Wilson, Harriet E. Adams

c. 1827
c. 1863

Author Harriet E. Wilson is believed to be the pseudonymous "Our Nig," who wrote what may have been the first novel by an African American published in the United States: 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 (1859). Some scholars also include her with Maria F. dos Reis, who in 1859 published a novel in Brazil, as the first two women of African descent to publish a novel in any language. "Our Nig's" work describes the life of Alfredo, a mulatto indentured servant, and condemns northern whites for a magnitude of racial prejudice and cruelty more commonly associated with slavery and the South. Three letters presumably written by friends of the novelist are appended to the novel, and it is because of the correspondences between the seemingly supplementary biographical information included there that the novel has been considered semi-autobiographical.

Despite these letters, however, little definite is known about Harriet Wilson's life. For instance, according to the 1850 federal census for the state of New Hampshire, a twenty-two-year-old "Black" (not "mulatto") woman originally from New Hampshire named Harriet Adams lived in the town of Milford with the family of Samuel Boyles, which in part corresponds to information included in the novel. This suggests that Wilson was born about 1827–1828. However, the 1860 federal census for the city of Boston, where Wilson moved in approximately 1855, and where she had her novel printed, lists a "Black" woman named Harriet E. Wilson born in Fredericksburg, Virginia in about 1807–1808.

The appended letters, as well as the end of Our Nig, provide details of the author's life between 1850 and 1860, when she lived in Massachusetts and worked as a weaver of straw hats. About 1851 Harriet Adams met Thomas Wilson, a fugitive slave from Virginia, and together they moved to Milford, New Hampshire, and married, perhaps on October 6, 1851. By the time Harriet Wilson gave birth in May or June of 1852 to their son, George Mason Wilson, Thomas Wilson had abandoned his wife and she had gone to a charity establishment in Goffstown, New Hampshire, the Hillsborough County Farm. Thomas Wilson returned and supported his wife and child for a short time, but then suddenly left them again and never returned.

Harriet Wilson, whose health had been bad since she was eighteen, was rescued by a couple who took in and cared for her and her son. When her health failed, Wilson began writing her novel in an effort to make money: "Deserted by kindred, disabled by failing health," she wrote in her preface to Our Nig, "I am forced to some experiment, which shall aid me in maintaining myself and child without extinguishing this feeble life." Little is known of Wilson's life after the publication of Our Nig, on September 5, 1859. Her son died in New Hampshire in February 1860, and Harriet Wilson died sometime between the death of her son and January 1870.

For more than a hundred years, Our Nig was barely noticed. In 1983, however, the critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. raised scholarly interest in Wilson and the novel by arranging to have the book republished, the text being an exact reprint of the 1859 edition.

See also Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Literature of the United States

Bibliography

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Introduction to 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, New York: Random House, 1983, pp. xi–lv.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Parallel Discursive Universes: Fictions of the Self in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig." In Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 125–163.

peter schilling (1996)