Our Nig
Page 22
Date of Record: [ditto mark] [it is not completely clear that this ditto mark indicates June 28 and not December 31]
Name and Surname of the Deceased. If a married or a divorced woman or a widow, give also maiden name and name of husband: Hattie E. Wilson [two ditto marks] Green [i.e., maiden name is Hattie E. Green]
Sex (and color if other than white): F. [no mention of race]
Condition (single, married, widowed or divorced): W. [widowed]
Age: Years: 75 Months: 3 Days: [blank]
Disease, or Cause of Death (primary and secondary cause): Inanition
Residence: Boston, Mass
Place of Death: Quincy
Place of Burial: [ditto mark] [i.e., Quincy]
Occupation: Nurse
Place of Birth: Milford, N.H.
Names and Birthplace of Parents:
Names (give maiden name of mother): Joshua Green [no entry for mother]
Birthplace [of parents]: [no entry for either parent]1
There are a number of problems with this entry. Wilson’s color is recorded as white (the default assumption in these New England records): “Sex (and color if other than white): F [no mention of race].” Secondly, her father’s name is given as Joshua Green and her maiden name as Harriet Green, even though previously she had always given her maiden name as Harriet E. Adams (or, at least, that is the name recorded), when living in New Hampshire. However, since she gives her birthplace as Milford, New Hampshire, and her age is approximately correct, and since no Harriet Adams (or Harriet Green) has been traced, apart from Harriet E. Adams Wilson, living in Milford during the correct period and of the correct age-range and color, the balance of probabilities weighs down on the side of recognizing this Hattie E. Wilson to be Harriet E. Wilson. After all, her death certificate (“Return of a Death”) gives her “color” as “African” though her death record does not.2
Document title: Commonwealth of Massachusetts Return of a Death
No.: 192
Name: Hattie E. Wilson
Sex: F[emale]
Color: African
Date of death: June 28 1900
Age: 75 Years, 3 Months, 13 Days
Maiden Name: Hattie E. Green
Widowed
Occupation: Nurse
Residence: Boston Mass. 9. Pelham St.
Place of Birth: Milford, N.H.
Place of Death: Quincy Mass. 93. Washington St.
Name and Birthplace of Father: Joshua Green
Place of Interrment: Quincy Mass. Mt. Wollaston
Dated at Quincy Mass. On June 3 1900
Physician’s Certificate [part of the death certificate]
Name and Age of Deceased: Hattie E. Wilson Age, 75 Years, 3 Months, 13 Days
Disease or Cause of Death: Inanition incident to old age.
This death certificate lends significant support to identifying the Boston Hattie E. Wilson as Harriet E. Wilson. It details her color as “African,” gives her birthplace as “Milford, N.H.,” and confirms her address as 9 Pelham Street, which suggests she had not been resident in the Cobb household for very long. That both the death record and the death certificate give her name as Hattie E. Wilson might be slightly surprising, since she had remarried (in 1870), but her marriage did not last that long (seemingly it terminated some time in 1877), which can explain well enough why she reverted to Harriet Wilson in her later life. The Boston Hattie E. Wilson married John G. Robinson, as the next piece of evidence shows—namely her second marriage certificate.
Document Title: Marriages Registered in the City of Boston for the Year Eighteen Hundred and Seventy
No.: 2319
Date of Marriage: September 29
Names, Surnames and Color of Groom and Bride: John G. Robinson, Harriet E. Wilson [In the column relating to the race of Robinson and Wilson, there is a tick by each of their names. Some of the other names on the page (from other marriages) do not have ticks placed here, so the ticks possibly mean ‘black.’]
Residence of Each at Time of Marriage: [two ditto marks] [meaning Boston]
Age of Each in Years: 26 [John], 37 [Harriet]
Occupation of Each: Physician [John] [there is no entry for Harriet]
Place of Birth of Each: Woodbury, Ct. [John] Milford, N.H. [Harriet]
Names of Parents: Albert G. [ditto mark], Jane S. [John] Joshua [ditto mark], Margaret Green [Harriet]
What Marriage, whether 1st, 2nd, 3d &c: [ditto mark] [meaning first marriage for John] Second [for Harriet]
Name and Official Station of Person by Whom Married: Rev. J. L. Mansfield of Mansfield3
There are again problems with this marriage record, as there are with the death record. Common practice among registrars would mean that the ticks relating to color indicate the couple were not white (the color white was indicated usually by the column being left blank). The problem with this deduction is that John G. Robinson, an apothecary, was white, not African American.4 Since both names are checked in the column relating to color, it would imply they were both nonwhite. Confusion might be said to reign, though the reasonable assumption in this instance would be that this particular registrar, on this occasion at least, unusually chose to use check marks to indicate the category white, mistaking Wilson as white. Furthermore, this Harriet E. Wilson’s age is markedly wrong. However, the listing of Milford, New Hampshire, as Wilson’s birthplace might (again) be convincing enough to reassure us that this Boston Harriet E. Wilson and our Harriet E. Wilson are one and the same.
Census Record: 1870 Census
Schedule 1.—Inhabitants in Ward 8 West of Washington Street, Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts
Enumerated on the 7th day of July 1870
Dwelling #71 [46 Carver Street]
Family #111
Line 3 Name: Robinson, John G.
Age: 26
Sex: Male
Color: White
Occupation: Physician
Value of Real Estate: [blank = none]
Value of Personal Property: $500
Birthplace: Connecticut
Line 4 Name: Wilson, Hattie E.
Age: 38
Color: White
Occupation: Physician
Value of Real Estate: [blank = none]
Value of Personal Property: [blank = none]
Birthplace: New Hampshire
Again, Wilson’s color is recorded as white. It is possible that in this instance she was seeking to pass as white. However, she always advertised herself as a “colored trance medium” in the pages of the Banner of Light. Alternatively, Robinson may have dealt with the census taker and may not have wanted to admit he was living with a nonwhite person. This is not likely, since Wilson ran a business as a colored medium from the house they shared. A third possibility is that the person who recorded the entry may have assumed Wilson was white from her appearance, without asking. This judgment call may have been made because the census taker assumed she must be white because her husband was white. Perhaps, even, the census taker only interviewed Robinson, and assumed his wife must be white without asking. The last and perhaps most unlikely possibility is that a simple slip of the pen occurred.
Census Record: 1880 Census
Boston Ward 16, Precinct 1, Suffolk County, Massachusetts
Enumeration District 703, Page 10B, Lines 43–45
Taken the 3rd day of June, 1880
Dwelling Number: 48 [15 Village Street]
Family Number: 126
Line 43
Name: Hattie E. Wilson
Color: Mulatto [first entered as “W” (white) but this was crossed out and “Mu” substituted]
Sex: Female
Age: 40
Relation to Head of Household: [blank]
Marital Status: Widowed
Occupation: Keeping House
Birthplace: Maine
Father’s Birthplace: Maine
Mother’s Birthplace: Maine
This census entry, in which the letter “W” f
or white has been crossed out and the letters “Mu” for mulatto have been substituted, strongly suggests Wilson was of mixed race but of a very light complexion. Wilson is here recorded as a housekeeper though she was at this time still quite active in spiritualist circles. This suggests that her income from her spiritualist work was generally very modest and at this time at least needed to be supplemented.
Death Notices of Hattie E. Wilson in The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe carried two notices concerning the death of Hattie E. Wilson in its edition of June 29, 1900. The first appeared in the news section:
QUINCY
Mrs Harriet E. Wilson of Boston died yesterday at the residence of Mrs Catherine C. Cobb on Washington st. (9)
The second appeared in its death notice section:
WILSON—In Quincy, June 25, Mrs Harriet Wilson of Boston. Funeral from the residence of Mrs Catherine C. Cobb, 93 Washington st. Quincy, Saturday, June 30, at 3 o’clock. Train leaves south terminal station at 2.28 p. m. Relatives and friends are invited. (12)
City of Quincy, Massachusetts Mount Wollaston Cemetery Lot No. 1337 Record (n.d.).
This burial lot cemetery record shows that Hattie E. Wilson is buried in the Cobb family grave. She was the third person to be interred there, following Frank H. Cobb (1897) and then Silas H. Cobb (in March 1900), in whose family home she had died. Whereas the Cobb family members are all buried in front of the large gray granite memorial marking the plot, Wilson is buried in the rear, to the north, where she lay in isolation until 1985. Wilson’s name appears on the family memorial, but on its back, at the foot of the memorial. Wilson’s interment in the Cobb family grave suggests a degree of closeness with the Cobbs that perhaps transcends that which is likely to accrue from having served merely as the Cobbs’ nurse, and more likely results from a long-established intimacy to do with Wilson’s mediumistic practice: she had possibly served as the family’s (or at least Catherine Cobb’s) medium for a number of years. The Cobb family lore after her death, which came to identify her as a Native American, supports this suggestion.
The back of the Cobb family grave memorial in Mount Wollaston Cemetery, Quincy, Massachusetts. Harriet (Hattie) E. Wilson’s name appears at the bottom beneath those of members of the Stoddard family, close friends with the Cobbs, who came to share the plot after Wilson’s death. Though Wilson’s name was the first to be added to the back of the memorial it was deliberately placed at the bottom. (Photo by Marcus Halevi.)
NOTES
1. Our thanks to Fatin Abbas, Johni Cerny, and Donald Yacovone for assistance with the transcriptions. See Massachusetts Deaths, 506: 95, Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Mass.
2. “Commonwealth of Massachusetts/Return of a Death,” under the name of Hattie E. Wilson, June 29, 1900. Other details match those found on her death record, by and large. It also tells us she died of “inanition” and that she died in the house of the family of Silas Henry Cobb, whom she had been nursing. See Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts (2005), xvii, 86.
3. See Massachusetts Marriages, 228: 129, Massachusetts Archives, Columbia Point, Boston, Mass.
4. It is possible that this John Robinson also became involved in spiritualism (it was a common pattern for husband and wife teams to operate in spiritualist circles). On January 7, 1871, the Banner noted that “a young ‘Indian trance speaker,’ (Roy St. Francais) of Canada spoke in Vineland N.J.… He is very eloquent, rather radical, but altogether one of the best speakers in the field. He was in company with Dr. Robinson, of Boston.” BL XXVIII, no. 17(January 7, 1871): 4.
APPENDIX 4:
A Note on the Penguin Edition
Professors P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts, in their Penguin edition of Our Nig, have uncovered remarkably valuable information about the identity of the Hayward family and Harriet E. Wilson’s life, especially following the publication of her novel in 1859 and the death of her son, George Mason. Their research has extended our knowledge of Wilson’s life span to the turn of the century, dramatically expanding what we know about the first female novelist in the African American literary tradition, as she pursued a career as a spiritualist during the final third of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, however, some of their claims about Wilson’s early life, prior to her departure to Boston, are sometimes overly speculative, with little or no supporting evidence provided. This dearth of convincing evidence and a certain troubling overenthusiasm for claiming definitive identifications between characters in the novel and individuals found in public records (through what we might call the biographical equivalent of false cognates) also serves to create doubt about their conclusions regarding her later life, underscoring the sometimes troublesome relationship between genealogical research and the more conservative and rigorous standards demanded of historical scholarship. When we attempted to duplicate their research, unfortunately we found that many of their claims were entirely or largely speculative and could not be supported adequately by the facts. We offer a summary here of several of their assertions that are deeply problematical and in need of reassessment (page numbers refer to the 2009 Penguin edition):
• The identity of Wilson’s father remains uncertain. The claim that Harriet E. Wilson’s father’s name was “most certainly Joshua Green” (xxxi), advanced on the basis that this is the name given on her second marriage certificate, and, after she had passed away, the name recorded on both her death certificate and the record of her death, neglects to take full account of the way her maiden name is recorded as Harriet Adams on four occasions: in both the 1850 and the 1851 “Report[s] of the Overseers of the Poor for the Town of Milford”; in the 1850 U.S. census; and in the record of her first marriage on October 6, 1851, to be found in the April 1852 “return” of the Reverend E. N. Hidden, fifth pastor of Milford’s Congregational church. There is plainly a discrepancy in the record. Wilson’s father’s last name remains uncertain. It is not “most certainly” Green.
• No record has yet been discovered that a Mag Smith or a Mag Adams lived in Milford, New Hampshire. To claim that Wilson’s mother was called Mag Smith is both speculative and unlikely, given Wilson’s consistent use of pseudonyms throughout her novel (vii).
• The drunken “Margaret Ann Smith who died in Boston,” and whose death was reported in the Milford Farmer’s Cabinet, was almost certainly not Wilson’s mother, though Foreman creates the false impression that she was. There is no evidence that this Portsmouth-born Smith ever visited Milford. She is also described as black in the account of her death in the Cabinet, whereas Wilson’s mother was almost certainly white (or just possibly a light-skinned “mulatta,” unlikely to be described as black). Foreman’s subsequent discovery that the sensational story of Smith’s death had been widely syndicated in newspapers across New England and that in some versions Smith’s color is given as white actually weakens her argument. As many papers throughout New England picked up this “shocking” story, there is no reason to believe that the Cabinet ran it because the Portsmouth Mag Smith had local connections. Further, if this speculative identification is true, then why did the Cabinet’s editors misleadingly leave Mag Smith’s color wrongly recorded as “black” in its account, when presumably those in Milford who remembered Harriet’s mother would have known her to be white? The Cabinet’s readers would be unlikely to recognize the black Mag Smith of Portsmouth as the white Mag Smith known in Milford. And both “Mag” and “Smith” were common names. In all probability, the Cabinet simply ran this story as another cautionary, pro-temperance tale (that Mag was “black” added an extra, racist, spice).
• There is no conclusive evidence that Wilson ever formally became an indentured servant, though it is probable she did.
• The identification of Harriet Wilson’s teacher in Milford as Abby A. Kent is not supported by any concrete evidence. Kent is never named as a teacher in the official records that survive in the Milford Historical Society.
• The identifications of Mrs. Hale as Mrs.
Sarah Dexter Kemball; the “two maids (old)” as Fanny and Edna Kidder; Mrs. Hoggs as Mary Louisa Boyles; Mrs. Mary Wrigley Walker as the Mrs. Walker mentioned by “Allida”; “Allida” as Jane Chapman (Maslen) Demond; “Margaretta Thorn” as Laura Wright Hutchinson; “C.D.S.” as Calvin Dascomb, Sr.; and Wilson’s landlady as Sophia W. Young are all not supported by any definitive evidence.
• The identification of the town or village (it is described as both) to which Wilson moves as “almost surely” Ware, Massachusetts, is not supported by sufficient evidence (106). Westborough, Walpole, and, above all, Worcester remain possible contenders.
• There is no evidence apart from the author’s pseudonym that the poem “Fading Away” by “Hattie” is by Harriet Wilson (see viii, xiii). The style of this Cabinet poem is nothing like the poem quoted on pages 135–36 of Our Nig, which is quite likely to have been penned by Wilson, since at this point in her testimonial, “Allida” is quoting from a letter by “the author of this book.”
• The claim that the Thomas Wilson who died on the sloop Cabassa in Cuba was Harriet Wilson’s husband is not supported by any documentary evidence, especially as Our Nig (which Foreman and Pitts usually accept as autobiographically accurate) represents him as dying in New Orleans.
• Though one might assume that people in spiritualist circles in New England knew one another, there is no basis for claiming that Wilson was involved with either Laura Hutchinson or spiritualists in the Milford environs. Worcester had a large and active spiritualist community; Ware a very much smaller one, while Nashua possessed one as well. Wilson may even not have turned to spiritualism until her arrival in Boston.
• No reason is offered for the unlikely claim that G. W. Cook, who is quoted in an epigraph to chapter 10 of Our Nig, is a pseudonym for George Washington Light (94).