Mrs. Wilson’s Preface to Our Nig, as unusual as it reads today, adds little to our reconstruction of the life of the author. Harriet Wilson’s Preface begins with the expected apologia for all deficiencies in her text. “In offering to the public the following pages, the writer confesses her inability,” Mrs. Wilson writes, “to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens. It is not for such,” she concludes with triumph and impressive control, “these crude narrations appear.” She has been “forced to some experiment,” she quickly adds, to maintain “myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life.” The “experiment,” of course, was the act of writing a fiction of her life. Here follows the attempt to anticipate the criticisms that such a book, published by a black one month before John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, might engender among those who had a vested interest in preserving the fiction that the stereotypic oppositions between North and South, freedom and slavery, black, as it were, and white allowed for no qualifications, no exceptions. For here, Harriet Wilson admits that her intention in writing this novel was to indict racism, whether it is found in the South or in the North.
I would not from these motives even palliate slavery at the South, by disclosures of its appurtenances North. My mistress was wholly imbued with southern principles. I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life, which the unprejudiced would declare unfavorable in comparison with treatment of legal bondmen; I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.
Concluding that her “humble position” and “frank confession of errors” might possibly “shield me from severe criticism,” Harriet Wilson then launches an appeal directly to “my colored brethren universally,” asking of them their “patronage, hoping they will not condemn this attempt of their sister to be erudite, but rally around me a faithful band of supporters and defenders.”
Although the direct appeal, for sympathy, patience, and financial support, was a standard feature of the apologia, not one other black author before Harriet Wilson felt compelled to anticipate the “severe” criticisms of even the Northern abolitionists. Mrs. Wilson, however, did, and wisely so. For Allida’s letter erroneously, but rather self-consciously, attempts to direct the reader’s attention away from the central subject of this novel, which is the brutality of a white woman racist who, against the wishes of all other members of her household—with the significant exception of the wicked mother’s equally wicked daughter—enslaves the protagonist, Frado, in a prolonged indenture as brutal as any depicted in the autobiographical slave narratives. Lest the point of the narrative be mistaken, Mrs. Wilson’s long subtitle of Our Nig confirms it:
SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE OF A FREE BLACK,
IN A TWO-STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH.
SHOWING THAT SLAVERY’S SHADOWS FALL EVEN THERE.
BY “OUR NIG.”
The boldness and cleverness in the ironic use of “Nig” as title and pseudonym is, to say the least, impressive, standing certainly as one of the black tradition’s earliest recorded usages. And if Allida’s letter suggests that “Alfrado’s tale” is that of love-betrayed, a glance at the text suggests the contrary. The subplot of love, marriage, childbirth, and betrayal only appears in the text’s final chapter, Chapter XII, “The Winding Up of the Matter,” which unfolds in scarcely five pages of a one-hundred-and-thirty-one-page novel. The chapter, headed by an epigraph from Solomon—“Nothing new under the sun”—recapitulates, almost as does a coda in a musical score, the themes of the text. It is this encounter with the racism of the white petite bourgeoisie of the North that Harriet Wilson squarely confronts. Frado’s deserting husband, Samuel, dies an anonymous death of yellow fever in New Orleans; Frado’s oppressor, Mrs. Bellmont, dies the slow, excruciatingly painful death that her sins, at least in the sentimental novel, have earned for her.
Perhaps another explanation for the obscurity of Our Nig was its unabashed representation of an interracial marriage, a liaison from which the novel’s protagonist was an offspring. That relationship, which other writers in the decade of the 1850s called “amalgamation,” had, it is true, been the subject of a few novels published before Our Nig; never, however, was miscegenation depicted with any degree of normality before Our Nig. The general attitude toward this controversial social matter was perhaps best articulated by Mrs. Mary Howard Schoolcraft in her novel, The Black Gauntlet (1860): “I believe a refined Anglo-Saxon lady would sooner be burned at the stake, than married to one of these black descendants of Ham.”
Novels such as The Ebony Idol (1860) or A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 19—(1835) made the subject an object of bitter, racist satire. Interracial marriage, it is fair to say, was not a popular subject for representation in either antislavery or proslavery novels. As the omniscient narrator of Our Nig editorializes about the marriage of Jim, a black man, to “lonely Mag Smith”:
He prevailed; they married. You can philosophize, gentle reader, upon the impropriety of such unions, and preach dozens of sermons on the evils of amalgamation. Want is a more powerful philosopher and preacher. Poor Mag. She has sundered another bond which held her to her fellows. She has descended another step down the ladder of infamy.
Even this representation, obviously, was not without its ironies, and even demeaning aspects; Jim’s proposal is not exactly rendered from a position of strength or from a sense of equality:
“Well, Mag,” said Jim, after a short pause, “you’s down low enough. I don’t see but I’ve got to take care of ye. ‘Sposin’ we marry!”
Mag raised her eyes, full of amazement, and uttered a sonorous “What?”
Jim felt abashed for a moment. He knew well what were her objections.
“You’s had trial of white folks, any how. They run off an left ye, and now none of ‘em come near ye to see if you’s dead or alive. I’s black outside, I know, but I’s got a white heart inside. Which you rather have, a black heart in a white skin, or a white heart in a black one?”
Despite this less than noble stance, however, Jim and his reluctant bride, Mag Smith, live peacefully, productively, and fairly happily for three years, until Jim dies. Surely this “unproblematical” relationship, at least in the stereotypical social sense of that term, did nothing to aid the book’s circulation in the North or the South.
We are free to speculate whether the oblivion into which Harriet Wilson disappeared for well over a century resulted from the boldness of her themes and from turning to that hated epithet, “nigger,” both for title and authorial, if pseudonymous, identity. We can, unfortunately, only risk the most tentative speculation. But we can say that a systematic search of all extant copies of black and reform newspapers and magazines in circulation contemporaneously with the publication of Our Nig yielded not one notice or review, nor did searches through the Boston, Massachusetts, dailies and the Amherst, New Hampshire, Farmer’s Cabinet.
How were other contemporary black novels reviewed? Clotel (1853), William Wells Brown’s first novel of four, was reviewed in 1853 in the London Eastern Star (reprinted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard December 31), and in the Hereford (England) Times on December 17 (reprinted in the Liberator on January 20, 1854). On February 3, 1854, the Liberator reviewed Clotel itself. The serialized publication of Martin R. Delany’s Blake was reviewed in the Liberator on April 15, 1859, as part of an advertisement. But neither Floyd J. Miller, in his edition of Blake (1970), nor Curtis W. Ellison and E. W. Metcalf, Jr., in their thorough reference guide, William Wells Brown and Martin R. Delany, could locate any other periodical reviews. Unlike the slave’s narratives, we can see, black fiction was not popularly reviewed, but it was reviewed on occasion.
That such a significant novel, the very first written by a black woman, would remain unnoticed in Boston in 1859, a veritable center of abolitionist reform and passion, and by a growing black press eager to celebrate all black achievement in the arts and sciences, remains one of the troubling enigmas o
f Afro-American literary history. Encountering Our Nig anew, I can only offer the thematic “explanations” rendered above, as difficult as even I find them to accept or believe. To suppress a text by ignoring it because it depicts a “successful” interracial marriage, or a black man pretending to be an “escaped slave,” only reinforces what the tradition must understand as the difficulty of reconstituting an act of language in its own milieu.
It is curious to trace the disappearance and reappearance of Harriet Wilson and her novel, Our Nig. It would be easier to imagine her presence in the tradition if we could identify some nineteenth-century reference to her, even an obscure reference, which then was overlooked or doubted; but we have found none. She does not even appear in Samuel May, Jr.’s 1863 Catalogue of Anti-Slavery Publications in America, 1750–1863, published just four years after Mrs. Wilson published Our Nig. Neither does she appear in the U.S. Bureau of Education Report of 1893–1894, which includes as its third section “Works by Negro Authors,” nor in Robert M. Adger’s Catalogue of Rare Books and Pamphlets . . . upon Subjects relating to the Past Condition of the Colored Race and the Slavery Agitation in this Country (1894) or his Catalogue of Rare Books on Slavery and Negro Authors on Science, History, Poetry, Religion, Biography, etc. (1904). Du Bois did not mention her in his three important bibliographies, published as part of his Atlanta University Studies, in 1900, 1905, and 1910. Daniel P. Murray, an Assistant Librarian at the Library of Congress, did not mention Mrs. Wilson or Our Nig in either his Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors, which he compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, or in the six-thousand-item bibliography that was to have been published as part of Murrays Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World. Nor was she unearthed in any of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century black biographical dictionaries, such as W.J. Simmons’s Men of Mark (1887) or J. L. Nichols and William H. Crogman’s Progress of a Race; or the Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro (1920).
If the historians, bibliophiles, and bibliographers overlooked Harriet Wilson, then the literary historians fared only a bit better. Benjamin Brawley, a diligent scholar and critic, does not mention text or author in The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918; 1930), Early Negro American Writers (1935), or in The Negro Genius (1937). Vernon Loggins, whose literary history remains the most complete to date, makes no mention of her in The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (1931). Neither does Sterling A. Brown refer to her in his critically sophisticated The Negro in American Fiction (1937). Harriet E. Wilson’s name is absent in Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (1980); in Arlene A. Elder’s The “Hindered Hand”: Cultural Implications of Early African-American Fiction (1978); in Addison Gayle, Jr.’s The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976); Richard Alan Yarborough’s “The Depiction of Blacks in the Early Afro-American Novel” (Ph.D. Dissertation, 1980); Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978); and Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin’s Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (1976). The most complete bibliography of the Afro-American novel, Afro-American Fiction, 1853–1916, edited by Edward Margolies and David Bakish, does not include Mrs. Wilson; nor do Theressa Gunnels Rush, Carol Fairbanks Myers, and Esther Spring Arata in their thorough Black American Writers, Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary (1975), or M. Thomas Inge, Maurice Duke, and Jackson R. Bryer in Black American Writers: Bibliographical Essays (1978). Roger Whitlow’s Black American Literature: A Critical History (1974) and Maxwell Whiteman’s A Century of Fiction by American Negroes, 1853–1952 (1955) are both silent about Mrs. Wilson’s existence. And so on.
I have, however, found five references to Our Nig. John Herbert Nelson mentions in passing only the title in his 1926 study, The Negro Character in American Literature. Herbert Ross Brown, in The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (1940), implies that H. E. Wilson is a white male, and says that this novel is unusual within its genre because “The author of Our Nig dared to treat with sympathetic understanding the marriage of Jim, a black, to a white woman who had been seduced and deserted,” an observation about one of the themes of Our Nig that simply did not occur to me on a first reading. Monroe N. Work, in his monumental compilation, A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America (1928), does indeed list both author and title, but under the category “Novels by White Authors Relating to the Negro.” James Joseph McKinney’s “The Theme of Miscegenation in the American Novel to World War I,” a 1972 Ph.D. dissertation, discusses the novel’s plot and suggests that the fiction is autobiographical. Both Mrs. Wilson and her novel are listed in Geraldine Matthews’s bibliography, Black Writers, 1773–1949 (1975), and in Carol Fairbanks and Eugene A. Engeldinger’s Black American Fiction: A Bibliography (1978), but with no information beyond that found in the second volume of Lyle Wright’s three-volume listing of American fiction (Wright II—2767). Curiously enough, the most complete entry for the title was made in a 1980 catalogue of the Howard S. Mott Company of Sheffield, Massachusetts, a company well-regarded among antiquarians. The listing, prepared by Daniel Mott, asserted that Mrs. H. E. Wilson’s novel was the first by an Afro-American woman. Mott says he decided that Wilson was black because of the evidence presented in the text’s appended letters. Perhaps it is appropriate that this second edition of Our Nig has been reprinted from Mott’s extraordinarily rare first edition.
Let us, at last, read closely Harriet Wilson’s novel. I propose, in the remainder of this essay, to describe the text’s own mode of presentation, to gloss its echoes, to establish its plot structure and compare this to those details that we have been able to glean of Mrs. Wilson’s biographical “facts,” then to compare these elements of the plot of Our Nig to a typology of “Woman’s Fiction” published in this country between 1820 and 1870, which Nina Baym has so carefully devised.
Harriet E. Wilson’s Preface to Our Nig, as I have suggested, is an extraordinary document in the Afro-American literary tradition; it is, if not unique, certainly one of the rare instances in which a black author has openly anticipated a hostile reaction to her text from “our good anti-slavery friends at home.” The author, moreover, confirms here both that her fiction is autobiographical, and that it has been crafted to minimize the potentially deleterious effects such a searing indictment of slavery’s “appurtenances north” might well have upon the antislavery cause.
I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life, which the unprejudiced would declare unfavorable in comparison with treatment of legal bondmen; I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home.
There are darker horrors to my tale than even these I set forward here, Mrs. Wilson claims; these she has decided against drawing upon in her fiction for fear of wounding the fight against slavery, since these would be seen to be “unfavorable” even when compared to the treatment of the slave. Hers is not meant to be an attack on Northern whites at all; rather, “My mistress was imbued with southern principles.”
Let us consider further this matter of the text’s silences and lacunae. We may consider Mrs. Wilson’s Preface and the three appended letters to comprise the documentary-biographical subsection of the text, while the novel itself comprises the text’s fictional representation of Mrs. Wilson’s experiences as an indentured servant in a Northern white household before 1850. What is curious about the relationship between these nonfictional and the fictional discourses, which together form the text of Our Nig, is this: the “closer” that the novel approaches the appended biographies, the less distance there is between “fact” and romance, between (auto)biography and fiction. This is one of the more curious aspects of this curious text: the fiction, or the guise of her fictional account of her life, tends to fall away the nearer her novel approaches its own ending, and the ending of
her text, the composite biography written by Mrs. Wilson’s friends. It is of considerable interest to outline the manner in which one discursive field “collapses,” as it were, into quite another, of a different status than the other.
To be sure, there are tensions between autobiography and fiction early in the novel. This tension is evident in chapter titles. Chapter I, for example, Mrs. Wilson calls “Mag Smith, My Mother.” The first-person pronoun would lead the reader to assume that the novel is narrated in the first person; it is not. Rather, a third-person narrator observes and interprets the thoughts and actions of all concerned. Clearly, however, the narrator is telling Frado’s tale, a tale of abuse, neglect, betrayal, suffering consciousness, and certain death from that inevitable visitor of the sentimental novel, the dreaded “fever.” These stock devices, employed with melodrama, direct appeal to the reader, and a certain florid, stilted diction in speech and thought, nevertheless function to reveal Frado’s saga. But Frado’s story, as these lapses into the first person would suggest, is Harriet E. Adams Wilson’s tale as well. Chapter II, “My Father’s Death,” and Chapter III, “A New Home For Me,” include other instances of the first-person shift. With Chapter IV and after, however, the chapter titles employ the third person, but are more often abstractions. These titles, in order, follow: “A Friend For Nig,” “Departures,” “Varieties,” “Spiritual Condition of Nig,” “Visitor and Departure,” “Death,” “Perplexities—Another Death,” “Marriage Again,” and “The Winding Up of the Matter.”
What are we to make of the first-person lapses in the chapter titles? We can conclude, with Allida, that the novel is indeed “an Autobiography,” of sorts, an autobiographical novel. Whether the lapses are the sign of an in-experienced author struggling with or against the received conventions of her form, or the result of the imposition of a life on the desires of a text to achieve the status of fiction, these first-person traces point to the complexities and tensions of basing fictional events upon the lived experiences of an author. The latter chapters of Our Nig contain events that parallel remarkably closely those experiences of Harriet Wilson’s that we are able to document. Curiously enough, the first-person proprietary consciousness evinced in the titles of the early chapters does not parallel events that we have been able to document and that we probably shall not be able to document. Since these early chapters describe events far removed from the author’s experiences closest in time to the period of writing, the first-person presences perhaps reveal the author’s anxiety about identifying with events in the text that she cannot claim to recollect clearly, and some of which she cannot recollect at all, such as the courtship and marriage of her mother, and the protagonist’s ultimate abandonment by her widowed parent. In later chapters Mrs. Wilson had no need to demonstrate or claim the direct relation between author and protagonist, since, as our research reveals, these two sets of events, the fictional and the biographical, overlap nicely. In Chapter XII, however, the narrator slips into the first person, in her first sentence, as if to reinforce the connection between narrator and protagonist.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 8