Harriet Wilson Our Nig Analysis

The title page of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig is significant because it reveals Wilson’s desire to challenge the Northern belief that they are free of the sins of the South’s inhumane institution of slavery. Her decision to title the text “Our Nig” shows that the text serves not as an individual’s tale of life as a black person in the North, rather it is the tale of the life any black person in the North. In using “Nig” – derived from a racial epithet used by whites in reference to any black person – Wilson generalizes the experiences described in her text as belonging not only to “Nig” in her novel, but to any “Nig” in the North. Her use of “Our” implicates her Northern readers as having been part of, if not the perpetrator of, the mistreatment of the character in the text. “Our” denotes that “Nig” was a piece of property that was under someone else’s ownership. Wilson is
Wilson also calls her text “Sketches from the Life of a Free Black” and says that it is authored by “Our Nig”. This further shows the contradiction in Northerner attitudes. There is an obvious contradiction in the usage of “free black” and “Our Nig” in that there is no true freedom for someone who is labelled as “ours”, a piece of property to be possessed. Wilson shows that Frado’s freedom and her identity as a human was stripped from her, just as a slave is stripped of theirs, to become property owned by someone else. Frado is born to “free” parents and is a “free black” but under the Bellmont’s she experiences the life of a slave as she is mistreated and treated as mere property to be used for the Bellmont’s benefit and profit.
Wilson’s description “Two-Story White House” signals a duality that exposes the racism she faces in the abolitionist North. In her text, Wilson touches upon two ideologies – freedom and