170 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865in the home of the Bellmonts, where she becomes an indentured servant and is
treated cruelly by her white mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, who beats her, and her daughter
Mary Bellmont. The white male members of the household try to protect Frado, but
they are mostly ineffectual, and Frado has to learn to protect herself. Coming of age
at 18, she then leaves the Bellmonts and marries an African-American who claims to
be a runaway slave. She has a child by him, is then deserted and discovers his claim
is false, experiences poverty and bad health, the result of years of abuse, and is forci-
bly separated from her child. As the story of Frado unfolds, some narrative attention
is given to events in the Bellmont family, and to the adventures of the Bellmont
children as they grow up and marry. In conventional fashion, the subsequent lives of
various Bellmonts are even summarized in the closing paragraph of the novel. But
the emotional center throughout is the poor black girl whose nickname – given to
her, of course, by whites – provides the book with its main title. And, at the end of
the story, the pathos of her plight is emphasized. “Reposing on God, she has thus far
journeyed securely,” the narrator advises us. “Still an invalid, she asks your sympathy,
gentle reader.”
Our Nig is a fascinating hybrid. It is, first, an autobiography, a deeply personal
confession and a cry for help. Founded on some of the author’s own experiences, it
begins with her saying that she is “forced to some experiment” to maintain her child
and herself and ends with a straight appeal to the reader for support. Three
testimonials then follow the narrative proper, affirming its literal truth and
reinforcing the request for aid. Apparently written by whites to mediate the story for
white readers, they are distinctly patronizing in tone (one testimonial, for example,
refers to “our dark-skinned brethren”), and they are quite probably fictional – written
by Wilson herself. Not only an autobiography with a fictional addendum, Our Nig
follows the classic pattern of the slave narrative, so as to show that “slavery’s shadows
fall even there,” in the North among indentured servants and other victims of racism.
There is even a moment of confrontation reminiscent of the Narrative of Douglass,
when Frado stands up to Mrs. Bellmont. “Stop!” Frado cries, “strike me, and I’ll never
work a mite more for you.” “She did not know, before, that she had the power to ward
off assaults,” the narrator confides. “Her triumph ... repaid her for much of her
former sufferings”; and, after that, there was “the usual amount of scolding, but
fewer whippings.” Along with that, Our Nig is a sentimental fiction of sorts. There are
numerous moments of pathos involving Frado, courtship and deathbed scenes for
the Bellmonts, and a series of appeals to the gentle reader. Some of this sentimentalism
is clearly designed to move the audience to sympathy with the plight of the heroine.
But some is more complex in effect, since the dynamic of the plot relegates those
incidents that, in a conventional sentimental novel, would be central (that is, the
familial and love problems of a genteel New England family group), to the margins
of the narrative. There they become, more than anything, further evidence of the
white capacity for excluding and ignoring blacks – for sidelining black people just as
now, in turn, they, the whites, are sidelined. And not only a sentimental novel, Our
Nig is also a realist one. It focuses not so much on moments of particular brutality
(although there are certainly some of them), as on the bitter daily burden of blackGGray_c02.indd 170ray_c 02 .indd 170 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM