, 1851, again as Harriet Adams.
Between being listed as a pauper for at least part of the period February 1850—February 1851 and her marriage to Thomas Wilson, Harriet probably departed from Milford and lived in a town or village (it is described as both), identified only as “W—–,” Massachusetts, according to the testimonial of “Allida.” The identity of the town of W—– remains uncertain.29 Frado likewise moves away from Singleton, to a town in Massachusetts where she learns to make straw bonnets (this page). There Frado meets a “professed fugitive” (this page) and returns to Singleton to marry him. If this was also the sequence of events in Wilson’s life (and “Allida” approximately reproduces this story), it must have occurred within the space of less than a year. Wilson’s life certainly matches Frado’s in her novel: after her 1851 marriage, she and her husband Thomas conceive a child, born within a year, probably on the county farm, and given the name George Mason Wilson (Frado congruently reports that, after she was deserted by her husband, she was again “thrown upon the public for sustenance” and that then her child was born; “Allida” and Margaretta Thorn both support this story in their testimonials).
Harriet Wilson next surfaces in the historical record in reports by Milford’s overseers of the poor for the years 1854–56. Her son was admitted briefly to the county poor farm in 1855, though appearing with her in the overseers’ records for 1855–56. Then, for three successive years (spring 1856-spring 1859), Wilson’s child appears on Milford’s pauper lists, though she does not. During this period, it seems that Wilson remained in the New Hampshire-Massachusetts region, having learned “a valuable recipe” (this page) for a product for “restoring gray hair to its former color,” as “Allida” informs us (this page). Foreman and Pitts demonstrated this by discovering several bottles manufactured in Manchester, New Hampshire, bearing Mrs. H. E. Wilson’s name. Flynn and Foreman also located advertisements quite widely scattered in New York, New Jersey, and the New England press—one of these even appearing in the Milford Farmer’s Cabinet in 1859.30 Wilson sold this hair product from the mid-1850s into the early 1860s.31
During this period of her life, in part passed as a resident of Nashua, New Hampshire, two important incidents occur in rapid succession. Our Nig is copyrighted and self-published in 1859, and then George Mason Wilson, Harriet’s son, dies in February 1860. Sadly, Wilson’s declared intention of selling her book to support her child was overtaken by events.
One of the bottles carrying the information that it contained Mrs. H. E. Wilson’s hair dressing produced in the early 1860s, probably in Manchester, N.H. (Gift of P. Gabrielle Foreman, from the collection of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Photo by Marcus Halevi.)
Advertisement: “Use Mrs. Wilson’s Hair Regenerator and Hair Dessing,” Methodist Quarterly Review 42, ed., D. D. Whedon (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1860, 714). The portrait is an artistic depiction of hair “regenerated” by Wilson’s dressing; the person depicted may be Wilson herself. In the advertisement, “Mrs. H. E. Wilson of Nashua” endorses her hair dressing in her own words. (Photograph by R. J. Ellis.)
Constructing an account of Wilson’s life involves taking these few definitive facts from the historical record and rounding them out with information and clues drawn from the text of Our Nig or its testimonials, but this always remains a risky procedure, given the fact that the text is a fictionalization. For example, the mention of a “Mrs. Wilson” in the report of Milford’s overseers of the poor in 1863 probably refers to Harriet Wilson. Though previous records had not given Harriet this title, in her hair regenerator advertisements (if these are indeed hers) she was given the name “Mrs. Wilson.” If we assume that “Mrs. Wilson” in the overseers’ report is indeed Harriet, based on this evidence and the support provided by Our Nig’s testimonials, then we could extrapolate that the combined income from her book, sales of her hair treatment product (as described in Our Nig),32 and possibly some continuing efforts at sewing still did not always provide sufficient resources, reducing her to state support again in 1863. Yet the hair treatment business “Mrs. H. E. Wilson” established in about 1857 and later developed with Henry P. Wilson seems to have been successful, according to Flynn’s and Foreman’s research. Possibly the explanation is that Wilson’s health collapsed again, plummeting her back into indigence.
This scenario would help to explain why Wilson moved to Boston at some time in the mid-1860s (probably 1866 or 1867): simply put, she needed to find not only a more promising but also a less debilitating platform for her talents. In Boston she took up a long-lasting career in the burgeoning spiritualist community, setting herself up as a medium able to communicate with a spirit world that supposedly surrounds and oversees our lives (see appendix 1). Research initially conducted by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts, now expanded very considerably by R. J. Ellis, has opened up a wealth of new information about Wilson’s life as a spiritualist after she left Milford.33 This indicates that Harriet Wilson possibly remarried in Boston in 1870 and died near the city in 1900. Though the description of Wilson as a chronic invalid in both the testimonials and the text of Our Nig would make it difficult to believe she survived until 1900, such recoveries were not unknown, and a career in spiritualism was not infrequently launched from a sickbed (with the medium maintaining that his or her sufferings had brought him or her into communion with the spirit world). The possibility also exists that the extent of her debility was exaggerated in her autobiographical novel.34 Questions also remain over two central pieces of evidence discovered by Pitts and Foreman: whether a second marriage certificate from 1870 and a death record of 1900 are those of Harriet E. Wilson, due to inconsistencies in dating and the assignation of race (see marriage certificate and death certificate transcriptions in appendix 3).
Yet despite such residual doubts, our own research confirms that Wilson’s life after the publication of Our Nig most probably did unfold in extraordinary ways. We have discovered hundreds of entries about Wilson in Boston’s spiritualist press, almost all of them analyzed for the first time in this edition. These dramatically extend and deepen the initial research of Foreman and Pitts, in particular by unearthing new writing by Wilson herself concerning her spiritualist activities. These discoveries establish how her Boston career as a medium and spiritualist furnish further evidence of Wilson’s extraordinary talents, even down to her daring decision in 1883, as a female and a “colored” medium, to set up her own spiritualist Sunday school (or “lyceum”) in competition with existing spiritualist lyceums. But we have also uncovered how this spiritualist career was troubled and troubling, posing many challenges for Wilson as, once again, she had to wrestle with the “shadows,” both the specters and material persecutions, of racism. Her later, long life in Boston sheds a fascinating, critical light on Our Nig.
Wilson’s spiritualist career in Boston reveals her seeking to optimize her marginal position as a black female in New England society. Just as Frado in Our Nig navigates the limits imposed by white racism (picking up and brandishing the stick at the woodpile, learning how to sew, selling a hair treatment), so Wilson displays a similar coping ability in later life. In becoming a “trance medium” (by her own description) she drew on the stereotype of the possessed African to help market herself, while accepting that venturing beyond “trance” into the more popular and lucrative terrain of “test” mediumship (which she would have laid claim to if she had conducted spiritualist sessions summoning up “tangible” evidence of the spirit world’s existence) would dangerously expose her to unusually hostile scrutiny. (Even white “test” mediums’ claims were often minutely challenged.)35 She also drew on the popular belief that some African Americans were skilled herbalists, harboring a deep cultural knowledge of natural treatments (a stereotype with some truth in it), when she offered, as part of her portfolio of spiritualist skills, “herb packs and manipulations”36 in the newspaper advertisements she composed.
Though Wilson praised the spiritualist “platform” in 1868 for its commitment to “no sect, no creed, no dogma and no caste,”37 spiritualist circles were not free from racist stereotyping. The Banner of Light, a leading weekly spiritualist newspaper, can be arraigned for such stereotyping from first to last, in markedly inconsistent ways. In April 1867 an article argued that “the negro must not be pushed out of the country, as the Indian has been,” but only a few weeks earlier another item advocated African colonization, so that “the race will be removed from close competition to the whites.”38 Nearly thirty years later, the Banner published a moving tribute to Frederick Douglass in an obituary on April 27, 1895, but it had also, earlier, carried an account of a “spirit manifestation session” during which Douglass appeared as “a kneeling slave chained to a post, with these words: A poor old slave.’ ”39 Disturbingly dissonant examples like these are commonplace: the Banner also often recounted spirit communications from former slaves speaking in minstrel-style dialect.40
Hattie E. Wilson, as Harriet Wilson now styled herself, by consistently describing herself in the Banner as a “colored … medium,” and by advancing on one occasion in 1867 “an eloquent plea for the recognition of the capacities of her race [and] the sentiment and philosophy of progress,” plainly wanted to express racial pride, but also to profit from the interest and even allure her color aroused, compromised though this often was by racist overtones.41 She needed her coping skills.42 At a time when spiritualists claimed to be pursuing scientific validation of their abilities, she possibly felt that her skills as a medium would be met with more skepticism (and accompanying strict “tests” of her truthfulness) if she attempted to call up white spirits, so she gained a name for herself as a medium summoning up “Indian guides” (guides much favored by nineteenth-century spiritualists as communicants from the spirit world, and ones even more beset by stereotyping than African Americans), despite the racist shadowings such a stereotype-infested venture carried within it.43 Indeed, the Spiritual Scientist alluded (perhaps satirically) to this habit of Wilson’s by running an article about one of her occasional Boston receptions where she spoke “under control” as a medium under the headline, “The Red Man’s New Year.”44
As we read of Wilson’s spiritualist career, involving her periodic switches of allegiance, we can see how she had to thread her way carefully through professional rivalries and financial calculations, not unrelated to the survival tactics employed when she had been a farm servant or when kept on the public rolls. She must have been continually aware of the boundaries limiting what she could achieve, both in her life with the Haywards and in her career as a spiritualist. Frado’s partial rebellion against Mrs. Bellmont at the woodpile is equivalent to Wilson’s later limiting
her claims to those of a “trance medium” (eschewing any attempt to produce “test” material manifestations) or her caution in introducing new ideas into her lyceum classes. Her use of pseudonyms for the Haywards and the fact that Our Nig is a novel, rather than an autobiography, also speak to her awareness and acknowledgment of what was allowable. She understood her limits, which is not to say that she resided cheerfully within them.
Wilson’s involvement in 1877 in a Women’s Amateur Dramatic Club production of the highly popular parlor farce The Spirit of Seventy-Six epitomizes this fascination with crossing boundaries and the care such crossings required. The play, first published in 1868 and probably written by Ariana Randolph Wormeley Curtis (possibly also with her husband, Daniel Sargent Curtis), depicts a United States where the conventional gender roles of men and women have become inverted. The play portrays how Tom Carberry struggles to come to terms with such an inversion, and its social consequences, on his return from a long trip to China. The Banner of Light of February 10 reports that “Mrs. Hattie Wilson, the well-known medium, appeared in her fine impersonation of ‘Tom Carberry’ in this production” (this page). Though anti-feminist in intent, the play nevertheless makes some uncomfortable points, as Carberry complains of the injustices he must endure as a consequence of his enforced feminization. One can well imagine the cross-dressed Wilson reveling in any occasional eruptions of subversive laughter, even as she resided safely within her role.45
Harriet Wilson’s time as a spiritualist in Boston reinforces just how circumscribed and straitened the lives of African Americans were in both antebellum and postbellum New England even in well-established black communities, such as the one in Boston, which Wilson apparently did not join. Her decision to set up a spiritualist lyceum suggests how her ambition sometimes led her to step over these limits; that her lyceum was only short-lived suggests that these constraints were very real. This in turn reminds us of how powerful Our Nig’s indictment of racism is, and how radical its implications are. One of the attractions of spiritualism for Wilson may have been the way that it was opposed to the established churches’ conservatism. One spiritualist leader declared that “the old theologic systems” had died the moment that the modern spiritual movement was born, “at least, its death as far as the converts to spiritualism were concerned.” Indeed, Wilson herself, “under control,” attacked the conservatism of this “theology.”46
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