1 Sketches from the Life of a Free Black: Our Nig’s subtitle recalls narratives such as
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and anticipates Harriet Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). On its cover page, however, “our nig” remains both nameless and genderless, a mere possession. By announcing that the narrative is written “by ‘our Nig,’ ” Wilson both underscores her dispossession while she also challenges it. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted, through the title, Wilson offers ironic commentary on black authorship and ownership. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. introduction to
Our Nig (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), li.
2 Two-Story White House, North: In addition to the obvious reference to the national implications of Wilson’s story conveyed in the reference to the White House, this phrase cues the reader to be attentive to the multiple stories told in
Our Nig, the fact that the text itself tells at least two stories.
3 “giving assault to all—Holland”: Josiah Gilbert Holland, “Bittersweet: A Poem,” in
Bittersweet, 5th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1959), 35-36. There are minor differences between Wilson’s epigraphs and the actual sources. Wilson repeatedly slightly misquotes or changes punctuation in epigraphs, suggesting that she may be quoting them from memory. (From note compiled by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and R. J. Ellis as found in
Our Nig, 3rd ed. [New York: Vintage Books, 2002]. Notes on all epigraphs come from this source, unless otherwise noted.)
4 Geo. C. Rand & Avery: The two principals in this Boston publishing company were George C. Rand, who was a personal friend of and worked closely with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and Abraham Avery, his brother-in-law. Suggestively, Geo C. Rand & Avery also published Spiritualist titles; and it is likely that Wilson was beginning to connect with the Spiritualist community at the time she published
Our Nig. Eric Gardner found that William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. possessed a copy of
Our Nig at his death and notes that the connection between Rand and Garrison, Sr. may explain this. Garrison, along with many other prominent abolitionists and women’s rights activists, also had strong links with Spiritualists. See Florence Osgood Rand,
A Genealogy of the Rand Family in the United States (New York: Republic Press, 1898); R. J. Ellis,
Harriet Wilson’s “Our Nig” (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2003), 27; Eric Gardner, “ ‘This Attempt of Their Sister’: Harriet Wilson’s
Our Nig from Printer to Reader,”
New England Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1993): 226-46; Ann Braude,
Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 73.
5 maintaining myself and child: Antebellum women writers, black and nonblack, often felt the need to justify their step into public arenas. Economic hardship and the necessary support of their families were seen as acceptable reasons to do so, while self-expression or the desire to impact public opinion were seen as decidedly unfeminine and unacceptable. Many women writers took on pen names or used their initials to shield themselves from the gendered implications and informal restrictions on their public interventions. Sarah L. Forten (Ada), Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), the biographer “Frank” (Frances) Rollin, and Mrs. A. E. Johnson are among the nineteenth-century black women writers whose authorial practices reflect this dynamic.
6 anti-slavery friends at home: “Anti-slavery friends” is a common term, seen in newspapers, letters, and addresses within the abolitionist movement. Wilson’s ironic usage displays her familiarity with such rhetoric. Milford, her “at home,” was associated with some of the strongest abolitionist activities in New Hampshire; the story she tells, as well as what she “omits,” would, she asserts, provoke shame for its residents, many of whom considered themselves to be true friends of freedom.
7 confession of errors: Wilson modifies the standard “apologia” that is so often a part of novelistic and narrative prefaces regardless of the author’s educational background or racial or gender identity.
8 appeal to my colored brethren: While no reviews or extant editions signal that
Our Nig was embraced by Wilson’s colored brethren, by the late 1850s black patronage for literary pursuits was certainly in place. Nearly two-thirds of black adults in northern cities were at least functionally literate. There were several well-established literary societies in nearby Boston; and though their runs often spanned only several years, a full generation of black newspapers had been launched by this time. Wilson had reason, too, for her specific request for brotherly generosity. While male literary societies supported organizations developed by their sisters, they had also roundly castigated the speaker and essayist Maria Stewart, who broke gendered boundaries by becoming the first American woman to address “promiscuous” audiences and address political themes. By 1833, the outspoken Stewart had been run out of Boston, eventually settling in New York City. See Marilyn Richardson,
Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Elizabeth McHenry,
Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 68-78; James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton,
In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 206-7.
1 Mag Smith, My Mother: This is one of the several first-person references in a text otherwise narrated in the third person and raises the question of whether or not this is a direct autobiographical statement. There is little definitive information about the historical “Mag Smith.” Until now, only Harriet’s use of the surname “Adams” had given researchers a clue to her mother’s married or maiden name. We now know that Wilson’s mother’s first name was Margaret, which was often at that time shortened to “Mag.” And it is also clear that if her parents were married, as outlined in
Our Nig, then Wilson’s maiden name was Green, not Adams. Indeed, her 1870 second marriage records list Wilson’s parents as Joshua and Margaret Green; her death certificate lists her father’s name, again Joshua Green, but leaves blank “maiden name and birthplace of mother.” Suggestively, a March 27, 1830, issue of
Farmer’s Cabinet—the paper that covered the area in which Wilson grew up—reports this death:
Margaret Ann Smith, black, late of Portsmouth N.H., about 27 years, was found dead in the room of a black man with whom she lived in Southack [sic] Street, Boston, last week. The verdict of the Coroner’s jury was that she came to her death from habitual intoxication. It appears that she and the man had quarreled, both being intoxicated, and he had beaten her severely, but that the immediate cause of her death was drinking half a pint of raw rum.—The Patriot.
See introduction for more information.
2 “Oh, Grief beyond all other griefs . . .”: “Lalla Rookh,” in
The Poetical Words of Thomas Moore, Collected by Himself (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1858), 257. Slightly modified from the original verse.
3 and left her to her fate: In the condensed opening paragraphs of
Our Nig, Wilson self-consciously manipulates the tropes of the story of the “fallen woman,” the subject of early British and American bestsellers that were still immensely popular during her time. In such stories a teenage girl is often pursued and charmed by a man who is her social and economic superior. In Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela (1740), the servant heroine resists such advances and is rewarded by becoming the bride of “Mr. B.,” her employer. In Susannah Rowson’s
Charlotte Temple (1791), the heroine believes her seducer’s promises, succumbs, and gives away her “precious” jewel, her virginity, only to be abandoned. These novels went through multiple editions and translations. Black women writers like Wilson and Jacobs incorporate these themes.
4 Jim: In pertinent legal documents (Wilson’s 1870 marriage certificate and her death certificate), her father’s name is listed as Joshua Green. As a “hooper of barrels,” Green would have worked either for or with Timothy Blanchard, the head of one of the two households headed by African Americans in Milford. Wilson perhaps borrowed this fictional name from Peter Greene (c. 1750-c. 1836)—possibly her grandfather—who was a blacksmith, farm laborer, and former slave who served in a New York regiment during the Revolutionary War and subsequently settled in Colrain, Massachusetts; he married twice and had several children, including sons Peter Green, Jr. (1787-1865), and James “Jim” Greene (1807-71). Of course,
Our Nig suggests that “Jim,” or Joshua Green, died before 1830. Misspellings of names like Hayward and Green abounded in the nineteenth century; the same families regularly show up in records with modified surnames. See “Pension Application of Peter Green,” National Archives.
5 the Reeds: Near neighbors of the “Bellmonts,” “the Reeds” could represent the families of Calvin Dascomb, Sr., John Blanchard, or Benjamin Hutchinson, a distant relative of Mrs. Hayward, or “Mrs. Belmont.”
6 Mrs. Bellmont: Rebecca S. (Hutchinson) Hayward (1780-1850).
7 Peter Greene: Timothy Blanchard (1791-1839), a mulatto farmer who owned a cooperage or barrel-making establishment, was born in Wilton, New Hampshire, one of twelve children of George Blanchard (c. 1740-1823), a freed slave and Revolutionary War veteran from Methuen, Massachusetts, who was a noted veterinarian. The family moved to Milford after 1800 and Timothy married Dorcas Hood, a white woman, on August 26, 1820; they would have six sons and two daughters (William Pitt Colburn, “Register,” in George Allen Ramsdell,
The History of Milford, New Hampshire, with Family Registers (Concord, N.H.: Rumford Press, 1901), 485.
8 Singleton: The village of Milford, New Hampshire.
9 “I’s black outside, I know, but I’s got a white heart inside”: Jim refers to race-based prejudice and to his internal goodness, based on commonplace theological beliefs in God’s power to wash away the sins of true Christians and make them clean or “white.” “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” Isa. 1:18.
10 the evils of amalgamation: As the Civil War approached, those who supported the overthrow of slavery and the full enfranchisement of blacks were labeled “amalgamationists” by their political foes. In the early republic, however, whites and blacks of the laboring classes often chose each other as romantic and legal partners. Maryland and Virginia were the first to ratify legal disincentives to interracial couples and to stipulate that the children of enslaved women would occupy the same social standing as their mothers. The interracial children of white women and the white women who chose to partner with black men faced harsh consequences. By 1725-26, Pennsylvania prohibited all interracial unions and remanded any children born to these unions to servitude for thirty-one years. Joel Williamson notes that between 1705 and 1725, all of the colonies from “New Hampshire to South Carolina were coming to legal conclusions not unlike those of Virginia.” See Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 8-11; Lorenzo J. Greene,
The Negro in Colonial New England, 2nd ed. (New York: Antheneum, 1968). See also Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
1 My Father’s Death: Another example of first-person usage in a text otherwise told in the third person.
2 “Misery! we have known each other . . .”: Percy Shelley, “Misery—a Fragment,” in
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edited by Mrs. Shelley. With a Memoir, vol. 2 (New York: Little, Brown, 1835), 399. The epigraph again differs slightly from the original.
3 victim of consumption: Consumption was the common name for tuberculosis, a highly contagious lung infection that “consumed” its victims as they wasted away. Consumption was perhaps the most popular literary cause of death for women and children in European and American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic fiction, reflecting the high rates of death for historical victims of the disease.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s Little Eva is consumption’s most famous literary victim.
4 the manifestation of Christian patience: In Christianity, one way in which believers demonstrate their faith is through patience. For example, Rom. 5:2-4 reads: “By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.”
5 Seth Shipley: Not yet identified.
6 the Bellmonts: Nehemiah Hayward, Sr. (1738-1825), and his wife, Mary Stickney Hayward (1735-1823), both originally from Rowley, Massachusetts, but more recently from Maugerville, New Brunswick, Canada, landed in the “Duxbury Mile Slip,” later Milford, in 1786, with their three surviving children, including Nehemiah, Jr., or “Mr. Bellmont.” Hayward, Sr. purchased land, put up a large house, and established a farm. See Matthew A. Stickney,
The Stickney Family: A Genealogical Memoir (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute Press, 1869), 451.
7 John, the son: Nehemiah Hayward, Jr. (1778-1849), was a well-to-do farmer of Milford, New Hampshire. Interestingly, the name “John Bellmont” closely resembles the name of Sojourner Truth’s last owner, John Dumont of Ulster County, New York. This near homonymic link to the master of the most famous former slave woman of the North may be meant to underscore that, despite his seeming benevolence, Mr. Bellmont is complicit in Frado’s involuntary servitude.
8 A maiden sister shared with him: The figure of the “maiden” or spinster “aunt” is a standard trope in nineteenth-century women’s fiction. The historical Sally Hayward Blanchard, Aunt Abby in
Our Nig, had been married. When her husband died, she returned to her family. Upon the death of her father in 1825, Sally purchased 59 acres of the family homestead (“an undivided half” of the original property of 118 acres) at “public auction” for seven hundred dollars, thus gaining “the right of occupying one undivided half of all buildings except the barn.” Jacob Flynn, administrator of the estate of Nehemiah Hayward, Sr., deceased, to Sally Hayward, Hillsborough County Deed Book 145:493, dated November 10, 1825, recorded November 15, 1825. Her brother had purchased the other 59 acres form his parents some years before. Nehemiah Hayward and Mary his wife to Nehemiah Hayward Jr., Hillsborough County Deed Book 49:47, recorded January 4,1800.
1 A New Home for Me: Each of the first three chapter titles feature first-person usage, while the novel is told in the third person.
2 “Oh! did we but know of the shadows so nigh . . .”: Eliza Cook, “The Future,” in
The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook (New York: Scribner, Welford, 1870), 187, fourth and fifth stanzas. Wilson’s use differs slightly from the published lines.
3 Mr. B.: Nehemiah Hayward, Jr., or “Mr. Bellmont.” The antagonist in the runaway English bestseller
Pamela (1740) is also named Mr. B. He is the “master” of the eponymous young servant he attempts to forcibly seduce.
Pamela, unlike
Our Nig, however, has a conventional happy ending. Mr. B. falls in love with his servant and marries her.
4 Mary [Bellmont]: Rebecca S. Hayward (1822—40), the Hayward’s youngest surviving child.
5 John, or Jack [Bellmont]: Charles S. Hayward (1818-57), the youngest Hayward son.
6 “in a few years”: Comments like this suggest that the “Bellmonts” know that it is unusual to put a child to work at the age of six. As Faye Dudden affirms, “orphaned children were commonly bound out at about age ten or twelve to serve until they were eighteen.” Faye E. Dudden,
Serving Women: Household Service in the Nineteenth Century (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 20.
7 “train up in my way from a child”: Prov. 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” This oft-quoted verse from Proverbs underscores the text’s ironic commentary on Mrs. B’s Christianity. She means to train up Frado in her way, not God’s way, to be her servant, rather than God’s servant.
8 Bridget: Bridget was a common, if disparaging, way to refer generically to Irish women. The first family of Irish immigrants to settle in Milford did so in the 1840s. Ramsdell,
History of Milford, 189.
9 how it was always
to be done: The text’s explicit emphasis on the permanence of Frado’s work again underscores the analogy of enslavement rather than indenture as a model for her experience.
10 “See that nigger”: This description of racial prejudice in Milford, and, by extension, the North, underscores the larger commentary about northern racism that
Our Nig levels. Mary, not wanting to be seen “walking with a nigger,” the text suggests, is hardly exceptional. New Hampshire’s most famous ugly episode with black education occurred in 1835 at the interracial, abolitionist-founded Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. Wilson’s point, of course, is that New Hampshire and its Canaan are no promised land for blacks.
11 Miss Marsh: Probably Abby A. (Abigail Atherton) Kent (1802-57), whose mother’s family members were prominent residents of the neighboring town of Amherst. The early death of her father, a prominent lawyer and legislator from Chester, New Hampshire, forced Abby to work as a schoolteacher in Amherst and the surrounding areas. She taught school until her 1834 marriage to Robert Means, Jr. By all accounts, Abby Kent Means was a lovely person: warm, tactful, understanding, and sensitive. Her best friend and cousin, Jane Means Appleton, married up-and-coming lawyer Franklin Pierce of Hillsborough, New Hampshire. Pierce was elected U.S. president in 1853; their only surviving child, Benjamin, was killed in a train wreck just before the family left for the D.C. inaugural. Jane Pierce was devastated and unable to fulfill her duties as first lady, so Abby Kent Means stepped in to fill in as White House hostess. When Jane Pierce could again take up the role as first lady, and Mrs. Means had some spare time, she would command the presidential carriage and ride to Myrtilla Miner’s “Free Colored Girls’ School” (a forerunner of the University of the District of Columbia), where she helped with teaching the girls their lessons. The local toughs, who verbally and physically harassed the teachers and students as they went about their business, backed off when the carriage with the White House seal on the doors was parked in front of the school, for which Miss Miner, the staff, and students were grateful. See Anne M. Means,
Amherst and Our Family Tree (Boston: Privately printed, 1921); Myrtilla Miner and Ellen M. O’Connor,
Myrtilla Miner; a Memoir and
The School for Colored Girls (1885, 1854, respectively; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 171.
12 referred them to one who looks not on outward appearances, but on the heart: “The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” 1 Sam. 16:7.
13 propping her mouth open: Beatings on large plantations were often public affairs, and so served both as individual punishment and collective violence done to the enslaved community that was forced to bear witness. In towns, however, slave owners were concerned about both their reputations and accountability; though rarely enforced because blacks were not allowed to serve as witnesses, laws did provide some constraints on violence against slaves. Mrs. B.’s efforts to silence, or privatize, her abuse, by propping Frado’s mouth so far open that she could not scream, echoes owners’ efforts to keep their abuse quiet. Though Frado is an indentured servant, Mrs. B. does not want to make public the open secret of her abuse by having Frado call attention to Mrs. B.’s violence. Many critics have noted the irony of Frado’s mouth being propped open so she won’t open her mouth, as it were, concerning Mrs. B.’s behavior.
14 she was never permitted to shield her skin from the sun: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother’s children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.” Song of Sol. 1:6. Wilson’s reference to the Song of Solomon also points to the inequitable distribution of farm work and power that Frado endures at the hands of her “mother’s children.”
15 She was not many shades darker than Mary now; what a calamity it would be ever to hear the contrast spoken of: This reference again links New Hampshire to the slaveholding South and the Bellmont household to southern plantations and homes. Wilson underscores the politics of skin color under which enslaved and legitimate children in the same family resembled each other, while white women would rather not have the family resemblance—or in
Our Nig’s ironic parlance, the (lack of) “contrast”—spoken of. “The mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children,” lamented South Carolina plantation mistress Mary Boykin Chesnut in her diary. “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Mary B. Chesnut,
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 29.
1 “Life is a strange avenue of various trees and flowers . . .”: Martin F. Tupper, “Of Life (Second Series),” in
Tupper’s Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 192, fourth stanza. Wilson’s punctuation and quotation differ from the original.
2 “cold waters to a thirsty soul”: “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.” Prov. 25:25.
3 Susan: Nancy Abbot (1810-88) of Wilton, New Hampshire, a schoolteacher and seamstress, married George Milton Hayward on August 16, 1834, in Milford. Abiel Abbot Livermore and Sewell Putnam,
History of the Town of Wilton, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire (Lowell, Mass.: Marden & Rowell, Printers, 1888), 546.
4 Henry Reed: David Hutchinson (1803-81), the eldest surviving son of Jesse Hutchinson, Sr. and Mary “Polly” Leavitt, married Elizabeth “Betsey,” the Haywards’ eldest daughter, who had left home before Wilson was abandoned at her parents, and so makes no appearance in
Our Nig. Though David Hutchinson, or a character based on his relation to Betsey, does not appear in the book, according to contemporaneous statements and the remembrances of his descendants, the portrait of Henry Reed is a highly accurate description of Hutchinson. Like “Henry Reed,” he was “tall and spare with red hair and . . . blue eyes” and, again like “Reed,” he was known for his parsimony, ability to drive a hard bargain, and propensity to file lawsuits. See John W. Hutchinson,
The Story of the Hutchinsons (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1896). Also see Carol R. Brink,
Harps in the Wind (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 115.
5 George Means: Samuel Blanchard (1805-1900) was a native of Rockingham, Vermont; he married Lucretia Hayward (Jane Bellmont) in Milford in 1834; they would have three girls and a boy. Although his father, Jonathan Blanchard, did not have “four wives,” as Mrs. B. suggests in her rant against “George Means,” Blanchard and his wife, Polly, did have fifteen children, as Mrs. B. loosely complains. One of those children, the Reverend Jonathan Blanchard, Jr. (1811-92), became an abolitionist affiliated with Theodore Dwight Weld and the Lane Seminary radicals. He was a well-known antislavery lecturer traveling throughout the Midwest, who later became the president of Knox College and subsequently founded Wheaton College in Illinois.
6 procured in a Western City: Charles Hayward would go “West,” as the Midwest was then known, to Bond County, Illinois, with his cousin and brother-in-law Zephaniah Hutchinson in late 1839. On February 29, 1840, Charles purchased forty acres of farmland there. See Bond County Deed Book 146:104, Office of the Bond County Recorder of Deeds, Greenville, Illinois. The 1840 Federal Census lists “C. Haywood [
sic],” “a white male between the ages of 20-29” (138, line 23).
1 “Hard are life’s early steps . . .”: Wilson transcribed this quote as prose though it originally appears in verse form. Lines by Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, “Success Alone Seen,” in
Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., by Laman Blanchard (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 261.
2 From early dawn until after all were retired: This language again strengthens
Our Nig’s metaphorical and material connections to the conditions of slavery. Enslaved workers labored from “dawn till dusk” or from “sunup till sundown.” Of course, their hours were actually much longer as tasks such as food preparation and, for house slaves, domestic labor such as nursing the sick and caring for whites’ nighttime needs and desires occupied workers well “after all were retired.”
3 She wore no shoes: This is a continuous condition for Frado; when she is about seven she goes to school with “scanty clothing and bare feet.” In this passage she is about fourteen. This is a familiar trope in African American antislavery materials and slave narratives and so deepens the comparison
Our Nig forwards. Wilson contradicts more favorable renditions of the North, such as Douglass’s affirmation in the 1845
Narrative that in the North he saw no “half-naked children and barefooted women.” Houston A. Baker, Jr.,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982), 148.
4 shaved her glossy ringlets . . . anything but an enticing object: There are several literary instances of mistresses shaving mulattas’ hair. In
Clotel (1853), the narrator describes how “every married woman in the far South looks upon her husband as unfaithful, and regards every quadroon servant as a rival. Clotel had been with her now but a few days, when she was ordered to cut off her long hair.” See William Wells Brown,
Clotel, or, The President’s Daughter, edited with introduction and notes by M. Giulia Fabi (1853, London: Partridge & Oakey; repr., New York: Penguin, 2004), 121.
1 “Other cares engross me . . .”: “Written in the Prospect in Death,” in
The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White (London: Bell and Daldy, 1830), 9. Wilson takes certain liberties with her citation.
2 Lewis [Bellmont]: Jonas Hutchinson Hayward (1814-66) left Milford for Baltimore in 1836; he took his brother’s failing stove business and turned it into an American industrial giant. With his brother Nehemiah, he patented a number of innovations for cooking stoves and perfected home heating systems, circulatory systems, fire hydrants, and plumbing fixtures. The firm, which became Bartlett Hayward & Company, employed thousands during its heyday, and still exists as a subsidiary of Koppers Corporation.
3 Susan and Charlie: Caroline Frances Hayward (1836-89) was the only child of George and Nancy Hayward; she never married. This is one of the few direct discrepancies in the text, although “Charlie” is an obvious quasi-homonymic nickname for Caroline.
4 veil of doubt and sin: In the New Testament, the veil metaphorically describes the inability to understand the spiritual truth one needs in order to accept Christ. See 2 Cor. 3:16.
5 to the communion of the saints: Christians often refer to followers of Christ, or the body of believers, as “the saints.” See, for example, 1 Thess. 3:13.
6 “we should very soon have her in the parlor”: In sentimental fiction, the middle-class parlor had particular significance as the heart of the home; indeed it symbolized safety and domestic civilization, a place protected from the “pollution” of the public sphere. Mrs. B. strives to keep everyone she sees as illegitimate out of the parlor. She is later irritated by Aunt Abby’s “impudence in presenting herself unasked in the parlor.”
7 prayer of the publican, “God be merciful to me a sinner”: In Luke 18:13, when the publican prays, as Frado here does, “God, be merciful to me a sinner,” he humbles himself, in direct contrast to the Pharisee who in prayer displays only self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. In this parable Jesus teaches: “every one that exalteth himself shall be abased” (Luke 18:14). As those who know the Bible would realize, the line Wilson quotes is followed directly by one of the Bible’s best-known phrases: “suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:16). Readers who share Wilson’s religious training would catch the extended irony of her biblical citation.
1 “Neath the billows of the ocean . . .”: According to Ellis, this epigraph may be from George W. Cook’s
The Mariner’s Physician and Surgeon; or a Guide to the Homeopathic Treatment of Those Diseases to Which Seamen are Liable, Comprising the Treatment of Syphilitic Diseases etc. (New York: J.T.S. Smith, 1848). Reginald Pitts suggests that it is as likely the work of George Washington Light (1809-68) who was a Boston book publisher of progressive titles, the editor of several papers including the
Colonizationist and the
Journal of Freedom, and an author of poetry and biography. He was active in antislavery and early trade union movements. His book,
Keep Cool, Go Ahead and a Few Other Poems (1851), does not include this verse, which may have been published in New England newspapers or elsewhere.
2 “bruised reed”: In quoting Matt. 12:20, “a bruised reed shall he not break,” the text foregrounds Mr. B.’s recuperation from his loss. Mr. B. now fosters Frado’s religious education.
3 narrow way: The “narrow way” commonly refers to the path of Christ that leads to salvation. See Matt. 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
4 “She got into the river
again . . . the Jordan is a big one to tumble into”: Jordan is both the river in which John the Baptist baptizes Christ and the symbolic boundary between slavery and freedom reflected in black spirituals. The text suggests that even the river Jordan cannot wash away Mary’s sins; her black heart will make her a “nigger.”
5 so detestable a plague: Note the similarity in Harriet Jacobs’s indictment of her master and Wilson’s of her “mistress.” Jacobs writes: “O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be, if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up, and disencumber the world of a plague.”
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 18.
6 she was restrained by an overruling Providence: Hagar, Sarai/ Sarah’s black Egyptian handmaid, flees from her mistress’s harsh treatment. An angel meets her and tells her that the Lord hears her affliction, and that her seed shall be multiplied, but that she should nonetheless go back to Sarah, saying, “Return to thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands.” Gen. 16:8-10.
1 “Crucified the hopes that cheered me . . .” C. E.: The Anglo-Irish writer whose
nom de plume was Charlotte Elizabeth (1790-1846) may be the author of the epigraph attributed to “C. E.” Her tracts, novels, and poetry were very popular in the United States and Britain. Among them were the antislavery novel
The System (1827) and a number of working-class novels including
Helen Fleetwood (1840).
The Wrongs of Women (1844) is considered to be her major work. She was the editor of the
Christian Lady’s Magazine (1833-36) and of the
Protestant Magazine (1841-46). Harriet Beecher Stowe edited
The Collected Works of Charlotte Elizabeth in 1849. Charlotte Elizabeth Brown married a Captain Phelan, an abusive drunk whom she left. When he died, she remarried Lewis H. J. Tonna, who was twenty-one years her junior.
2 Jenny: Sarah Ann Newby, originally from Virginia (1822-51), married Charles S. Hayward (Jack) on April 1, 1841, in Bond County, Illinois. Their son, George Milton Hayward II (1844-81), was taken in by his Uncle Jonas in Baltimore and trained in the family business of selling stoves. See 1880 Federal Census for Washington, D.C., sheet 237-A. Also see Bond County, Illinois, marriage book 1:34, Bond County Historical Society, Greenville, Illinois.
3 Mrs. Smith: One of the near neighbors of the Haywards/Bellmonts—possibly Mrs. Rachel Putnam Dascomb, wife of Calvin Dascomb, Sr.
4 Mrs. Moore: Not identified. Possibly named for Mrs. Mary J. French Moore (1808-98), second wife of the Reverend Humphrey Moore, the abolitionist pastor of the Congregationalist Church in Milford (1802-36) who married the Haywards and later became an antislavery state representative.
5 Mrs. Hale: Perhaps Sarah Dexter Kimball (b. 1816) who was the wife of Reverend Lycurgus Kimball (1814-51), who pastored the Milford Congregational Church from 1847 to 1849. They had two children, Edwin and Harriette Louise. The latter child’s birth, on September 26, 1846, may be referenced in
Our Nig, when Wilson uses “additional cares” to describe the extra burden of child-care. See Ramsdell,
History of Milford, 198; Leonard A. Morrison and Stephen P. Sharples,
History of the Kimball Family from 1634 to 1897 (Boston: Amrell & Upham, 1897), 520; 1850 Federal Census for Rushville Corporation, Schuyler County, Illinois, sheet 8, lines 31-34.
6 Mrs. Hoggs: Possibly Mary Louise (Barnes) Boyles (1811-92), originally of Goffstown; she married Samuel Boyles (1806-71) in 1830 and they had three children. Mrs. Boyles took in both boarders and paupers, as stated in the 1850 Federal Census return for Milford that features “Harriet Adams” (later Harriet E. Wilson) and also the 1860 and 1870 Federal Census returns for Milford where there are a number of unrelated persons in the Boyles household. Suggestively, the Boyleses may have been Spiritualists; Samuel Boyles’s tombstone in the West Street Cemetery in Milford states that he was “translated to the Spirit World.” A number of Milford tombstones marking the last resting place of known Spiritualists bear similar inscriptions. Visit by Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald Pitts to West Street Cemetery, October 2003.
1 “Nothing new under the sun”: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Eccles. 1:9.
2 within the compass of my narrative: The only first-person usage within the body of the narrative itself.
3 professed fugitives: Harriet Wilson was not an exception in exposing the attraction of posing as a “fugitive” when faced with the stunning lack of economic opportunities free blacks confronted in the United States. Nor was “Samuel” or Thomas Wilson alone; several “professed fugitives,” as Wilson puts it in the plural, traveled throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic States, giving “lectures” and soliciting. In 1854,
London’s Anti-Slavery Reporter ran a column titled “Colored Lecturers—Caution” that warned: “We have to caution the public—and especially our antislavery friends—against certain coloured men who are now going through the country . . . delivering lectures on American Slavery, temperance, and other subjects.” They “strongly recommend our friends, throughout the country, not to give countenance to any individuals professing to be fugitive slaves, unless the latter present some satisfactory recommendations, and can give an account of themselves and of the manner in which they reached the country, which will bear investigation. Whilst we would not, on any account, divert benevolence from a worthy object, we feel it incumbent upon us to do all that lies in our power to prevent it from being practised upon.” The
Liberator also printed a number of articles warning the public against pretended fugitive slaves. See
London’s Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 1, 1854.
4 Samuel was kind to her when at home, but made no provision for his absence: Some variation of women being left to their own support was not uncommon when men left their families to lecture, as on the antislavery circuit, or to work. Douglass, William Craft, and Martin Delany, for example, took extended trips away from home, leaving their wives to manage household affairs and finances. In
Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 171, W. Jeffrey Bolster notes a number of instances where the wives and children of men long at sea were forced to apply for help from the Overseers of the Poor in the towns and cities where they lived.
5 illiterate harangues were humbugs for hungry abolitionists: Critics agree that these references, which paint abolitionists as overeager dupes, may in part explain why
Our Nig was never reviewed in the abolitionist press. The movement had been hurt by the fake narrative that James Williams had dictated to an unwitting John Greenleaf Whittier, which appeared in the February 1838
Anti-Slavery Examiner. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. puts it, the narrative was “so compelling, so gripping, so
useful . . . that the abolitionists decided to publish it and distribute it widely, sending copies to every state and to every congressman” before it was exposed and they were forced to issue retractions. Likewise, the
London Anti-Slavery Reporter warned that such imposters “lay their plans with an especial view to this practise upon those whom they are aware are already pre-disposed to listen to a skillfully-invented and well-told tale of woe, and suffering, and hair-breadth escapes.” Wilson echoes the paper’s observation that “if anti-slavery friends would, as a rule, observe a little more caution, imposters would not find it so easy to make dupes.” As Suzanne Schneider points out, the very popular P. T. Barnum was known as the “prince of humbug” at this time; Wilson’s language calls attention to the issues of commodification, spectatorship, and sensationalism that haunted the display of black Americans as speakers on the antislavery circuit. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “From Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement,” in
Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed
. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 59; and
London’s Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 1, 1854. Schneider, private conversation with Gabrielle Foreman, April 2004.
6 Then followed the birth of her child: George Mason Wilson was born at the Hillsborough County Poor Farm in Goffstown in late May or early June 1852, possibly June 15 of that year. Although it is likely that he could have been named for George Mason Hayward (“James Bellmont”), it is of interest that the baby bears the same name as (Caleb) George Mason Hutchinson (1844-93), the only son of Caleb and Laura Wright Hutchinson. Caleb was an elder brother of the Singing Hutchinson Family, and his own son was called “George” most of his life in order to distinguish him from his father. It is possible that Caleb and Laura, or his twin, Joshua, with his wife, Irene Fisher Hutchinson, may have cared for young George Wilson. The 1860 Census shows that Joshua Hutchinson took in paupers, for which he was presumably compensated by the town. See 1860 Federal Census for Town of Milford. See also 1850 Federal Census for Milford, Hillsborough County, 377: 1860 Federal Census for Milford, 126; Colburn, “Register,” in
History of Milford, 788.
7 As soon as her babe could be nourished . . . she left him in charge: Nineteenth-century readers would have understood Wilson’s decision to leave her son in someone else’s charge so that she would be able to gain a livelihood that could support them both. “Women whose marriages had failed had to give up their children in order to enter domestic service, leaving them with relatives, boarding them, or binding them out.” Dudden,
Serving Women, 206.
8 Mrs. Capon: Not yet identified.
9 Watched by kidnappers: Free-born and self-emancipated blacks in the North faced a precarious situation after the compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave provision was passed. Financial incentives at every stage encouraged remanding back to slavery people who were identified as runaways, whatever their actual legal status. Instead of jury trials, special commissioners heard cases; they were paid five dollars if an alleged fugitive were released and ten dollars if he or she were returned south.
10 maltreated by professed abolitionists: Wilson’s assertion is in line with white antislavery and women’s rights advocate Sarah Grimké’s report on racial discrimination among Quakers. In 1839, Grimké describes a woman’s confession that in her household the black hired hand was given separate dishes. The family “‘would no more have thought of using them, than if a cat or dog had eaten with them’—Such said she ‘are the prejudices I was educated in, I have found it hard to overcome them.’ ” Wilson’s commentary underscores that even the most egalitarian communities would often mistreat blacks in their midst. Carolyn Williams, “The Female Antislavery Movement: Fighting against Racial Prejudice and Promoting Women’s Rights in Antebellum America,” in
The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 167.
11 Traps slyly laid by the vicious to ensnare her: Traps by the vicious could refer to plots to enslave free blacks, plots to sexually ensnare impoverished women, or a combination of the two.
12 gentle reader: This form of direct address is commonly employed in domestic fiction.
13 as Joseph from the butler’s, but she will never cease to track them till beyond mortal vision: In
Our Nig’s closing passage, Frado is positioned as the biblical Joseph, a spiritually powerful and unjustly enslaved reader of dreams who will eventually escape and prosper (Gen. 40:23). This last reference to Joseph portends Wilson’s future as a well-respected and serious practitioner of Spiritualism, where in trances, mediums communicated with those in the “spirit world.”
1 itinerant colored lecturer: Possibly Thomas H. Jones (1806-c. 1865), an escaped slave from Wilmington, North Carolina, who published his story,
The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who was a Slave for Forty-Three Years, in three printings (1854, 1862, 1865). He was also a Baptist minister and lecturer based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Jones gave public talks about his life as a slave until May 1851 when, upon the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act, he fled to Canada, where he stayed for almost two years. He later returned to Worcester, where he stayed until 1862, before relocating to Boston’s Sixth Ward.
2 Mrs. Walker: Probably Mary Wrigley Walker (1798-1871), a native of Rochdale, Lancashire, England, who emigrated to America with her husband Matthew about 1820, settling first in Charlstown, Massachusetts, then in Stow, Massachusetts, and then Providence, Rhode Island, before moving to Ware, Massachusetts, the “W—Mass.” where Wilson almost surely spent time as a “straw sewer” in the 1850s. Walker’s last years were spent in Harwick, Massachusetts.
3 “black, but comely”: “I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Look not upon me, because I am black; because the sun hath looked upon me. My mother’s children were angry with me, they made me the keeper of the vineyards, but mine own vineyard have I not kept.” Song of Sol. 1:5-6.
4 “My cup runneth over”: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.” Ps. 23:5-6.
5 “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”: Jer. 10:23.
6 “rich in faith”: “Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him? But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress you, and draw you before the judgment seats? Do not they blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?” James 2:5-7.
7 County House: The Hillsborough County Poor Farm was established in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 1849, in order to “house the county poor,” who at that time numbered about ninety. The buildings burned in 1866, and the farm was moved to the Whiting Farm in Wilton in April 1867, and still later to the hamlet of Grasmere, just outside of Goffstown. See George Plummer Hadley,
History of the Town of Goffstown, New Hampshire, 1733-1920 (Concord, N.H.: Published for the Town of Goffstown, 1924), 424-27; Livermore and Putnam,
History of the Town of Wilton, 176-80.
8 “‘prophet’s chamber,’ except there was no ‘candlestick’”: “Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.” 2 Kings 5:10. “Allida” is quoting here from a letter from Wilson. It is a reference to the story of a Shunamite woman, from a tribe that is recognized as “black and comely,” who invites a poor stranger, the prophet Elisha, to stay in her home. She and her husband build him a modest “chamber” where he can stay during his journeys; and the prophet, in turn, promises the woman a son, yet he dies as a young boy. The couple appeals to Elisha, who returns to pray over the boy who has been laid out in Elisha’s chamber. Elisha revives the child, at which time the relieved mother “went in, and fell at his feet, and bowed herself to the ground, and took up her son, and went out.” 2 Kings 5:37. Wilson’s reference in this letter typifies her narrative strategies. She occupies the place of both Elisha, for whom the modest prophet chamber is constructed, and the Shunamite, the black female protagonist of the story. These verses, and the ways in which she complicates them, eerily anticipate her own experience, though Wilson’s lacked a happy ending. Wilson and her soon-to-be-born son end up back in the prophet’s chamber, in this case, the County House; he dies as a child, and though she tries to save him, to take up her son and go out, young George is never revived.
9 “ ‘I am poor and needy’”: “But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.” Ps. 40:17.
10 A kind gentleman and lady: Possibly Joshua Hutchinson (1811-83) and his wife, Irene Fisher Hutchinson (1810-88). Joshua was the leader of the Hutchinson “Home Branch,” those members of the Family Singers who performed throughout New England while the more famous siblings traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Joshua was actively antislavery and the family regularly hosted black guests and abolitionist speakers. As the family took care of town paupers, they would have been perfect candidates to care for George Wilson and treat him well, as “Allida” suggests.
11 “at the resurrection of the just”: “But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind. And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.” Luke 14:13-14.
12 bestowed a recipe upon her for restoring gray hair to its former color: There were a number of “recipes” used by antebellum hairdressers and barbers; this “recipe” could have been provided by an African American barber in a town she may have visited—William H. Montague of Springfield, Massachusetts, or Phillip O. Ames of Nashua, for example. See chronology notes for more information.
13 Autobiography: Though
Our Nig’s maneuvers are clearly novelistic, the facts it relates are as clearly autobiographical. Within the text,
Our Nig is referred to as “sketches” or as an “autobiography.”
14 “I will help thee, saith the Lord”: “I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.” Isa. 41:14.
15 Allida or “Aunt J”: Probably Jane Chapman (Maslen) Demond (1814-1904); originally from North Bradley, Wiltshire, England, Jane emigrated with her family to New York City when she was in her teens. On June 30, 1841, she married Lorenzo Demond (1812-73) of Spencer, Massachusetts; they would have three children. In 1845, they moved to Ware, Massachusetts, where Lorenzo operated a large farm as well as a “bonnet-making manufactory.” He hired local women to stitch together straw hats at their homes; this is the work Harriet does in W—, Massachusetts, until her health again fails. The 1850 Federal Census Enumeration of Population for the village of Ware does not show any women with the occupation of “straw sewer”; the 1860 Census shows twenty women who listed their occupation as “sews straw.”
16 She was indeed a slave, in every sense of the word: An 1857 New Hampshire law declared that any person “who held or attempted to hold a person in slavery, should be deemed guilty of felony, and on conviction to be confined to hard labor not less than one, nor more than five years.” J. W. Hammonds, “Slavery in New Hampshire,”
Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 21 (January-June 1889), 65. Though Rebecca Hutchinson Hayward (“Mrs. B.”) had died in 1850, Wilson’s excoriation and the confirmation of “Margaretta Thorn,” published just two years after New Hampshire’s passage of such a law, carries the force not only of their conviction, but threatens to merge moral and legal indictments.
17 and a lonely one, too: Most young women working in single-servant households “found the isolation of domestic service extremely painful.” Three-quarters of the domestics in Providence in 1855, for example, worked under such arrangements, as had 45 percent in Boston in 1845. Most domestics in urban settings socialized with others in the nearby vicinity, despite their employers’ complaints and attempts to undermine their efforts. While Wilson was not the only servant employed on the Hayward farm, she was the only indentured and house servant in a rural setting and her loneliness would have been further magnified by her racial isolation. See Dudden,
Serving Women, 197-98.
18 inasmuch as ye have done a good deed: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matt. 25:40.
19 while the day lasts, and we shall in no wise lose our reward: “And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.” Matt. 10:42. This references what is commonly called the “last days,” when God will account for His children’s good deeds.
20 Margaretta Thorn: Possibly Laura Wright Hutchinson of Milford, wife of Caleb Hutchinson, part of the Milford Hutchinson clan and later a noted Spiritualist medium. The writer is almost certainly a resident of Milford or the immediate area, personally knew Wilson’s story very well, and obviously sympathized with her.
21 C. D. S.: Though Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Barbara A. White suggest that “C. D. S.” stands for the legal abbreviation “Colored Indentured Servant,” the term was used primarily, and perhaps only, in Ohio. More probably this is Calvin Dascomb, Sr. (1790-1859), who farmed in the towns of Milford and Wilton, and was married to Rachel Putnam of Wilton (1796-1856), a first cousin once removed of Nancy A. Hayward (“Susan Bellmont”). Dascomb was a near neighbor of the Haywards for many years and thus would have known Harriet from the time she arrived at the Haywards’ through her marriage and her son’s birth. See Livermore and Putnam,
History of the Town of Wilton, 360, 479, 527; Colburn, “Register,” in
History of Milford, 666.