Our Nig

Harriet Wilson.  Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black: In a Two Story While House, North.         Showing   That  Slavery’s  Shadows Fall Even There. Vintage Books, New York.  1983.  Original publication, 1859.

      My last blog subject was the 17^th century Elena Piscopia who was greatly honored at age 22  for her universal  knowledge, and was the first woman to win a PhD in Philosophy.

     Here is another first woman of achievement who authored in 1859 the first Afro-American novel, Our Nig.  Sadly she is virtuously unknown 175 years later.  Her novel was her sad story , laid in New England, of a free-born girl and woman who endured  virtual slavery  from age 6 to 18.  Her mother, a white woman, Meg Smith, was seduced by a scoundrel who deserted her.  Her baby died but her grief and shame were bottomless.  Her friends deserted her; she was despondent.  She was saved by a black freeman, Jim, who shared food and shelter with her, loved and married her.  They had two children,     Frieda and a boy.  Jim died of consumption; another man, Seth Shipley filled in.  Hard financial times led Mag and Seth to take the boy and seek employment in another area and leave Frieda , aged 6 to the  financially  upstanding  Belmont family whom they felt would take Frieda to their hearts. Meg said she had a washing job and needed a few hours and would take Frieda after that.  Meg  never came.

            And then began the unspeakable treatment of Frieda by Mrs. Belmont.  She worked the 6 year old from daybreak to dark.  First she cared for the chickens, the cows and sheep, and then housework from daybreak to dark.  These tasks were accompanied with whippings, slaps, very little food and no suitable clothes.  Her daughter Mary treaded her equally badly.  Mr. Belmont could not challenge the treatment by the women.  Only the sons, an invalid sister and an aunt tried to help her.  When Mr. Belmont insisted on sending her to school, the teacher recognized her potential and the students were friendly.  So it continued until Frieda was 18 years old.  Mrs. Belmont could not hold her any longer. 

              Frieda’s health was very fragile from 12 years of mistreatment but the elderly friends found work she was able to do. She met a man claiming to be an escaped slave, but he was really a charlatan from the West Indies; after marriage and a son, she discovered the truth.  She did find work making straw hats and then got involved in patent medicine to support herself.

           Our Nig appeared a year before Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s , swept the country and England.  The South desperately needed a market for its cotton and money to wage the Civil War. If Our Nig could have had the popular acclaim in England and America, telling the story of another side of black life,  could the English have supported the South and made the outcome of the Civil War and American history different?