• There is no reason to prefer the attribution Charlotte Elizabeth [Brown] over that of Charlotte Elliott when seeking to identify “C. E.,” the author of the epigraph at the head of chapter 11 of Our Nig (101).
NOTES TO THE TEXT
Compiled by R.J. Ellis with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., David A. Curtis, and Lisa Rivo
1 OUR NIG: The title of the book, by including the word “nig,” which in 1859 was well recognized as a derogatory and abusive term, is perhaps one of the reasons why the book sunk into obscurity for so long. The bookseller William French, in 1981, in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained that booksellers debated whether the book was written by a white or African American person (the latter perhaps being unlikely to include the word “nig” in the title). The book’s recurrently fierce critique of Northern abolitionism (see our introduction, this page and passim) even suggested the remote possibility that a white Southerner might have been the author. Corroboratively, Gates also discovered that the book was largely unrecorded in reference works on African American writing up until that time, other than a handful of exceptions, notably: John Herbert Nelson, who mentions the title only (The Negro Character in American Literature, 1926); James Joseph McKinney (“The Theme of Miscegenation in the American Novel to World War One,” 1972 Ph.D.); Geraldine Matthews (Black Writers, 1773–1949, 1975), and Carol Fairbanks and Eugene A. Engeldinger (Black American Fiction—A Bibliography, 1978)—these rehearsing what was written in Lyle Wright’s three-volume listing of American fiction (American Fiction 1774–1900, II, 2767); and Daniel Mott (in a Howard S. Mott Company catalogue, 1980). By contrast, in two other reference works, Wilson is taken to be white: Herbert Ross Brown’s The Sentimental Novel in America (1940) and Monroe N. Work’s A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America (1928). The title Our Nig should be recognized as offering an ironic commentary on blacks’ difficulties in laying uncontested claim to both sole authorship and copyright. White American families at this time commonly appended the pronoun “our” before their servants’ names. See, for example, Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr’s Farmingdale, in which the white family decide to name their new, adolescent servant “Our Mary” (Caroline Thomas [Julia Caroline Ripley Dorr], Farmingdale [New York: Appleton Company, 1854], 231). Given the substantial allusions in Wilson’s Our Nig to the sentimental novel tradition, she perhaps intends an intertextual reference here. While Dorr’s Mary is being taken into the bosom of a loving family who are rescuing her from her impoverishment, almost the opposite is happening to Frado, as the Bellmont family give her the racist labeling, “Our Nig.”
2 The book’s title and subtitle are loaded with complexities, generated by the ironic circularity of “Our Nig … by ‘Our Nig,’ ” which underlines the way Frado is trapped by her racial identity. The description of the farmhouse uses the ambiguous terms “two-story” (suggesting that double, racist, standards operate) and “white house” (suggesting these double standards pervade the antebellum United States). See our introduction, this page and passim. Harriet E. Wilson’s adoption of a pen name was probably driven by expediency. The Hayward family, models for the abusive Bellmonts, still had prominent New England connections though they had dispersed from Milford, New Hampshire, by the time Our Nig was published. Wilson would therefore welcome the anonymity provided by a pseudonym. (See Barbara A. White, “ ‘Our Nig’ and the She-Devil.”) Ironically, a further motive might have been a desire to buffer herself from criticism for having the effrontery to write as a female—a role still not always accepted by either white or black communities at this time. See, for example, Marilyn Richardson’s introduction to her Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
3 Epigraph: The quotation on the title page occurs in Josiah Gilbert Holland’s Bitter-Sweet: A Poem. In the fifth edition of Bitter-Sweet (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859), these lines appear on pages 35–36. Holland (1819–81) was a Massachusetts writer. Wilson’s quotation is largely, but not wholly, accurate. The quotation in the 1859 edition reads:
… I know
That care has iron crowns for many brows;
That Calvaries are everywhere, whereon
Virtue is crucified, and nails and spears
Draw guiltless blood; that sorrow sits and drinks
At sweetest hearts, till all their life is dry;
That gentle spirits on the rack of pain
Grow faint or fierce, and pray and curse by turns;
That Hell’s temptations, clad in Heavenly guise
And armed with might, lie evermore in wait
Along life’s path, giving assault to all—
These lines form part of the twenty-second speech of the “First Movement,” spoken by “Ruth.” The next two lines continue: “I know the world is full of evil things, / And shudder with the consciousness.” Often the pertinence of Wilson’s chapter epigraphs is enhanced when these are read in their full context. In this case, even the poem’s title, Bitter-Sweet, is ironically apposite. Like the subtitle, this reflexivity suggests that Wilson was well read and underlines how sophisticated Our Nigs narrative is.
4 Geo. C. Rand & Avery: The printer, George C. Rand & Avery, was not known as a regular publisher of novels, though the firm had been involved in the printing of abolitionist materials. George Curtis Rand was a friend of and worked with William Lloyd Garrison. Possibly Rand was carrying out the printing in part (or even wholly) as a charitable endeavor (see Gardner, “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister,’ ” 226). The first edition therefore contains many minor errors or irregularities. Other errors may derive from the fact that this printing firm did not usually handle novels, and may therefore have been unfamiliar with the conventions that existed.
5 Mrs. H. E. Wilson: This identification on the copyright page helped identify the author lying behind the pseudonym “Our Nig.” The copyright date was August 18, 1859; the publication date, September 5, 1859.
PREFACE
6 failing health … feeble life: Wilson’s “failing health” and impoverished circumstances are confirmed by the three letters appended to the text (133–40). Wilson gave birth to her son, George, at the Hillsborough County Farm in Goffstown in 1852. Her son was to die within six months of Our Nig’s publication.
7 I would not … palliate slavery … [nor] provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home: Wilson’s immediate assertions that she would not “palliate slavery at the South, by disclosures of its appurtenances North,” and that she has “purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home” make plain that she was aware of the risk that, by denouncing Northern racism and abolitionist hypocrisies, she was echoing the arguments of Southern apologists for slavery. See our introduction, this page-this page.
8 I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren: Wilson here seems to indicate that her novel was aimed at a “colored” audience. However, the copies of Our Nig that have survived seem to have been owned by white Americans, including the son of the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. See Eric Gardner’s research (Gardner, “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister’ ”). Perhaps Wilson is not so much indicating that she expects her readership to be black as suggesting that only African Americans will be prepared to attend fully to her message concerning the prevalence of racism in the “two-story” North, or be moved sufficiently to lend her financial or other material support. We are, however, not sure that the text does solely orient itself to a “colored” readership, and these doubts are fuelled by the preface itself: why would Wilson “purposely omit” from her novel “what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home” if she did not expect at least some white readers? See also notes 19 and 109.
9 H. E. W.: These correspond to the initials in the name Mrs. H. E. Wilson, by whom the book was copyrighted.
CHAPTER 1
10 MAG SMITH, MY MOTHER: The use of the first-person pronoun (�
��me”; “my”) in the titles of the first three chapters does not mesh with the third-person narrative voice used in the rest of the book. While these uses of “my” and “me” might suggest an autobiographical origin (presupposing that these first-person usages are a sign of poor editing by Wilson during a hypothetical recasting of her text into the third person), they may alternatively be seen as a device to dramatize Frado’s humanity—by personalizing her, giving her an immediate, first-person voice, addressing the reader through these chapter titles. “Mag Smith” is the first of many pseudonyms used in the book. See note 15 and passim.
11 Epigraph: This is taken from “The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” part of Thomas Moore’s then famous Romantic, Orientalist long poem Lalla Rookh. Moore (1779–1852) was at the time often identified as Ireland’s national poet. The poem can be found in Moore’s frequently reprinted Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Collected by Himself. See for example the Philadelphia edition (J. B. Lippincott, 1858, 257). Wilson’s quotation is not wholly accurate. The version in the 1858 edition reads:
Oh, Grief, beyond all other griefs, when fate
First leaves the young heart alone and desolate
In the wide world, without that only tie
For which it lov’d to live or fear’d to die;—
Lorn as the hung-up lute, that ne’er hath spoken
Since the sad day its master-chord was broken!
The poem then continues:
Fond maid, the sorrow of her soul was such
Ev’n reason sunk,—blighted beneath its touch;
And though, ere long, her sanguine spirit rose
Above the first dead pressure of its woes,
Though health and bloom return’d, the delicate chain
Of thought, once tangled, never clear’d again.
It is possible that Wilson also encountered Moore’s blistering attacks on U.S. slavery and upon Jefferson for keeping a slave mistress in his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). See, in particular, Moore’s epistles in Poems Relating to America, which denounce “the present demagogues of the United States” for allowing it to become a country containing both “the vilely slav’d and madly free— / Alike the bondage and the licence suit, / The brute made ruler and the man made brute.” Consequently, to Moore’s eyes, visitors to Washington see “Naught but woods and J_____n … see, / Where streets should run and sages ought to be.” Moore’s satire here bitterly reflects upon how the United States was no reservoir of freedom: “Freedom, Freedom, how I hate thy caste” (Thomas Moore, Poems Relating to America, in Moore’s Poetical Works, vol. 1 [London: Longman, Orme, Brown and Longman, 1840], 30, 266, 292, 291). Lines from Moore’s “Weep Not for Those” (1816) stand at the head of “Death,” the chapter in Uncle Tom’s Cabin describing the death of Little Eva.
12 Early deprived of parental guardianship: The cloying sentimentality of this overwritten opening is derived from the then-dominant sentimental mode of writing also found, for example, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the body of Our Nig, however, the writing becomes crisper and more direct.
13 She surrendered to him a priceless gem: While drawing upon the conventions of sensation literature, in which women are seduced and lose the “priceless gem” of their virginity (see Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Foreman and Pitts, 2009: xxxiv) this outburst of feeling may also be an outlet for Wilson’s frustrations over the unpalatable legacy left to her by her mother. The “damned mob of scribbling women,” preeminently led by E. D. E. N. Southworth in the terrain of sensation literature, of which Hawthorne famously and almost contemporaneously complained, provided plentiful examples of such plot trajectories in the decades preceding the Civil War. These influences help account for the strange vocabulary in the closing paragraph of this first chapter, concerning “amalgamation” and “infamy,” which again adopt the phraseology found in such gothic sensation writing.
14 How much you earn dis week: The contrast here between the speech of “Jim” and “Mags,” as one speaks in dialect and the other more formally, echoes the sort of stereotypical differentiations found in white writing at this time (particularly in minstrel ventriloquism), but uncommonly in African American works. This provides another reason why Wilson was not infrequently taken to be a white writer passing as African American by scholars and foreshadows later debates among African American artists about whether writing in dialect was a viable mode for African Americans, given its commonplace appearance in black-face minstrel performances.
15 “Bellmont”: This is the pseudonym for the Milford, New Hampshire, Hayward family, as Barbara A. White has shown. Our table in the introduction, this page, shows which members of the Hayward family correspond with the Bellmonts in Our Nig. Here Mr. Bellmont is Nehemiah Hayward, Jr.
16 “I have barrels to hoop”: That Jim is a cooper suggests, by extension, that the household of the cooper, Timothy Blanchard in Milford, New Hampshire, may have been Wilson’s early or first home. See Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig” 34–35.
17 Singleton: The pseudonym for Milford, New Hampshire. The naming is ironic: all of “Singleton” does not speak with a single voice. Many in the town had developed strong abolitionist sympathies, but others remained unsympathetic and racism remained commonplace. The Congregationalist church that Wilson probably attended reflected such division, which ensures Singleton possesses no such implied unity. See our introduction, p. liv. See also Ellis, Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig,” 88 et seq., and passim.
18 his efforts in Mag’s behalf told also of a finer principle: Despite many counterindications in the opening pages, which seem to suggest the author embraces a “white = good” and “black = bad” cosmology, Wilson often highlights how such a divide is damaging, as she does here. See also notes 19 and 21.
19 I’s black outside, I know, but I’s got a white heart inside: Wilson here refers to the unfortunate and intentional conjunction of Christian eschatology and skin color distinctions (in which black is equated with bad and white with good), which was also conventionally drawn upon, in different ways, by proslavery and antislavery advocates to justify their antagonistic positions. Wilson advances an argument commonly adopted by antislavery exponents, who argued that appearance could belie reality, and that to rely on a black appearance was superficial and should not deflect attention away from a person’s inner purity— in particular that made manifest by Christian belief. This black-white eschatology has been frequently attacked for supporting racism via its demarcations, but it is easy to see why Wilson uses this argument strategically here in order to establish the principle of human beings’ common humanity—an Enlightenment principle that many of her later observations will rely upon. These sentiments also suggest Wilson anticipated a white readership.
20 the evils of amalgamation: The term “amalgamation” had been popularized by proslavery advocates seeking to frighten whites away from the abolitionist cause by the racist suggestion that the abolition of slavery would lead to prolific, lascivious interracial liaisons diluting whites’ inherent superiority. This, for all proslavery proponents, would be an infamous development, which also explains the chapter’s closing comment about Mag’s descent into “infamy”: Wilson intimates that Mag has interiorized these commonplace racist values of white society.
21 She had descended another step down the ladder of infamy: This gothic-toned passage, another outburst of negativity about Frado’s mother, might seem to indicate Our Nig is written by a white writer from the way it adopts the Christian eschatology employed both by white racists and white sensation literature, but any careful reading should easily gainsay this. See notes 18 and 19. See also note 13.
CHAPTER 2
22 Epigraph: This is taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Misery—A Fragment.” This can be found in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, edited by Mrs. Shelley, with a memoir (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1835), 399. Wilson’s quotation is not quite accurate. The quotation in the 1835 edition reads:
<
br /> Misery! we have known each other,
Like a sister and a brother
Living in the same lone home,
Many years—we must live some
Hours or ages yet to come.
The quotation consists of the poem’s third stanza. Stanza 4 commences, pertinently: “ ’Tis an evil lot, and yet / Let us make the best of it.” Shelley himself was an apposite poet to quote, as he famously championed liberty and attacked religious conservatism.
23 proud of his treasure: That Jim regards Mags as a commodity (a “treasure”) that can enhance his social standing can remind us that black males are negatively represented in this text, so anticipating many later depictions of them by black women writers. Our Nig here stands in sharp contrast to much early male black writing’s positive emphasis on male action, intended, at the time, to counter the frequent racist white depictions of black male passivity (if somewhat at the expense of granting female black agency its necessary recognition). See note 70 and introduction, this page.
24 consumption: Common term for tuberculosis.
25 when in the right position: This acute little satire on black posturing is part of the attack Wilson makes on black patriarchy. Note how Seth calculates the worth of Frado as if she were a commodity: “She’d be a prize somewhere.” See also note 23.
26 a beautiful mulatto: This is one of only two points in the book where Frado is described as beautiful, the other occurring on this page (though this page mentions “two pretty mulattos,” while on this page Seth describes Frado as “six years old, and pretty” and on this page she is again described as “pretty”). It is also one of only five places in the novel where her skin color is drawn to the reader’s attention. Described in passing as a mulatta on this page, we are also told on this page that she is “yeller” and on this page that she is “not very black.” More particularly, on this page, the text describes Mrs. B.’s determination to keep Frado in the sun to ensure her skin darkens, and so better distinguish her from her daughter Mary. This comparative reticence about Frado’s beauty and hue somewhat militates against viewing Our Nig as just another sentimental fiction focusing on a “tragic mulatta” falling prey to white male predation. Though the text plainly draws on this sub-genre’s gothic conventions, her story diverges from the characteristic pattern of these “tragic” (or, rather, pathetic) tales by departing from the customary focus upon white seduction and rape. Thus, though Jim’s lingering over “the pleasing contrast between her [Mag’s] fair face and his own dark skin” (this page) raises issues of gender, race, and sexuality, any such exploration remains secondary to Wilson’s more immediate concern to focus on the interactions of race, class, and sadism, as when Mrs. B. threatens to spoil Frado’s beauty (this page). The “dangerous passion” exciting Mrs. B. in chapter 8 (this page) hints at the way Our Nig’s focus on two white females’ mistreatment of a black female carries a quite untypical charge of perversity—namely female sadism—one far more complex to handle than the more conventional emphasis on rape, seduction, and miscegenation residing at the core of most other writing dealing with the theme of interracial violence upon the female mulatta taken from this period.
Our Nig Page 23