Wilson, Harriet E. Adams

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WILSON, Harriet E. Adams

Born circa 1828, Milford, New Hampshire; died circa 1865

Wrote under: "Our Nig" (novel copyrighted by Mrs. H. E. Wilson)

Daughter of Charles Adams (probably, though not proven); married Thomas Wilson, 1851; children: George M. Wilson

Harriet E. Adams Wilson was the first African American woman to publish a novel in the U.S. and one of the first two black women in the world to publish a novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. The work appeared on 5 September 1859, printed for Wilson by George C. Rang & Avery, Boston. The novel chronicles the hard life of a young woman named Frado, an indentured servant in an antebellum Northern household.

Our Nig is characterized by generic tension. At once autobiographical and fictional, it builds on two literary forms prevalent in Wilson's day: the slave narrative (a black male genre) and the sentimental novel (a white female genre). Wilson thus innovated a new literary form. In the view of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wilson not only provided "a 'missing link'…between the sustained and well-developed tradition of black autobiography and the slow emergence of a distinctive black voice in fiction," she " created the black woman's novel."

The details of Wilson's life remain sketchy. It is believed she was born in Milford, New Hampshire in 1827 or 1828, although some sources give a date of 1808. In 1850 she moved to Massachusetts where she worked as a "straw-sewer" and servant and met Thomas Wilson, whom she married in 1851. He deserted her soon thereafter, leaving her to bear and support their son alone. Perhaps she received an education like that of her at least semiautobiographical character Frado: nine months of elementary schooling over three years. Wilson fought illness and poverty all her life, and wrote Our Nig at least in part to remedy her precarious situation. Her preface explains: "Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health, I am forced to some experiment which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life." Wilson's son died six months after Our Nig was published. Details of Wilson's death are unknown.

Our Nig vanished from view for more than a century after its publication, perhaps because of its unflinching portrait of Northern racism and its rendering of a marriage between a white woman and a black man. Since its rediscovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and its republication in 1983, the text has been of special interest to scholars of African American autobiography and literature by African American women. Their work has focused on Wilson's expansion of the representation of black women beyond the conventions of the slave narrative and the sentimental novel and her novel's revelation of the impact of race, class, and gender on black women and their self-representations.

Bibliography:

Andrews, W. L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1988). Bell, B. W., The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987). Gates, H. L. Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1900). Jackson, B., A History of Afro-American Literature (1989). Jacobs, H. A., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1987). Pryse, M. and H. J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (1985). Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (1989). Wall, C. A., ed., Changing Our Own Words (1989).