Hattie E. Wilson: We Are More than What We Survive

Wanda Sabir

Professor Anna Corwin

Women and World Religions, PARW 6548

December 23, 2024

Final Essay 1

Title: Hattie E. Wilson: We Are More Than What We Survived
Inscription: “Those Who Are Gone Have Never Really Left…the Dead Have a Pack with the Living” 

          Quirky Harriet Wilson is known for the excavation of her semi-autobiographical novel Our Nig (1859). Rescued from relative obscurity by scholars 150 years after its publication in 1982,  this first novel published by an African American woman troubled the abolitionist New England landscape. Rather than bring into discussion important themes Wilson raises, like child labor and indentured servitude or slavery by another name, New England abolitionists ignored topical variations and conveniently turned the dial.

          Hattie Wilson's story fictionalized in her novel, Our Nig, complicates things. Written at the height of the Anti-Slavery movement, her story centers an orphaned free Black child in Milford, Connecticut, a stronghold for the abolitionist movement and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Our Nig not only complicated things, it also introduced a narrative that highlights a state's child neglect. The free child was captive in a legal system without oversight. Connecticut had laws  which protected the rights of Black children and adults from abduction and involuntary servitude. Like our current foster care system, child welfare authorities had oversight of these homes and were to make routine checks on the children, to see they were safe, healthy and being treated well.  Wilson like her “Frado” was beaten, starved, went without proper clothing and shoes, was not sent to school regularly, and was given tasks beyond her physical capacity. She was just six when consigned to this bigoted white family and was not freed until she was eighteen. 

“[In Connecticut, where Harriet E. Wilson was born,] the earliest state law protecting children in employment was enacted in 1672. It authorized the state to terminate indenture or apprentice agreements if it found that a master was cruel or abused the servant or failed to properly clothe, feed or instruct him in business or trade. In 1821, the state prohibited children under 14 from binding themselves as apprentices or by indenture,” writes Laura Jordan, attorney, in “Development of Certain Employee Protections Report,” United Nations Association of the U.S.A., November 20, 1998. 

Wilson was born in 1825. These laws would have applied to her circumstances. When her mother abandoned her to the Hayward family, it was against the law for the family to employ her. 

         Another complication was the antislavery rhetoric that there was only one type of captivity, yet Hattie had survived a fate as bad or worse. Indentured servitude did not build wealth. Girls went from this situation into marriage or the poor house. Single females had no legal way to take care of themselves. They were employed as nurses or housekeepers. 

         Frado, the protagonist, had no allies. When she leaves she is weakened and ill. She marries and is abandoned after she gives birth. She writes a book to raise funds to take care of her son, but the child dies before it is published.  There were no book tours, reviews or readings. And then the book disappeared for 150 years until scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. found it and was intrigued enough to investigate its claims to have been written by a Black woman. The novel had been attributed to white male writers. A Black woman couldn't have written the tale.

  

        Sexual Healing. Hum

        Is Hattie Wilson's triumph one of sexual healing? She is the product of a white mother and an African father. Though recent scholarship questions her mother's heritage, Mag (Margaret Adams or Smith)  could have been a light-complexioned Black woman passing.  Hard on luck she traded her whiteness for legal room and board. Respectability was its cost. Then when her breadwinner died, she rids herself of the girl, her daughter, who was pretty, lighter brown, and smart her mother’s boyfriend stated.

          Mag left the child, promising to return, with a known “she-devil,” Mrs. Bellmont (real name Hayward), who can’t keep help.  Mag was killed a month later in a domestic row with her African boyfriend, though the official report was she died from alcohol poisoning.  

          Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig is such a historic contradiction. What we know about slavery in the north, and the subsequent abolitionist stronghold there is first challenged by Sojourner Truth's 1850 Narrative (Ulster County, New York) followed in 1859 by Wilson's novel (Milford, Connecticut). The hypocrisy exposed in Frado's little girl life is undeniably tragic. "[She] remarks wistfully to Jane Bellmont (Lucretia Hayward), "Even a white invalid has more value than a black supergirl.”  This hypocrisy is further validated by family clergy who abhor slavery as the worse evil yet look away from such evils by another name.

Methodology

Black Woman as God

          We start with the biographical history of the writer Harriet E. Wilson which includes the story of her parents and her indentured servitude, the topic of her semi-autobiographical novel. Included also are the politics of the day, slavery, abolition, racism and spirituality. In this paper, I will argue that one’s life does not always determine one’s options.  Even though Wilson’s body is centered in the discourse—its exploitation, lingering harm, and grief, she does not lose her agency. Wilson’s spirit is never trampled. Her little-girl-self practiced impermanence. She had to hold on to get through. 

            In Cynthia J. Davis’s "Speaking the Body's Pain: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig" (1993), the author explores how the trope “pain” is used to free Nig from bondage. Pain is a force that validates Nig’s life. The child’s survival verifies and validates her humanity. None of what happens to her is her fault. She was wronged. Wilson tells the antagonists about themselves in Our Nig.

        To read Our Nig, is to reread the Black woman body as an object or thing. I wonder if suffering is necessary for enlightenment. I can’t say I have found an answer.

          Black women know “Their Nig.” Perhaps God wanted to “identify with that segment of society that suffered the most, and is still suffering. . . . It is my feeling, [William Eichelberger says,] that God is manifesting Himself. . . in the form of a Black American Woman, as mother, as wife, as nourisher, sustainer and preserver of life, the Suffering Servant who is despised and rejected by men. . .”.    
           Even so, is it enough? Is the pain worth it--divinity, life after this life?

Standpoint

          Wilson asks in her public lectures that her people, African Americans be recognized as citizens with equal rights.  I am here as a witness.  I say—"I see you, sister. I hear you. I got you! In the parlance that is Black English, I’d say, “Hattie, Gurrrl. You are not alone. I am walking with you too!” 

            Now, she is walking with me. 

            Hattie pulls herself together. She is after all, a Black woman who has learned to be self-reliant, yet flexible—she knows how to ask for help and use available, though limited, resources like the poor farm, modern equivalent to homeless shelters. Connecticut would also supplement private citizens who cared for the indigent, with a stipend. Wilson was able to find a family to take care of her son George for a little while where he thrived. 

            Later Hattie finds hope in Spiritualism, a belief in ancestral wisdom, spiritual healing and activism.  Hattie's father and son were not gone. Their spirit beings visited her. Her father tells her kind stories about a mother who abandoned her. These loving, honored ancestors who appeared unbidden in her room soothed her grief.  Hattie then began sharing her spiritual medicine with other women, especially women, who'd lost their children, as she advocated for children's rights and against indentured servitude. She advised parents to not turn their children over to the state.  

          Through her work as a national speaker and healer, Hattie writes herself into the dominant conversation while she lives. She lives a long, full, rich, happy, adventurous life. Her lectures, speeches at conferences, trance readings, and participation in the Spiritualism organization as delegate,  secretary, and even critic, are widely covered by the Banner of Light, a popular Spiritualist newspaper.   Hattie threw large birthday parties, sang in a quartet, married a younger man, and then lived apart in what we'd call today, an open relationship—Spiritualists did not believe marriage was fair to women. It is as if Hattie restarts her life: post-Our Nig. She gave unresolved issues to the ancestors to take care of while she handled what her human resources allowed.

          150 years later, Hattie has her say. As we reread her work and learn of her life after bondage, we find encouragement. Frado lived. Though powerless, Wilson does not let her protagonist die, nor does her Frado expect anyone to come save her. After twelve years of wishful thinking, she knows she is her only hope.  Jesus . . . His dad, mother, Mary, no one is coming to save her. In Our Nig, Frado considers a heaven where she will see her tormentor, She-Devil, and decides to skip the (up)lift.  Wilson embodies a scripture she walks, breathes, and sings. Her ancestors live in her. The Black Woman is God!

Literature Review

           In P. Gabrielle Foreman's article, "The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” the nineteenth-century African American women's literature scholar, looks at the slave narrative and sentimental fiction through the narratives of Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs. Published in 1859 and 1861, both share themes of abandonment, self-preservation, poverty, captivity, exploitation and maternity. Both use writing as material spaciousness within hostile geography. Given the powerlessness these authors experience as economic captives whether this is chattel slavery or indentured servitude, the two women have limited choices when planning escape. Foreman says, "[I]f the word has a transparent relation to the soul only when it is not disrupted by the slave economy (read: when slavery as figured in both Jacobs and Wilson does not exist), it can function as the means through which to reveal a soul revived. The word, then, also holds a valorized position in the black female literary tradition, both in relation to spiritual and physical freedom". 

          Wilson wrote her novel to raise funds to take care of herself and her son. All the men in her life from her deceased father "Jim" to the fictional John Bellmont, father figure in the house she labored for twelve years to her son's father Thomas, do not support or protect her. They are silent.  Foreman says, "Even as Wilson invokes the sentimental convention of the abandonment of her protagonist, she inverts the gendered categories of silence and death in sentimental fiction— abandonment in Our Nig is achieved through death and silence of its male characters. 

         Nor do the abolitionists who oppose slavery in the South, yet allow it to flourish unchallenged in the North among their neighbors and peers acknowledge Wilson's plight.  However, unlike the genre fiction she crafts her life, Frado nor Wilson die. Instead, she "asserts her agency by choosing to tell her story.” 

          Both authors, Jacobs and Wilson refuse "romantic" conclusions. Wilson's novel restates her premise for support through book sales. Both authors are mothers who love(d) their children and "insist on the right to support their children and themselves within their own domestic and woman-centered economy." 

          Their texts: read: lives, remain inconclusive because such economic autonomy does not exist for nineteenth-century free Black women (nor do autonomous spaces.)

          Scholar, Jill Jones's "The Disappearing 'I' in Our Nig" shows how Harriet E. Wilson's narrative voice and shifting POV undermines her protagonist's agency, autonomy, and freedom.  Wilson's use of the conventional formulas: slave narrative, sentimental and Gothic fiction allow her Frado to endure unbelievable suffering yet fail in her ability to change the situation that traps her.  

Wilson's use of multiple perspectives in her tale, that allows its dissolution in the end, is not entirely unexpected. The fictive and actual collide.

       The reason Wilson's Frado is unable to dismantle the circumstances that bind her, is because these, what Jones calls "traditional structures" are inadequate to resolve issues as complex as race in America.  This construct is attached to a politics that denies Frado's personhood, human rights and power. 

          Her mistress was not singular, she was a legal system. Even sympathetic members of the household, read: nation, would not help the Black girl. All of them benefitted from the girl's labor. None of the fictionalized Bellmont family, no matter how sympathetic, wanted Frado freed.  Frado was a distraction, a convenient whipping post for She-Devil’s unaddressed childhood trauma. Her father beat her.  Wilson's act of writing, was a way to leave the past behind as she created a new wealth stream. It failed as her resistance to attempts to extinguish her soul threatened to overwhelm her human resources. 

          Jones writes that a protagonist's role is one of conflict-struggle to victory, yet Frado gets no reward. Nothing changes, so is this a novel?

"Freedom of choice and the ability to grow, socially and personally, are prerequisites for a novel's protagonist. For this reason, [Myra] Jehlan states, a slave cannot be a protagonist. Politically, the slave 'is deprived of his birthright to become himself; in novelist terms, he is denied his own plot' (387)". 

         Emotionally, psychologically and physically spent, there is an urgency written into Our Nig's conclusion. The "I" voice, P. Gabrielle Foreman says "again asserts itself . . . as [Wilson] establishes her explicit relation to her own story. Our Nig can be read as an autobiography." 

          Wilson's protagonist, weak and unable to care for herself, relies on care from others. Survival takes a lot of energy.  The six-year-old might have had ideas of rebellion, but to actually do something was not feasible if at all possible. What child can resist adult abuse? After twelve years what once felt hard to endure is less so. Human beings can adapt to anything.

       Frado possessed an animate interior that struggled with her often unbearable circumstances. Frado does eventually want to know God. However, what kind of God is it that would allow her tormentor access to its kingdom? She wants none of that.

          Barbara A. White’s “Our Nig and the She-Devil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the “Belmont” Family” (1993) reveals background on the fictional Belmont family, whose real surname is Hayward. White also gives more information on the protagonist Frado’s parentage and place of birth, as well as information on her son and his father. What is most interesting is the abolitionist ties to the Hayward (fictional Belmont) family. Evidence here supports Wilson’s scathing critique of abolitionist response to her circumstances. 

          In Lois Leveen's "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig" (2001), the author personifies Frado's physical space within the "two story white house, north" where she lives as indentured servant (read slave) until she escapes. Wilson's autobiographical novel is 19th century Afro-futurism meets Gothic slave narrative and sentimental fiction genres. Nothing could be darker than an attic so cramped a bed fit only in its center, a space so tiny its occupant would soon be unfit long before her usefulness expired (outgrow the space if not her usefulness). When Jack, Mrs. Bellmont's son tells his mother Frado will outgrow the attic, she replies when the girl does, it will mark the end of her service. This pending expulsion as the child grows older is one that Leveen states, "constructs the house as something that [Frado] must earn not solely through her labor but also by embodying physical confinement, by denying herself full adulthood and restricting herself enough to fit within the racially and class-constructed spatial limitations imposed upon her."  

          As a free born child, Frado challenges her position. Wilson challenged her position too by becoming a published writer. Our Nig is the result. Leveen says for free Black people the only jobs available were unskilled menial labor. Conveniently forgotten was the skilled labor enslaved Africans performed. Africans created and mastered so many technologies in the New World.

          However, all the work available to a child, later adult Black woman was domestic service.   Leveen writes, "Wilson's authorial strategy in depicting the house of oppression contests the very assumptions that serve as the foundation for the racial and spatial practices in that house"   House is metaphorically this nation, a nation at war over the legality of slavery. Wilson's Our Nig is Leveen states, "a critique of the hypocrisy of abolitionist racism.”  Most Northern whites believed Africans an inferior race. Mrs. Bellmont's daughter Mary does not want the child near her which is why Frado is housed above the kitchen in a separate wing of the house.” 

          This separation is philosophical because the mixed-race child could be Mary's sister or playmate. Instead, violence is the temperament inside the storied house until Fardo resists (567). Abandoned by her assumed white mother, Frado cultivates allies within and without the storied white house.

          How her Black body navigates such terrain is why Our Nig is such an important counternarrative. When Wilson leaves indentured servitude, marries, has a child, becomes a doctor or spirit medium . . . her early formative experience – abandonment, indentured servitude, and its emotional and physical violence shape Wilson's (Frado's) resolve to discard a belief system that denied her agency and rights based on her racial presentation, gender, class and lineage.

          Laveen suggests Wilson's literary return to the scene of distress, suffering and subjugation to "ensure she will not have to occupy such houses again, is an attempt to find [economic] means for the free [B]lack woman to be at home in nineteenth-century America. Like classic slave narratives of this same period, Our Nig expands the genre as fiction. It is an important heroine's journey (578).

Conclusion 

          Hattie Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth and other nineteenth-century African women free born or formerly enslaved writers had to use pseudonyms, change character names, places and alter facts just enough so the guilty could parenthetically hide in their documents (P. Gabrielle Foreman). The astute authors left enough clues or markers so that researchers could use decoys to find the truth (White). Wilson used sentimental fiction, the slave narrative and Gothic literary forms to craft her story. The guilty parties were respected members of the antebellum movement. In fact, Wilson is born in Milford, Connecticut, a stop on the Underground Railroad.  There were major abolitionist conferences there too. Her publisher was an abolitionist. Wilson's father and his child were of a part of a literal handful of African Americans in the segregated town. It wouldn't have been hard to locate the white family that tormented the orphaned child as Barbara A. White has done (1993).

          Rebecca Hayward or she-devil as Frado calls her, has "strong abolitionist connections." Not only does her pastor, Reverend Humphrey Moore, perform her marriage in 1806. He was elected into the House of Representatives in 1840 and to the New Hampshire Senate in 1841 on an antislavery ticket.  She-Devil is also related to the Hutchinson Family Singers who "gained international recognition in the late 1840s and 1859s as a group of folksingers who supported progressive causes, most notably abolition, women's rights and temperance; they were the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Pete Seeger or an Odetta". 

        She-Devil’s son, Jonas, a Baltimore entrepreneur and abolitionist, hosted the singing group on a tour in New England in January and February in 1844.  Jonas wasn't the only hypocritical racist Wilson accuses in her Our Nig. White asks if Hayward's insistence that Frado not attend church because she might be influenced by antislavery teachings. Wilson is not blind to the hypocrisy that surrounded her.

        The young writer, desperate to make a living to support herself and her baby boy, found little to no support for her publication. It was too embarrassing, even fictionalized to acknowledge Wilson's claims, so both the writer and her brave treatise were buried along with her seven-year-old son, George, who does not survive. Scholar, P. Gabrielle Foreman says, Wilson's is the only record of African indentured servitude from that era. Hers is also the first novel published by an African American in the nation. 

          Wilson wrote herself into existence after her body, broken and feeble at eighteen, survived the tortures she recounts in her thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Our Nig (1859). 

          150 years later the text is rediscovered, and Wilson shakes off accumulated dust, free at last! She proclaims. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. authenticates his discovery, at a time when twentieth-century Black women writers are popular. The two eras meet.  Alice Walker says, "'She sat up all night reading and pondering the enormous significance of Harriet Wilson's [work]. It is as if we'd just discovered Phillis Wheatley--or Langston Hughes.'" 

         It is as if Wilson, a Spiritualist, planned this precise moment. And why not? It is entirely possible. In Our Nig, Mrs. Bellmont tells her husband that Frado should not be reading the bible. That the scripture will make her unfit for work. This is what many slaveholders thought too. Mr. Bellmont tells his wife to let the child read the scripture if it brings her comfort. She-Devil says to her husband that the girl might get ideas in her head that she might “turn pious nigger and preach to white folks”.  The irony is Wilson did preach to white folks in the thousands and was well-loved and respected for her piety and graciousness then and now. 

Bibliography

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Jones, Jill. “The Disappearing “I” in Our Nig.” Legacy 13, no. 1 (1996): 38–53. 

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Leveen, Lois. "Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." African American Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 561-580.

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