Similarly, the heroine’s encounters with men depart significantly from her sister heroine’s encounters in other novels written by women. Frado’s relations with (white) men are remarkably free of economic considerations. Rather, the men of the Bellmont household, all of whom ultimately die or move away, are sympathetic to Frado’s sufferings and even conspire at times to help her to fight against Mrs. Bellmont’s tyrannies. Frado’s complex relationship to James, which intensifies as he lies slowly dying, is a curious blend of religion and displaced sexual desire. His economic status, however, does not come to bear directly upon his relations with Frado; however, Frado’s dormant passion for religion initially awakes only insofar as she is able to associate being near to God with remaining near to James. While Aunt Abby and the local pastor seek to encourage her religious development, Frado’s road to heaven is paved by her toils for James. Indeed, Frado never truly undergoes a religious transformation, merely the appearance of one; as the text emphasizes, “a devout and Christian exterior invited confidence from the villagers.” Frado’s innate innocence, outside of the respectability of the church, is one of the most subtle contrasts and social critiques of Our Nig. When the evil daughter, Mary, dies, well after Frado has “resolved to give over all thought of the future world” because “she did not wish to go” to a heaven that would allow Mrs. Bellmont entrance, Frado’s innocent joy signifies her ironic rejection of Christian religion. Later, the narrator tells us that “It seemed a thanksgiving to Frado.” As Frado tells Aunt Abby:
“She got into the river again, Aunt Abby, did n’t she; the Jordan is a big one to tumble into, any how. S’posen she goes to hell, she’ll be as black as I am. Would n’t mistress be mad to see her a nigger!” and others of a similar stamp, not at all acceptable to the pious, sympathetic dame; but she could not evade them.
This inversion of blackness and evil and good and whiteness is only one example of three, including Frado’s lover, Samuel, and Our Nig’s title.
Frado, unlike most of her sister characters in other novels, succumbs to her attraction to a dissolute lover, a union that destroys her only period of independence and happiness. As the narrator relates, “There was a silent sympathy which Frado felt attracted her, and she opened her heart to the presence of love—that arbitrary and inexorable tyrant.” Then, one paragraph later, “Here were Frado’s first feelings of trust and repose on human arm. She realized, for the first time, the relief of looking to another for comfortable support. Occasionally,” the narrator concludes anxiously, “he would leave her to ‘lecture.’” Accordingly, husband Samuel
left her to her fate—embarked at sea, with the disclosure that he had never seen the South, and that his illiterate harangues were humbugs for hungry abolitionists. Once more alone! Yet not alone.
Not alone, because husband Samuel leaves Frado in the early phase of a troubled pregnancy. The birth of the son, we know, motivates the author’s creation of a text to contain her story and to provide sustenance for mother and child. This “professed fugitive from slavery,” one of four black male characters in Our Nig, is the evil negation of Frado’s father, Jim, “a kind-hearted African,” a man she barely knew, since he died within “a few years” of marriage to “his treasure,—a white wife.” He is also the negation of the long-suffering James. If Our Nig was a simple tale, or if it just conformed to the generic expectations of the sentimental, then black husband Samuel’s portrayal would not have been so unremittingly negative, even if it had remained so brief.
Our Nig makes an even more important statement about the symbolic connotations of blackness in mid-nineteenth century America, and more especially of the epithet, “nigger.” The book’s title derives from the term of abuse that the heroine’s antagonists ‘rename her,’ calling her “Our Nig,” or simply “Nig.” Harriet E. Wilson allows these racist characters to name her heroine, only to invert such racism by employing the name, in inverted commas, as her pseudonym of authorship. “By ‘Our Nig’” forms in its entirety the last line of the book’s title; its inverted commas underscore the use as an ironic one, one intended to reverse the power relation implicit in renaming-rituals which are primarily extensions of material relations. Transformed into an object of abuse and scorn by her enemies, the “object,” the heroine of Our Nig, reverses this relationship by renaming herself not Our Nig but ‘Our Nig,’ thereby transforming herself into a subject.
She is now a subject who writes her own thinly veiled fictional account of her life in which she transforms her tormentors into objects, the stock, stereotypical objects of the sentimental novel. This, surely, is the most brilliant rhetorical strategy in black fiction before Charles Chesnutt’s considerable talent manifests itself at the turn of the century. We may think of Mrs. Wilson’s rhetorical strategy as a clever and subtle use of the trope of chiasmus, the trope which also is at the center of Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical strategy in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1845). Though related to Douglass’s purposes, however, Harriet Wilson’s employment of this device is unparalleled in representations of self-development in Afro-American fiction.
Wilson’s achievement is that she combines the received conventions of the sentimental novel with certain key conventions of the slave narratives, then combines the two into one new form, of which Our Nig is the unique example. Had subsequent black authors had this text to draw upon, perhaps the black literary tradition would have developed more quickly and more resolutely than it did. For the subtleties of presentation of character are often lost in the fictions of Wilson’s contemporaries, such as Frances E. W. Harper, whose short story “The Two Offers” was also published in September 1859, and in the works of her literary “heirs.”
Our Nig stands as a “missing link,” as it were, between the sustained and well-developed tradition of black autobiography and the slow emergence of a distinctive black voice in fiction. That two black women published in the same month the first novel and short story in the black woman’s literary tradition attests to larger shared cultural presuppositions at work within the black community than scholars have admitted before. The speaking black subject emerged on the printed page to declare himself or herself to be a human being of capacities equal to the whites. Writing, for black authors, was a mode of being, of self-creation with words. Harriet E. Wilson depicts this scene of instruction, central to the slave narratives, as the moment that Frado defies Mrs. Bellmont to hit her. The text reads:
‘Stop!’ shouted Frado, ‘strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you;’ and throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and independent thoughts.
As had Frederick Douglass in his major battle with overseer Covey, Frado at last finds a voice with which to define her space. A physical space of one’s own signifies the presence of a more subtle, if equally real, “metaphysical” space, within which one’s thoughts are one’s own. This space Frado finds by speaking, just as surely as Frances E. W. Harper’s character, Chloe, finds hers while “Learning to Read”:
So I got a pair of glasses,
And straight to work I went,
And never stopped till I could read
The hymns and Testament.
Then I got a little cabin,
A place to call my own—
And I felt as independent
As the queen upon her throne.
Reading, too, proved to be a major event in Frado’s life. Shortly after finding her voice, Frado decided to recommence her early encounter with books, turning frequently, the text tells us, “from toil to soul refreshment”:
Frado had merged into womanhood, and, retaining what she had learned, in spite of the few privileges enjoyed formerly, was striving to enrich her mind. Her school-books were her constant companions, and every leisure moment was applied to them. Susan was delighted to witness her progress, and some little book from her was a reward sufficient for any task imposed, however difficult. She had her book alway
s fastened open near her, where she could glance from toil to soul refreshment.
In the penultimate chapter of Our Nig, the narrator tells us that along with mastering the needle, Frado learns to master the word:
Expert with the needle, Frado soon equalled her instructress; and she sought to teach her the value of useful books; and while one read aloud to the other of deeds historic and names renowned, Frado experienced a new impulse. She felt herself capable of elevation; she felt that this book information supplied an undefined dissatisfaction she had long felt, but could not express. Every leisure moment was carefully applied to self-improvement,. . . [emphasis added]
In these final scenes of instruction, Harriet Wilson’s text reflects upon its own creation, just as surely as Frado’s awakened speaking voice signifies her consciousness of herself as a subject. With the act of speaking alone, Frado assumes a large measure of control over the choices she can possibly make each day. The “free and independent thoughts” she first feels upon speaking are repeated with variation in phrases such as “a new impulse,” and “an undefined dissatisfaction,” emotions she experiences while learning to read. “This book information,” as the narrator tells us, enables Frado to name things by reading books. That such an apparently avid reader transformed the salient and tragic details of her life into the stuff of the novel—and was so daring in rendering the structures of fiction—is only one of the wonders of Our Nig.
What, finally, is the import of Our Nig? Its presence attests to a direct relation between the will and being of a sort rarely so explicit. Harriet E. Wilson’s project, as bold and as unsure as it promised to be, failed to allow her to regain possession of her son. In this sense, Mrs. Wilson’s project was a failure. Nevertheless, her legacy is an attestation of the will to power as the will to write. The transformation of the black-as-object into the black-as-subject: this is what Mrs. Harriet E. Wilson manifests for the first time in the writings of Afro-American women.
SOURCES: Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Preface, introduction and notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Orig. pub. Boston: G. C. Rand & Avery, 1859; New York: Vintage Books, 2002).
INTRODUCTION, THE BONDWOMAN’S NARRATIVE: A NOVEL BY HANNAH CRAFTS
THE SEARCH FOR FEMALE FUGITIVE SLAVE
EACH YEAR, SWANN Galleries conducts an auction of “Printed & Manuscript African-Americana” at its offices at 104 East Twenty-fifth Street in New York City. I have the pleasure of receiving Swann’s annual mailing of the catalogue that it prepares for the auction. The catalogue consists of descriptions of starkly prosaic archival documents and artifacts that have managed, somehow, to surface from the depths of the black past. To many people, the idea of paging through such listings might seem as dry as dust. But to me, there is a certain poignancy to the fact that these artifacts, created by the disenfranchised, have managed to survive at all and have found their way, a century or two later, to a place where they can be preserved and made available to scholars, students, researchers and passionate readers.
The auction is held, appropriately enough, in February, the month chosen in 1926 by the renowned historian Carter G. Woodson to commemorate and encourage the preservation of African American history. (Woodson selected February for what was initially Negro History Week, because that month contained the birth dates of two presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as that of Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, author, and orator.)
For our generation of scholars of African American Studies, African American History Month is an intense period of annual conferences and commemorations, endowed lecture series and pageants, solemn candlelight remembrances of our ancestors’ sacrifices for the freedom we now enjoy—especially the sacrifices of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—and dinners, concerts, and performances celebrating our people’s triumphs over slavery and de jure and de facto segregation. We have survived, we have endured, indeed, we have thrived, Black History Month proclaims, and our job as Carter Woodson’s legatees is, in part, to remind the country that “the struggle continues” despite how very far we, the descendants of African slaves, have come.
Because of time constraints, I usually participate in the auction by telephone, if at all, despite the fact that I devour the Swann catalogue, marking each item among its nearly four hundred lots that I would like to acquire for my collection of Afro-Americana (first editions, manuscripts, documents, posters, photographs, memorabilia) or for the library at my university.
This year’s catalogue was no less full than last year’s, reflecting a growing interest in seeking out this kind of material from dusty repositories in crowded attics, basements, and closets. I made my way through it leisurely, keeping my precious copy on the reading stand next to my bed, turning to it each night to fall asleep in wonder at the astonishing myriad array of artifacts that surface, so very mysteriously, from the discarded depths of the black past. Item number 20, for example, in this year’s catalogue is a partially printed document “ordering several men to surrender a male slave to the sheriff against an unpaid debt.” The slave’s name was Aron, he was twenty-eight years of age, and this horrendous event occurred in Lawrence County, Alabama, on October 30, 1833. Lot 24 is a manuscript document that affirms the freed status of Elias Harding, “the son of Deborah, a ‘coloured’ woman manumitted by Richard Brook . . . [attesting] that he is free to the best of [the author’s] knowledge and belief.” Two female slaves, Rachel and Jane, mother and daughter, were sold for $500 in Amherst County, Virginia, on the thirteenth of October in 1812 (lot 13). The last will and testament (dated May 9, 1825) of one Daniel Juzan from Mobile, Alabama, leaves “a legacy for five children he fathered by ‘Justine a free woman of color who, now, lives with me’” (lot 17). These documents are history-in-waiting, history in suspended animation; a deeply rich and various level of historical detail lies buried in the pages of catalogues such as this, listing the most obscure documents that some historian will one day, ideally, breathe awake into a lively, vivid prose narrative. Dozens of potential Ph.D. theses in African American history are buried in this catalogue.
Among this year’s bounty of shards and fragments of the black past, one item struck me as especially interesting. It was lot 30 and its catalogue description reads as follows:
Unpublished Original Manuscript. Offered by Emily Driscoll in her 1948 catalogue, with her description reading in part, “a fictionalized biography, written in an effusive style, purporting to be the story, of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts, a mulatto, born in Virginia.” The manuscript consists of 21 chapters, each headed by an epigraph. The narrative is not only that of the mulatto Hannah, but also of her mistress who turns out to be a light-skinned woman passing for white. It is uncertain that this work is written by a “negro.” The work is written by someone intimately familiar with the areas in the South where the narrative takes place. Her escape route is one sometimes used by run-aways.
The author is listed as Hannah Crafts, and the title of the manuscript as “The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a Fugitive Slave, Recently Escaped from North Carolina.” The manuscript consists of 301 pages bound in cloth. Its provenance was thought to be New Jersey, “circa 1850s.” Most intriguing of all, the manuscript was being sold from “the library of historian/bibliographer Dorothy Porter Wesley.”
Three things struck me immediately when I read the catalogue description of lot 30. The first was that this manuscript had emerged from the monumental private collection of Dorothy Porter Wesley (1905–95), the highly respected librarian and historian at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. Porter Wesley was one of the most famous black librarians and bibliophiles of the twentieth century, second only, perhaps, to Arthur Schomburg, whose collection constituted the basis of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, which is now aptly named after him. Among her numerous honors was an honorary doctorate degree from Radcliffe; Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute for Afro-American Research annually offers a postdoctoral fellowship endowed in Porter Wesley’s name. Her notes about the manuscript, if she had left any, would be crucial in establishing the racial identity of the author of this text.
The second fact that struck me was far more subtle: the statement that “it is uncertain that this work is written by a ‘negro’” suggests that someone—either the authenticator for the Swann Galleries, who turns out to have been Wyatt Houston Day, a distinguished dealer in Afro-Americana, or Dorothy Porter Wesley herself—believed Hannah Crafts to have been black. Moreover, the catalogue reports that “the work is written by someone intimately familiar with the areas in the South where the narrative takes place.” So familiar was she, in fact, with the geography of the region that, the description continues, “her escape route is one sometimes used by run-aways.” This was the third and most telling fact, suggesting that the author had used this route herself. If the author was black, then this “fictionalized slave narrative”—an autobiographical novel apparently based upon a female fugitive slave’s life in bondage in North Carolina and her escape to freedom in the North—would be a major discovery, possibly the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave. (Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, published in 1859, ignored for a century and a quarter, then rediscovered and authenticated in 1982, is the first novel published by a black woman. Unlike Hannah Crafts, however, Wilson had been born free in the North.)
Just as exciting was the fact that this three-hundred-page holograph manuscript was unpublished. Holograph, or handwritten, manuscripts by blacks in the nineteenth century are exceedingly rare, an especially surprising fact given that hundreds of African Americans published books—slave narratives, autobiographies, religious tracts, novels, books of poems, anti-slavery political tracts, scientific works, etc.—throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the survival of this large body of writing, to my knowledge no holograph manuscripts survive for belletristic works, such as novels, or for the slave narratives, even by such bestselling authors as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, or William Wells Brown. And because most of the slave narratives and works of fiction published before the end of the Civil War were edited, published, and distributed by members of the abolitionist movement, scholars have long debated the extent of authorship and degree of originality of many of these works. To find an unedited manuscript, written in an ex-slave’s own hand, would give scholars an unprecedented opportunity to analyze the degree of literacy that at least one slave possessed before the sophisticated editorial hand of a printer or an abolitionist amanuensis performed the midwifery of copyediting. No, here we could encounter the unadulterated “voice” of the fugitive slave herself, exactly as she wrote and edited it.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 10