Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 169fact: a fascinating literary hybrid and elaborate artifice that exposes the real nature of
life under slavery, the mental and material shackles forced upon slaves, and the bru-
talities and blindness engendered in oppressors. It is not, perhaps, what the narrator
describes it as in her preface, a “record of plain unvarnished facts.” It is something
more and better than that: a revelation of the truth, emotional and imaginative –
“consistent with the writing of a woman,” as Hannah herself puts it. And bearing
witness to what it might mean to be both female and a slave.
Two other novels by African-Americans to appear before the Civil War were Blake;
or, The Huts of America (partly serialized in 1859, fully serialized in 1861–1862, and
issued as a book in 1870) and 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
(1859). Blake was the work of Martin Delany (1812–1885), a free black born in what
is now West Virginia. In 1852 Delany published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration,
and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, which argued for the emigra-
tion of blacks to a state of their own creation. Blake continued that argument. The
hero, Henry Blake, possesses many of the qualities Delany liked to identify with him-
self. He is “a black – a pure negro – handsome, manly, and intelligent” and “a man of
good literary attainments.” Born in Cuba, Blake is decoyed into slavery in Mississippi.
There, he marries another slave; and, when his wife is sold and sent away from him,
he runs away to begin organizing slave insurrections, first in the South and then in
Cuba. “If you want white man to love you, you must fight im!” an Indian whom he
meets in the course of his wanderings tells Blake. And, although Blake does not want
the white man to love him, he certainly wants to fight him. “From plantation to
plantation did he go,” the narrator observes of Blake, “sowing the seeds of future
devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave.” And for him the site
of his ambition, and future redemption, is Africa. There he hopes to “regenerate”
black civilization on the basis of economic success and entrepreneurial activity. The
message of Blake is, in fact, at once revolutionary and deeply conventional, in the
American grain. “I am for war – war against whites,” the hero tells his allies, while
insisting that they should resist amalgamation, reject life in the United States, and
return to their African homeland. But Blake also advises them, “With money you
may effect your escape at almost any time.... Money alone will carry you ... to
liberty”; and money, he points out, is the reward of enterprise. Delany was a father
of black nationalism who did not reject the American way but, rather, hoped to see
it pursued by African-Americans in Africa. The violence he embraced, and drama-
tized in his novel, was founded on a simultaneous alienation from and attachment
to the land where he was born.
Our Nig is very different. The first published novel by an African-American
woman, it is also the first in black American literature to examine the life of an
ordinary black person in detail. It was originally thought to be the work of a white,
and perhaps even male, writer. And it was only recently established that Harriet E.
Wilson (1808?–1870) was the author, drawing in part on personal experience. The
central character, Frado (short for Alfrado and also called “Our Nig”) is deserted by
her white mother after the death of her African-American father. She is abandonedGGray_c02.indd 169ray_c 02 .indd 169 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM