Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson

First published: 1859

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: Mid-1800’s

Locale: Boston, Massachusetts, and environs

Principal Characters:

• Frado, a pretty mulatto girl
• Mrs. Bellmont, the book’s principal antagonist
• James, the Bellmonts’ son

The Novel

Our Nig is the story of an abandoned mulatto girl, Frado, who works from the age of six until she is eighteen as an indentured servant for a white, middle-class family in Boston. Before Frado’s narrative moves forward, Harriet E. Wilson swiftly presents the background story, telling how Frado became an orphan. Next, she gives a full account of the protagonist’s suffering at the hands of two cruel mistresses, and then she rapidly summarizes the sad events following Frado’s arduous servitude: a bad marriage ending with desertion, single parenthood, and extreme poverty.

The reader first meets Frado’s natural mother, the “lonely Mag Smith,” a lower-class white woman who has been seduced and abandoned by an aristocratic white male. As a ruined woman, Mag enters into a relationship with a “kind-hearted African” named Jim, part owner of a coal-delivery business. Out of pity and a belief that marriage to a white woman, even one at the bottom of her world, can be a means for his upward mobility, Jim proposes to Mag; for her own financial security, Mag accepts. After the marriage, Jim becomes a devoted and dutiful husband. When Jim dies a few years later, Mag has two young mulatto daughters; the older one is Frado.

Widow Mag is courted by Jim’s business partner. After a period of financial struggle, she is convinced that she needs a man’s help, so she marries her second black suitor. The day comes when Mag and her new husband decide to leave the village to seek a better life. Since neither of them wishes to be saddled with two little girls, they slyly leave six-year-old, high-spirited Frado with a white, middle-class family, the Bellmonts. Thus begins Frado’s life of misery and pain.

Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary become Frado’s chief tormentors. Day and night, they make the young girl’s life miserable with their constant demands, beatings, and psychological assaults. To make matters worse, Mrs. Bellmont assigns Frado drab and unhealthy sleeping quarters. The good-hearted characters, Mr. Bellmont, Jack, James, Jane, and Aunt Abby, witness the abuse, but they are too preoccupied or passive to effect any substantial changes for the young servant. Frado saves herself eventually by realizing her own power to dictate limits to what she will endure.

The critical scene in which Frado learns to resist her chief enemy occurs after James, her favorite in the Bellmont household, dies. James is Mrs. Bellmont’s son, but he is very different in temperament from his mean mother. He is more like his father in kindness; but, unlike Mr. Bellmont, he is more inclined, however ineffectively, to protect Frado.

Despite James’s sympathy for Frado, he never suggests to her that she can stand up for herself. Not until after James dies does Mr. Bellmont tell Frado that she should not allow herself to be beaten when she does not deserve it. The first opportunity Frado has to apply this novel concept comes shortly thereafter. Mrs. Bellmont sends Frado for wood, and when Frado does not return soon enough for her, she walks out to Frado’s woodpile, takes a stick, and strikes Frado over the head. To her surprise, Frado loudly refuses to be beaten again. In amazement, Mrs. Bellmont leaves the yard. From that moment on, Frado knows she is free. During the next and final year of her indenture, Frado receives her usual scoldings and a few whippings, but never again does Mrs. Bellmont threaten her with similar violence.

Frado’s servitude ends when she is eighteen. She is sent out into the world with only one dress, a Bible, and a physical constitution too frail for hard work. Mrs. Moore, a kindly Christian woman, takes Frado in and teaches her to make straw hats. After a short apprenticeship, Frado uses her quickly acquired skill to support herself. This short period of autonomy for Frado ends when a black man named Samuel walks into her affection-starved world and sweeps her off her feet. Against Mrs. Moore’s advice, Frado marries Samuel, a shifty orator who makes his living off abolitionists, giving “humbug” speeches about his life as a slave, although he has never been below the Mason-Dixon line.

After a few months, Frado’s marriage goes awry, but by this time she is already pregnant. Because of her delicate condition and lack of money, she has to go to a poorhouse, where she gives birth to a son. At one point, Samuel, Frado’s husband, reappears, giving her some respite from abject poverty, but he leaves again without warning. Later, she receives word that Samuel has died of a fever. Frado is forced to put her little boy in a foster home. Under these desperate circumstances, Frado starts to write her story. The story ends with Frado’s hopeful vision that the book’s sale will provide enough money to support herself and her child.

The Characters

Frado’s basic impulses to laugh and to enjoy life’s simple pleasures are not easily repressed by the cruel servitude she enters when her white mother, Mag, runs off and leaves her with the Bellmonts, a white family dominated by a cruel and bigoted matriarch.

Although life with the Bellmonts is exceedingly grim for Frado, the bright light of her humanity never completely dies. Indeed, Wilson writes, during the first three years of Frado’s indenture, when she attends school, her constant “jollity” cannot “be quenched by whipping or scolding.” Even after her formal education ends and life becomes creased by constant insults, the “spark of playfulness” manifests itself in the occasional “funny thing” she says to her sympathizers, in her performance of daring stunts, and in her amusements with animals.

Mrs. Bellmont, a fierce social climber, takes out her frustrations on Frado. Consequently, no matter what occurs to “ruffle” Mrs. Bellmont, “a few blows on Nig seemed to relieve her of a portion of ill-will.”

Mrs. Bellmont is enthusiastically assisted in her efforts to break Frado’s spirit by her equally willful and malcontent daughter, Mary, who advances in the practice of cruelty as she matures.

Constantly besieged by the two cruel Bellmont “ladies,” Frado receives crumbs of kindness from three key family members: Mr. Bellmont, the father of the family, and Jack and James, his two sons. (Jane, a crippled daughter, and “Nabs,” the elderly maiden aunt, live in the house and are kind to Frado, but they are too cowed by their states of dependency to speak out.)

Although Mr. Bellmont is consistently sympathetic toward Frado, his sympathy never translates into action. His refusal to exert his influence to stop the outrages against Frado shows that Mr. Bellmont’s respect for white privilege outranks his sense of justice for African Americans. Nevertheless, Mr. Bellmont does not have the stomach to watch Frado suffer. He avoids being a witness to her punishments by leaving the house at moments of crisis. Through his cowardice, which he mistakes for kindness, the attacks upon Frado, being uncensored, are prolonged.

As an adolescent, Jack saves Frado several times from undeserved suffering at the hands of his mother and sister. As Jack grows up, however, his outside interests and friendships begin to occupy his time and thoughts, and Frado’s plight becomes only a small area of abrasion in his otherwise smooth life.

James, the oldest of the Bellmont children, is Frado’s most effective protector, but even he fails to rescue Frado. James’s failure is at first the result of his long absences from home during Frado’s childhood; later, it is his marriage that keeps him separated from Frado. When James returns to his paternal home for good, Frado is nearly grown, and he is encumbered by a fatal illness. He no longer has the stamina to be a vigilant intercessor on Frado’s behalf. Seeing the hopeless despair of Frado’s earthly existence, James makes a concerted effort, in his last days, to convert her to Christianity. Despite his earnest entreaties, however, Frado cannot bring herself to worship the same God who, according to James, is the savior of her enemies.

Samuel, the “fine, straight negro” whom Frado finally marries after she frees herself from both the physical and psychological chains of servitude, proves to be a charlatan—a free-born black man who lectures as a former slave in the abolitionist cause. His maverick spirit causes him to leave Frado without a protector at the times when she needs him most, during her pregnancy and during her struggle to care for her child.

Critical Context

Although the story of Our Nig ended on an optimistic note, Gates uncovered a sad finale to Wilson’s true-life story. He found that the writer was disappointed in the precise ways she had hoped for success. The book did not create a source of income, and her precious son, for whom she undertook the task of writing a book, died of a fever at the age of seven. (Ironically, the recent discovery of an obituary notice for Wilson’s son in a local paper supplied the most cogent evidence of Harriet E. Wilson’s existence as a real person, and also confirmed her social classification as an African American.)

The ironic fate of Wilson and her book is a cruel yet a fitting finale to the saga, for Wilson’s social vision was exceedingly advanced for her time, as was her expanded humanistic vision reflected in Our Nig. Certainly, the author herself recognized that the world probably was not ready for her story. In an unusual foreword to Our Nig, Wilson acknowledged the problem the subject matter of her book could pose for an important segment of her audience that she called “good anti-slavery friends.”

Wilson nevertheless exposed how prejudiced people living in Massachusetts in the 1850’s were abetted in their outrageous behaviors by the passivity of white liberals whose antislavery convictions were directed toward the South. She offered the pitiful story of her harsh life as an indentured servant in the North as proof.

Bibliography

Jefferson, Margo. “Down and Out in Black Boston.” The Nation 236 (May 28, 1983): 675-677. Focuses on Wilson’s ingenious use of irony and sarcasm as key elements distinguishing her book from other narratives written by antebellum blacks. Explores Wilson’s sophistication in satirizing contemporary white women writers of the period through her careful selection of a title for her book.

Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Surveys the conditions of blacks in North-ern states after those states abolished slavery and details the prejudices that circumscribed the lives of free blacks living in the North.

Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. A pioneering study of slave narratives. Provides a helpful context for assessing Our Nig.

Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire; or Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Addresses the issue of why traditional African American scholarship has produced negative readings of Our Nig and other books written by nineteenth century black women.

Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Edited, with an introduction, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 2d ed. New York: Random House, 1983. Gates’s fifty-five-page introduction places Our Nig in its historical context. Gates summarizes the interesting and involved research used to authenticate the authorship of the novel, and he analyzes Wilson’s narrative style, demonstrating how the writer used both the conventions of the sentimental novel and innovative devices to write her unique story.