“To Demand Your Sympathy and Aid”: Our Nig and the Problem of No Audience

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.... Thus it is in the United States the prejudice rejecting the Negroes seems to increase in proportion to their emancipation, and inequality cuts deep into mores as it is effaced from the laws. -Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) The effort to speak of the audience of a writer who, in her own time, gained almost no audience at all, is obviously problematic. But when the text explicitly claims for itself its desire to sell in the marketplace, it seems we are invited to interrogate both its potential contemporary audience and the reader constructed within the text, as well as the relationship between the two. This is the case with Our Nig, and Harriet Wilson faced the daunting challenge of addressing an audience she had good reason to doubt. Wilson took up the challenge and crafted a novel intent upon selling it, and to do so, she constructed a relationship with the reader within her text that sought to win the reader's sympathies though she crossed the boundaries of acceptable discourses on race found in any commercial antebellum literary market. However, examining Our Nig within a larger context of racial discourses beyond the commercially viable suggests a new means for understanding the complicated relationships between this text and its contemporary readers. Critics commonly treat Our Nig as something of an anomaly because of its long obscurity, questioning why it was that such a text never entered into the public anti-slavery dialogue though it was printed in Boston in 1859. I want to suggest that Our Nig is indeed an anomaly of sorts, but not in this regard. A look at the antebellum black press and other African-American novelists of her time demonstrates that Wilson was not at all alone in her efforts to redirect public attention from the narrow confines of pro and anti-slavery writings to a broader perspective of issues facing black Americans which were not to be solved by emancipation. These writings, and as a result, this larger context of race issues, have not been adequately explored and so Our Nig appears (wrongly) a singular, and (correctly) threatening, challenge to the status of prominent antebellum discourses on race. The anomaly that Our Nig does represent, however, is evident in the way Wilson chose to construct her challenge to prevailing and acceptable racial discourses. Mary Louise Pratt's definition of "autoethnography" as "instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer's own terms," proves useful in understanding Wilson's project in Our Nig (7). Our Nig makes use of the dominant culture's literary strategies in order to subvert several prevailing ideologies, specifically by denying agency to her central protagonist, Frado, and by denying the efficacy of "Sentimental Abolitionism" (Douglass' Monthly 339). In this way, sentimental novel and slave narrative conventions are engaged and turned against their own predominant ethos. We see in Our Nig a "partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror" that subtly critique mainstream belief systems, particularly regarding racial identity, individual agency, and American freedom (Pratt 7). The often noted irony of Wilson's title and self-naming, "our nig," is one obvious example of such an "appropriation" that redefines the "conqueror's" term. Because there was a multitude of literary markets available at mid-century, as Richard Brodhead has written of in Cultures of Letters, any discussion of the forces and mediations between writer and reader needs to be specifically contextualized. Thus, we can examine the market in terms of writings on slavery and abolitionism, for which there was a large audience; at the same time, there was also a strong market for pro-slavery and racist writing. …