Writing Prompts for Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson

1. 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—this is the original title (see page 1). From all indications, Wilson’s narrative is the first novel published by an African American and the first novel published by a black woman in English. Considering this momentous work, why would it be lost to scholars for over 120 years? In reading Wilson’s narrative, do you see any reason why her biographical novel was lost to us until it was rediscovered and recovered by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1983? Or to restate the question, do you see any political indictments on a) the North, b) abolitionists and/or Christians, and c) freed or escaped black activists? Note what scholar Margo Jefferson wrote about Wilson:

Wilson was all too aware that, with New England's moral attention turned to
enslaved blacks down South, a tale of a black female indentured servant up North
was ill timed. I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life,
which the unprejudiced would declare unfavorable in comparison with treatment of
legal bondmen, she declared in a preface designed to ease advanced minds and
frail egos. I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good
anti-slavery friends at home.... I sincerely appeal to my colored brethren
universally for patronage, hoping that they will not condemn this attempt of
their sister to be erudite [scholarly], but rally around me a faithful band of
supporters and defenders.

Use examples from the text to argue your stand.

Work Cited: Margo Jefferson, "Down and Out and Black in Boston," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 236, No. 21, May 28, 1983, pp. 675-77.

2. How is this work different than the ones we’ve read thus far in this course? Why would Wilson write her story, a crucial testimony in the voice of a black American, in the form of a fiction rather than autobiography? Why use the 3rd person when speaking about her own history? Do you see Gothic elements? In what ways does it or does it not fall into the Gothic genre?

3. Do you see Wilson using elements of the sentimental and the melodramatic in her narrative? How so?

4. Henry Louis Gates writes, “It is the complex interaction of race-and-class relationships ... which Our Nig critiques for the first time in American fiction.” In this class, we’ve talked about how oppressed characters resisted oppression sometimes in subtle ways. In what ways does “Our Nig” resist oppressive authority? Consider what Our Nig has to say about race, class, and sex (gender) during "antebellum" (pre-Civil War) America? Why is it that women are so often, in our readings, the persecutor of other women?

5. In what ways does Frado/Wilson associate herself with personal power and salvation?

6. What does the text have to say about motherhood? Consider the many mothers in the text--beginning with "poor Mag." In other novels, we have the missing mother trope, but here, we have mothers, but what kind?