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Article Excerpt
Much more than a straightforward document supporting black uplift and condemning northern racism, showing "that slavery's shadows fall even there." Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) replicates the anticapitalist rhetoric common to proslavery propaganda of the era. Wilson fully exploited proslavery's best arguments against the North for her own rhetorical purpose of exposing northern racism. She would have been attracted to such arguments not only because they aptly described her own life as a New England mulatta and indentured servant, but also because they were extremely salable in the form of popular fiction, thus supporting her objective of selling the novel to feed herself and her ailing son. I do not discredit Wilson, but show how resourceful she was in appropriating for her own antiracist polemical purpose the most potent argument the South had against the North at the time in George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South (1854), Cannibals All, or Slaves without Masters (1857), and Caroline Rush's North and South, or Slavery and its Contrasts (1852), which bring our Our Nig's anti-market tropes.
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Zora Neale Hurston once said that "slavery is the price I paid for civilization" (1928, 216). Her proud rejection of white pity for the black past is inspiring, yet it nonetheless draws controversy among my students on the first day of Literatures of the African Peoples at the University of Iowa. Is Hurston's refusal to lament her slave past an oblique justification of slavery? The ensuing discussion considers how she honors rather than degrades the slave labor of her ancestors. She finds dignity in labor, not for its own sake, but for the ennobling and enlightening dimensions of the "civilization" it helps build. Yet a sense of uneasiness lingers as students struggle with the resonance between Hurston's contention in her essay and antebellum southern arguments for slavery as an essential ingredient of civilization. The challenge is to show students how the replication of southern slaveholders' arguments not only maintains racial dignity, but bursts with a pride diametrically opposed to white southern ideology.
Other African American writers, particularly those with opinionated political critiques, have similarly been faced with the risk of playing into the hands of a racist opposition. Richard Wright employs potentially damaging stereotypes of black male sexuality in Native Son, while Booker T. Washington went so far as to assert in Up from Slavery that slavery was a "school" for African Americans. Perhaps the most striking example of this dynamic appears in Harriet Wilson's fictionalized autobiography, 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). Indeed, we cannot understand this pattern without considering Our Nig, the first in the African-American literary tradition to employ this tactic.
Framed in the context of the prominent anticapitalist arguments of its time. Our Nig shocks students much in the way Hurston's quote does, and not just for the rare glimpse it offers into the northern "free" black experience. Much more than a straightforward document supporting black uplift and condemning northern racism, showing "that slavery's shadows fall even there," the novel replicates the anticapitalist rhetoric common to proslavery propaganda of the era. My purpose is to examine the uncanny continuities between Wilson and the peculiar institution's most prominent apologists who depict northern economic conditions, especially for free blacks and women, as cruel and uninhabitable. Certainly, Wilson never intended to defend southern slavery, and never embraced the presumed domestic warmth of its purported benevolent paternalism. Thus, I do not discredit Wilson, but cast her in a realistic light by showing how resourceful she was in appropriating for her own antiracist polemical purpose the most potent argument the South had against the North at the time.
Proslavery works such as George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South (1854), Cannibals All, or Slaves without Masters (1857), and Caroline Rush's North and South, or Slavery and its Contrasts (1852) bring out Our Nig's anti-market tropes (1) by their striking similarity to Wilson's own language, particularly those which attack capitalism's excessive individualism that prioritizes exploitation and domination over human sympathy. This rhetorical pattern, in both Our Nig and proslavery writing, depicts such savage self-interest as yielding to godlessness, neglect, physical abuse and--the biggest threat--severe poverty and death by starvation. This essay first considers Wilson's efforts to write for survival in a political context indifferent to her story to illustrate the historical condition that inspired the rhetorically damning portraits of the market in proslavery propaganda, white New England literature, and Our Nig. My discussion moves between Wilson's novel and the proslavery texts in order to illustrate how the ferocious faces of the free market in her fiction ironically complement the domestic bliss Fitzhugh finds in slavery. Wilson actively engaged the literary marketplace, fully exploiting proslavery's best arguments against the North for her own rhetorical purpose of exposing northern racism. Wilson would have been attracted to such arguments not only because they aptly described her own life as a New England mulatta and indentured servant, but also because they were extremely salable in the form of popular fiction, thus supporting her objective of selling the novel to feed herself and her ailing son.
The Economic and Political Conditions of Our Nig's Composition
Out Nig's resemblance to proslavery writings has received little attention other than Joy Jordan-Lake's (2005) treatment of the novel as a reaction to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). While Jordan-Lake's study does not share my locus on Wilson's anticapitalist bent, its method of showing Our Nig's continence with proslavery has been critically underrepresented for reasons similar to my own. Pairing a black northern author like Wilson with proslavery southern writers appears "unnatural" and disturbing, and potentially "frustrates our desire for empowering narratives," a general tendency Lois Loveen finds in Our Nig (2001, 580).
I situate Our Nig in the history of economic commentary alongside--paradoxically enough--figures racially and politically averse to Wilson's plight who nonetheless wielded the same rhetorical weapons against capitalism. (Wilson even overlaps with pro-feudalist arguments that resonate with socialists and communitarians like Orestes Brownson and the Transcendentalists, whom I discuss later). I do so not to belittle Wilson, but to point out the necessary constraints within which any antebellum black woman writer had to operate if she wanted to criticize northern racism and hypocrisy. It is instructive to find that arguments with repellent racist or hierarchical components can contain highly persuasive analyses about the limitations of capitalism and individualism. Such arguments highlight aspects of the US that more mainstream narratives were afraid to recognize. Our Nig thus functions as a window into the constellation of anticapitalist thought in the antebellum United States. It also deepens our appreciation of the central role of anti-market rhetoric in antebellum African American writing as a means for exposing racism. Frederick Douglass's famous "trust no man" passage toward the end of his Narrative lamenting his new status as runaway slave and thus stolen commodity in the "free" North is but one example (1968).
The main rhetorical modes available for a New England mulatta indentured servant like Wilson to discuss the issue of northern racism in antebellum America were the slave narrative, (2) pro-slavery / anti-capitalist writing, and the domestic novel. (3) Significantly, these three genres treated race at the time almost exclusively in terms of the system of organized slavery in the South. Wilson's preface to Our Nig attempts to situate itself in relation to slavery by claiming "my mistress was wholly imbued with southern principles" but quickly allows that her attack on racist northern labor conditions may potentially play into the hands of proslavery arguments (1983, 3). Her grisly portrait of free life in the North, she admits, could appear "unfavorable in comparison" thus reflecting "shame in our good anti-slavery friends at home" that might "palliate slavery at the South": words so clearly conforming to the pattern of proslavery argumentation that they are heartbreaking in their attempt to distance themselves from it (3). George Fitzhugh would have relished the opportunity to exploit Wilson's testimony for his propaganda in this regard (4) (carefully avoiding, as one might imagine, the novel's evidence of black educational and spiritual potential in the process). Fortunately, the book remained mainly in the hands of school children and others in and around Milford, New Hampshire, and safe from southern exploitation.
Critic Eric Gardner's historical data, if not his conclusions, directly support this view, suggesting "not only that abolitionists knew about the book but that they may have consciously chosen not to publicize it" (1993, 227). He explains that the printing of this novel by a black woman in 1859 Boston, the center...
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