Frado is frequently unwell due to years of abuse and neglect. Upon leaving that place, however, her life gets no easier. While Frado fervently hopes that one of the Bellmont boys will take her away to work in their homes, she ends up staying for the full period of servitude with Mrs.

Bellmont and protect Frado, but they are frequently away and so Frado must suffer constant abuse. Aunt Abby tries to teach her religion and bring her to church services. Bellmont, his sons Jack and George, sickly daughter Jane, and sister Aunt Abby are kind to Frado and generally treat her with generosity and compassion. The other members of the family, however, have more loving and humane feelings for Frado. What is clear is that Frado is treated similarly to a slave - whipped, beaten and viewed as somehow less than human by Mrs. In her own introduction, Wilson indicates that she has left out some of the more egregious examples of abuse out of concern for the effect such revelations would have on the abolitionist movement in the North. The Bellmonts are a fairly well off farming family, and while living under their roof, Frado is able to get a few years of education but she is horribly abused by the matriarch Mrs. She was “a beautiful mulatto” who, after the death of her father and remarriage of her mother, was abandoned with the Bellmont family as an indentured servant. Gates sees it as a mix of the “sentimental novel” and “slave narrative.” The protagonist, a child named Frado, is the daughter of a white woman and a black man. As novels go, “Our Nig” is a bit unorthodox. Scholars have debated whether it should properly be called a novel at all since it seems to be quite clearly the story of Harriet Wilson herself. Gates in his introduction refers to “Our Nig” as an autobiographical novel. That alone would make it worth the read, but further historical research on Harriet Wilson reveals that the story behind the publication of the novel is every bit as interesting and revelatory about racism in the United States as Wilson’s story itself.

Thus, “Our Nig” is the first novel published by an African American and the first by an African American woman in the US. Previously, it had been assumed that the story was written by a white woman but after poring over historical documents and putting the pieces together, Gates found evidence that Harriet Wilson, who had lived in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, was an impoverished African American woman who published her own novel as a way to support herself and her child. In the early 1980s, the eminent scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., established that the 1859 novel entitled “Our Nig” was in fact written by an African American woman named Harriet E. Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even ThereĮdited by Henry Louse Gates, Jr. Full title: Our Nig or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North.

Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson