This birthplace and birth date, however, are problematic for several reasons. According to the 1860 Boston federal census, Mrs. Harriet E. Wilson was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808 (if the age of fifty-two recorded by the data collector was accurate). Again, as in the 1850 census, she is described as “Black.” We have found no other black women listed in either Hillsborough County, New Hampshire (where Milford is located), or in Boston, where the author of Our Nig registered her copyright on August 18, 1859.
A strong reason for pursuing the leads in the 1860 federal census is that the novel itself asserts that its author lived in Massachusetts at the time it was written, namely 1859, as internal evidence suggests. In the final chapter of Our Nig, where the narrator abandons the mask of storyteller, and, in her own voice, appeals to the reader for sympathy and support, the text reads as follows: “She passed into the various towns of the State she lived in, then into Massachusetts.”
If Harriet E. Adams Wilson’s place and date of birth remain shaky, we are on firmer ground in the decade between 1850 and 1860. Harriet Adams, in 1850, lived with a white family in Milford, New Hampshire, the family of Samuel Boyles. (Boyles, a white fifty-year-old carpenter—according to the 1850 census—is fifty-two in the 1860 census; similarly, his birthplace has shifted from “Vermont” in 1850, to “Massachusetts,” suggesting that discrepancies in census data were common even among stable and middle-class white Americans.) Since the Boyleses had four resident adult nonfamily members living with them, according to the 1860 census—three of whom are described as “Spinsters”—we can surmise that they rented rooms to boarders and possibly were remunerated by the county for sheltering the aged and disabled, probably on a regular basis.
One year later, in 1851, according to records at the Milford Town Clerk’s Office, Harriet Adams married Thomas Wilson. This information was “returned by the Rev. E. N. Hidden” in April 1852, along with information about a dozen or so other marriages. The Reverend Hidden, a thirty-eight-year-old white Congregational clergyman, according to the 1850 census, dated the marriage as October 6, 1851, at Milford, New Hampshire. Thomas Wilson’s “residence” is listed as “Virginia,” and Harriet Adams’s as “Milford.” Incidentally, the church’s marriage records, which could have provided more information, were destroyed by fire.
In late May, or early June 1852, George Mason Wilson was born, the first and apparently only child of Harriet E. Adams and Thomas Wilson. (Of Thomas Wilson, we know no vital statistics. A brief narrative of the escape of a ‘Tom Wilson’ from New Orleans to Liverpool was published in the Liverpool Inquirer on February 28, 1858. This narrative, however, does not overlap in any way with Our Nig or the three letters in its Appendix.) We know the child’s birth date, his race, and his parents’ identity from his 1860 death certificate. His birth date was approximately nine months after Thomas and Harriet married.
George Mason Wilson was born in Goffstown, New Hampshire, just a few miles from Milford, where his parents were married. In Goffstown was located the Hillsborough County Farm, which was established in 1849. One of the letters appended to Our Nig states that, abandoned by her husband, the author of Our Nig was forced—after “days passed; weeks passed”—to go to the “County House,” where she gave birth to a child.
The 1855 Boston City Directory listed a “Harriet Wilson, Widow,” at 7 Robinson Alley. Two “Harriet Wilsons” appeared in the Boston City Directory of 1856. One listing designates a “widow,” who lived at 4 Webster Avenue, the other a “dressmaker,” who lived or worked at 19 Joy Street. These “Harriet Wilsons” may, or may not, be the same person. In each successive Boston City Directory, an annual publication similar to contemporary telephone directories, only one Harriet Wilson appeared between 1857 and 1863: the widow who remained at Webster Avenue.
This widow, according to the 1860 Boston census, was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and is listed as “52” years of age. The census describes her as “Black,” and living in the home of Daniel and Susan Jacobs, ages thirty-eight and thirty-one, respectively. The census lists Mr. Jacobs’s profession as “mariner.”
Harriet E. Wilson registered the copyright of Our Nig at the District Clerk’s Office at Boston on August 18, 1859. Because New Hampshire had had its own District Clerk’s Office since 1789, and because the office in Boston served most, if not all, of Massachusetts, it is reasonable to assume that Harriet E. Wilson was a resident of Massachusetts by 1859, and was separated from her son, whom she had been forced to foster to another family because of her desperate financial condition. Since the novel was printed for the author, rather than “published” by a commercial house, and since other Massachusetts printers would have been capable of producing Our Nig, the fact that she selected the George C. Rand and Avery company of Boston reinforces speculation that by 1859 Mrs. Wilson lived in or near that city.
Many of these facts about H. E. Wilson’s life that have been drawn from public documents correspond dramatically to assertions about the life of the author of Our Nig that were made by three acquaintances who endorsed her novel, in the seven-page Appendix that follows Chapter XII. When brought together, these facts leave no doubt that the author of Our Nig, who signed her copyright as “Mrs. H. E. Wilson,” and Harriet E. Adams Wilson, are the same person. But another source of confirmation is the plot of Our Nig—described as autobiographical by her supporters—which parallels major events of Mrs. Wilson’s life that we have been able to verify.
Let us first analyze the statements found in the text’s Appendix.
Margaretta Thorn, whose letter is entitled “To the Friends of Our Dark-Complexioned Brethren and Sisters, This Note Is Intended,” is the source of the little that we know about the author’s childhood. She has “known the writer of this book for a number of years,” she testifies, and therefore is uniquely able to “add my testimony to the truth of her assertions.” Harriet Wilson, “the writer of this books,” she repeats as she concludes her first paragraph, “has seemed to be a child of misfortune.” Harriet’s childhood apparently was less than ideal: early on, she was “deprived of her parents, and all those endearing associations to which childhood clings.” She was hired out to a family “calling themselves Christians,” Margaretta Thorn continues, adding parenthetically that may “the good Lord deliver me from such.” This family put her to work “both in the house and in the field,” allegedly ruining her health by unduly difficult work. “She was indeed a slave, in every sense of the word,” she continues, “and a lonely one, too.”
Harriet’s health had been impaired since she was “eighteen,” Margaretta Thorn continues, and “a great deal of the time has been confined to her room and bed.” This protracted illness forced some authorities, she suggests, to take her child to “the county farm, because she could not pay his board every week.” Mrs. Wilson, however, was able to place her son in what we would call a foster home, where, Margaretta Thorn tells us, “he is contented and happy, and where he is considered as good as those he is with.” From Margaretta Thorn’s assertion that this unnamed foster family treated her son as their son and Harriet Wilson “as a daughter,” and refused to maintain friendships with neighbors who did not do so as well, we may safely conclude that the foster family was white. She then concludes her pious epistle, as do both Allida and C.D.S., with an exhortation that those who call themselves friends of the blacks should purchase the novel and thereby enable its author to become self-sustaining and to retrieve her child:
And now I would say, I hope those who call themselves friends of our dark-skinned brethren, will lend a helping hand, and assist our sister, not in giving, but in buying a book; the expense is trifling, and the reward of doing good is great.
The third appended letter, signed simply “C.D.S.,” is dated “Milford, July 20th, 1859,” two days short of one month before Mrs. Wilson registered her copyright at the District Court at Boston. The 1860 census for Milford, New Hampshire, listed two residents whose first names begin with “C
” and whose surnames end in “S,” but none is listed with “D” as a middle name or initial: Catherine Shannahan and Charles Shepard. But “C.D.S.” was also a legal abbreviation for “Colored Indentured Servant.” C.D.S.’s epistle is less informative than Margaretta Thorn’s or Allida’s, claiming only that he has “been acquainted with” the “writer of this book” for “several years” and knows her character to be “worthy the esteem of all friends of humanity; one whose soul is alive to the work to which she puts her hand.” Appealing to “the sympathy of all Christians, and those who have a spark of humanity in their breasts,” C.D.S. asks his readers to purchase the book, so “that its circulation will be extensive.” C.D.S., we can deduce, is either, like Margaretta Thorn, a white citizen—since he adds the customary confirmation that “Although her complexion is a little darker than my own, I esteem it a privilege to associate with her, and assist her whenever an opportunity presents itself”—or a mulatto indentured servant. Closing by “bidding her God speed,” the author signs “C.D.S.”
Allida’s long letter occupies most of the Appendix. It is an especially compelling document not only because of its length, but also because it contains scattered clues and suggestions about Our Nig’s author, as well as three subtexts, including an excerpted letter from Harriet to a “Mrs. Walker,” in whose household she lived in W——, Massachusetts, where she mastered the fine art of making straw hats; a poem written by Harriet; and a poem probably written by Allida.
Allida asserts that she has known “the author of this book” for “about eight years,” or roughly since 1851, so she is able to verify the “truth” of this strange fiction, which she will later label “an Autobiography.” The author was “brought to W——, Mass.” by “an itinerant colored lecturer,” she begins her testimony. This unnamed town, she continues, is “an ancient town,” in which “mothers and daughters” work “willingly with their hands” with “straw,” which Allida underscores as if to provide a clue to the town’s identity. Of the numerous “W——, Massachusetts” towns, three present themselves as likely candidates for Harriet’s temporary dwelling place. Walpole was “well-known” for its straw works between 1830 and 1842 or so; the “straw goods” industry began at Ware, Massachusetts, in 1832, and “straw sewing was done largely in the homes about town,” just as Allida informs us Harriet did in Mrs. Walker’s household. The History of Westborough, Massachusetts claims that the straw goods and millinery industries were “for a long time confined to this part of Massachusetts.” From these facts we can conclude that Harriet most probably lived in the section of Massachusetts that includes Ware and Walpole, as well as Worcester, which is approximately fifteen miles from Westborough.
In this town Harriet boarded with “the family of Mrs. Walker,” who “immediately succeeded in procuring work for her as a ‘straw sewer.’” An ideal pupil, Allida continues, Harriet learned quickly “the art of making straw hats,” yet was prevented by ill health (“on account of former hard treatment”) from continuous employment, a condition that forced Mrs. Walker to nurse her in “a room joining her own chamber.” Citing Harriet’s direct speech about her maternal feelings toward Mrs. Walker, Allida reveals that Harriet called her “Aunt J——,” confirming that the name “Allida” is a pseudonym. After a brief period of bliss, disaster strikes in the form of a black lover.
“One beautiful morning in the early spring of 1842” (surely a printer’s error for 1852, since we know the marriage was registered in the spring of 1852), Allida’s narrative proceeds, Harriet, out for a walk, met the “‘lecturer’” who had brought her to W——, Mass. He was accompanied by “a fugitive slave,” whom Allida characterizes as “Young, well-formed and very handsome,” a self-described “house-servant, which seemed to account,” she concludes, “in some measure for his gentlemanly manners and pleasing address.” This “entirely accidental” meeting, Allida laments, “was a sad occurrence for poor Alfrado,” the protagonist of Our Nig and the author herself: “Suffice it to say, an acquaintance and attachment was formed, which, in due time, resulted in marriage.”
It must have been love at first sight because “in a few days, the couple left W——, and all her home comforts, and took up her abode in New Hampshire.” After a blissful respite, Harriet’s husband “left his young and trusting wife, and embarked for sea.” Her husband failed to return, and Harriet’s “heart failed her.” Unable to sustain herself, with no friends other than “that class who are poor in the things of earth,” Harriet was forced to seek refuge in “the ‘County House;’ go she must.” We recall that the Hillsborough County House, in Goffstown, New Hampshire, was George Mason Wilson’s birthplace. Precisely at this point in her narrative Allida inserts a letter that Harriet purportedly wrote to “her mother Walker” about “her feelings on her way thither, and after her arrival,” which, Allida assures us, “can be given better in her own language” than reported indirectly.
Harriet’s letter serves as a confirmation of the fictional narrative’s style, subtly reinforcing Allida’s assertion of the veracity of the storyteller and her tale, as well as of her solitary authorship. Quite unlike the instance of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), whose prefatory authenticator, Lydia Maria Child, admits minimal “revision,” “condensation,” and “arrangement,” not one of the three letters appended to Our Nig ever questions that Harriet Wilson wrote all the words in the text in their exact order. Her accomplishment is all the more astonishing because Our Nig reads so much more fluidly and its plot seems so much less contrived than The Heroic Slave (1853), Clotel (1853), The Garies and Their Friends (1857), or Blake; or, The Huts of America (partially serialized in 1859, then probably serialized fully in 1861), the fictions published before Our Nig in the Afro-American tradition; particularly since the authors of two of those novels, William Wells Brown and Martin R. Delany, traveled widely, published extensively, lectured regularly, and educated themselves diligently. Delany even studied medicine at Harvard.
Nevertheless, the “autobiographical” consistencies between the fragments of Harriet Wilson’s life and the depiction of the calamities of Frado, the heroine of Our Nig, would suggest that Mrs. Wilson was able to gain control over her materials more readily than her fellow black novelists of that decade precisely by adhering closely to the painful details of suffering that were part of her experience. On “the portable inkstand, pens and paper” that Mrs. Walker and her friends at W— presented to Harriet as wedding or farewell presents, Harriet wrote an epistle of lament to Mrs. Walker, which Allida quotes at length, including a five-stanza poem. Harriet’s poetry is similar to the religious, sentimental stuff of the period; her letter, however, although suffused with melodrama, is characterized by the same attention to detail and event as is the text of Our Nig.
Her letter reads in part:
. . . just before nightfall, we halted at the institution, prepared for the homeless. With cold civility the matron received me, and bade one of the inmates shew me my room. She did so; and I followed up two flights of stairs. I crept as I was able; and when she said, ‘Go in there,’ I obeyed, asking for my trunk, which was soon placed by me. My room was furnished some like the ‘prophet’s chamber,’ except there was no ‘candlestick;’ so when I could creep down I begged for a light, and it was granted. Then I flung myself on the bed and cried, until I could cry no longer.
George Plummer Hadley, in his History of the Town of Goffstown, 1773–1920, states that the Hillsborough County Farm was purchased in 1849 to house “the county poor, which at that time numbered eighty-eight.” The “Farm” consisted of a large farm house, a barn, a “small dwelling-house near the oak tree,” and some smaller buildings. The “paupers,” as Hadley calls them, were “scattered through different buildings, which were heated by wood fires.” Conditions there apparently were horrid: in 1853, some of the inmates “were stricken with smallpox, and it was necessary to build a pest-house” for their proper isolation and care. As Hadley con
cludes, “What tales of sorrow could some of the unfortunates unfold.”
Allida proceeds to inform her readers that Harriet remained in this desolate institution “until after the birth of her babe,” until both were rescued by the return of “her faithless husband,” who “took her to some town in New Hampshire,” where, to his credit, he supported his family “decently well.” Then, he left again “as before—sudden and unexpectedly, and she saw him no more.” Only “for a time” could Mrs. Wilson support herself and her son, then “her struggles with poverty and sickness were severe.” Harriet and her infant escaped disaster only through the agency of “a kind gentleman and lady,” who “took her little boy into their own family,” providing for him well “without the hope of remuneration.”
And what of the child’s mother? Allida tells us: “As for the afflicted mother, she too has been remembered.” Incredibly, “a stranger,” one “moved by compassion,” “bestowed a recipe upon her for restoring gray hair to its former color.” The ingenious Harriet, who promptly “availed herself of this great help,” apparently proved to be “quite successful” at this unusual trade, until her health, once again, failed her. Confined to bed, “she has felt herself obliged to resort to another method of procuring her bread—that of writing an Autobiography.” Following a paragraph asking the reader to “purchase a volume,” Allida ends her narrative of Harriet Wilson’s life with an eight-stanza poem, “I will help thee, saith the Lord.”
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 7