Early Novel Written By Free Black Woman Called Out Racism Among Abolitionists

By Joe Rodolico, NPR

Editor’s note: This report contains a racial slur.

Here’s one thing historians know to be true about Harriet Wilson: Some indomitable part of her spirit allowed her to survive a life on the margins of American society.

In 1859, Wilson published a book that she gave a provocative title: Our Nig. That name is a derivative of a racist nickname given to the book’s protagonist, a little girl of mixed race who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family. The girl is tortured by the family matriarch, beaten and forced to sleep in a frigid crawl space. Even the kindest members of the family call her “nig.”

“Some of the things she wrote in her book were shocking,” says JerriAnne Boggis, founder and director of The Harriet Wilson Project. “But it’s not any more shocking than anything that you didn’t know about slavery. It was shocking that it happened in the North because that’s not our story. Our story is the abolitionist movement.”

Wilson’s book called out racism among abolitionists in the North. It’s also emblematic of how important pieces of African American history can be forgotten — and then rediscovered.

In the novel, Wilson did not say much about the story’s setting or about herself. But Our Nig‘s long subtitle gave clues historians would later pick apart: “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North; Showing That Slavery’s Shadow Falls Even There.“

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