Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900) is traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
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Wilson's autobiographical novel Our Nig was published in 1859.[1] Our Nig illustrates the injustice of indentured servitude in the antebellum northern United States. The novel fell into obscurity soon after its publication. In 1982, it achieved national attention when it was rediscovered by professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr..
In 2006, William L. Andrews, an English literature professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University, brought to light Julia C. Collins' The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865). Maintaining that Our Nig is more autobiography than fiction, they argue that The Curse of Caste should be considered the first fully fictional novel by an African American to be published in the U.S.[2][3] However, a number of novels and other works of fiction of the period were in some part based on real-life events or could somehow be considered autobiographical—some titles include Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall; Louisa May Alcott's Little Women; or even Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797). The first known novel by an African American is William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, originally published in the United Kingdom
Eric Garnder theorizes that Our Nig did not receive critical acclaim from abolitionists during its first publication because of the novel's inconsistencies with traditional slave narrative. The abolitionists may have consciously decided not to promote Our Nig because the novel recounts "slavery's shadow" in the North, fails to offer the promise of freedom in the North, and illustrates a protagonist that is assertive towards a white woman.[4]
In the article, “Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig,” Lois Leveen makes the argument that although the story is about a free black in the north, the “free black” is still oppressed. The “white house” represents, as Leveen puts it, “The model home for American society is built according to the spatial imperatives of slavery.” Even though Frado is a “free black” she is still treated like a lower class human being and is often beaten and berated as a slave would be. Leveen makes the argument that Wilson is trying to say that even the “free blacks” weren’t really free.
Harriet E. "Hattie" Adams Wilson was born in Milford, New Hampshire, the daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was the ideal.
Documentary research undertaken by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts convinced them that the Hayward family were the basis of the "Bellmont" family depicted in "Our Nig". (This was the family who held the young "Frado" in indentured servitude, abusing her physically and mentally from the age of six to eighteen. Their material was incorporated in supporting sections of the 2004 edition of Our Nig.)
After the end of her indenture, Hattie Adams (as she was then known), worked as a house servant and a seamstress in households in southern New Hampshire and in central and western Massachusetts. She married Thomas Wilson in Milford on October 6, 1851. Thomas Wilson had been traveling around New England giving lectures based on his life as an escaped slave, when he met Hattie Adams. Although he continued to periodically lecture in churches and town squares, he soon confided to her that he was never in bondage ("he had never seen the South") and that his "illiterate harangues were humbugs for hungry abolitionists" (these quotes are from page 68 of "Our Nig".)
Wilson abandoned Harriet soon after they married. Pregnant and ill, Harriet Wilson was sent to the Hillsborough County, New Hampshire Poor Farm in Goffstown, New Hampshire, where her only son, George Mason Wilson, was born. His probable birth date was June 15, 1852. Soon after George's birth, Thomas Wilson reappeared in her life and took her and her son away from the Poor Farm. Thomas Wilson returned to sea and died soon after. Harriet Wilson returned her son to the care of the Poor Farm.
She then moved to Boston, Massachusetts to seek a living for herself and her son. While in Boston, Harriet Wilson wrote Our Nig. On August 18, 1859, she copyrighted it, and a copy of the novel was deposited in the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. On September 5, 1859, the novel was published by George C. Rand and Avery, a publishing firm in Boston.
On February 16, 1860, her son George died in Milford at the Poor Farm, at the age of seven. In 1863, Harriet Wilson appeared on the "Report of the Overseers of the Poor" for the town of Milford.
After 1863, Harriet Wilson's whereabouts were unknown until 1867, when she was listed in the Boston Spiritualist newspaper Banner of Light as living in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. She subsequently moved across the Charles River to the city of Boston where she became known in Spiritualist circles as "the colored medium."
On September 29, 1870, Harriet Wilson married John Gallatin Robinson in Boston, Massachusetts. Robinson, an apothecary, was a native of Canada, having been born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Robinson was of English and German ancestry; he was also almost eighteen years Harriet Wilson's junior. They resided at 46 Carver Street between 1870 and 1877 when they appear to have separated. City directories after that date show both Wilson and Robinson in separate lodgings in Boston's South End. No record has been found of a divorce, but divorces were infrequent.
From 1867 to 1897, Mrs. Hattie E. Wilson was listed in the Banner of Light as a trance reader and lecturer. She was active in the local Spiritualist community, and she would give "lectures", either while entranced, or speaking normally, wherever she was wanted. She spoke at camp meetings, in theaters, and in private homes throughout New England; she shared the podium with such stalwarts as Victoria Woodhull and Andrew Jackson Davis. She traveled as far as Chicago as a delegate to the American Association of Spiritualists convention in 1870.
Mrs. Wilson delivered lectures on labor reform, and children's education; although the texts of her talks have not survived, newspaper reports imply that she often spoke about her life experiences, providing sometimes trenchant and often humorous commentary.
Closer to home, Hattie Wilson was active in the organization and maintenance of Children's Progressive Lyceums, the Spiritualist church equivalent to Sunday Schools; she organized Christmas celebrations; she participated in skits and playlets; at meetings she sometime sang as part of a quartet; she was also known for her floral centerpieces and the candies and confectioneries she would make for the children were long remembered.
When she was not pursuing Spiritualistic activities, Hattie Wilson was employed as a nurse and healer ("clairvoyant physician"). For nearly 20 years from 1879 to 1897, she was the housekeeper of a boardinghouse in a two-story dwelling at 15 Village Street (near the present corner of Dover [now East Berkeley Street] and Tremont Streets in the South End.) She rented out rooms, collected rents and provided basic maintenance.
Despite Wilson's active and fruitful life after "Our Nig", there is no evidence that she ever wrote anything else for publication.
On June 28, 1900, "Hattie E. Wilson" died in the Quincy Hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts. She was buried in the Cobb family plot in that town's Mount Wollaston Cemetery. Her plot number is listed as 1337, "old section."
At Wilson's death, her estranged husband Robinson, describing himself as a "capitalist", was living in the town of Pembroke, Massachusetts with a twenty-four-year-old woman named Izah Nellie Moore. Two years later they married.
The Harriet Wilson Project of Milford has raised funds to place the Harriet E. Wilson Memorial Statue in the town's Bicentennial Park. It was unveiled November 4, 2006 .