Our Nig; Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black PDF Download

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513268201
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 65

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Book Description
Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. Published anonymously, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is considered the first novel by an African American to be published in North America, having been rediscovered by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1981. Based on Wilson’s own experience as a free black forced into indentured servitude in New Hampshire, the novel critiques the racism and indifference of white Northerners and abolitionists who claim to oppose slavery while upholding prejudice and injustice against African Americans. Abandoned by her white mother following the death of her father, a free black man, Frado is raised as an indentured servant on the Bellmont farm. The Bellmonts, a middle-class family, initially believe Frado has been dropped off by her mother for the day, but when Mag fails to appear for several days, they realize the girl has been left in their care. Unwilling to raise her as one of their own, the Bellmonts immediately put her to work in their kitchen. Although she is treated kindly by their son Jack, Frado is frequently beaten by Mrs. Bellmont, who resents having the young mixed-race girl in her house and sees her work as an intrusion on her own housekeeping duties. Suffering under Mrs. Bellmont’s abuses, Frado longs to escape. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3732661113
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original: Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486136914
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
"I sat up most of the night reading and pondering the enormous significance of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." — Author Alice Walker This seminal autobiographical novel, originally published in 1859, is believed to have been the first by an African-American woman. Harriet Wilson's compelling story describes the life of a mulatto girl who, after the death of her mother, is exploited first by a terrifying Northern family for whom she worked and then by an opportunistic husband. A classic of African-American literature, Our Nig has made an enduring contribution to understanding the lives of free blacks in the nineteenth century. A fascinating combination of slave narrative and sentimental novel, the story traces the hardships and suffering of Frado, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in Massachusetts and spends much of her destitute life wandering through New England. A clear and accurate account of race relations and perceptions of race in the antebellum North, Our Nig is essential reading for students of African-American history and culture.

Author: Harriet Wilson
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781494781064
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit. The female child of a white female outcast and a black freeman, Harriet Wilson gives a detailed account of what it was like being raised by a white family in the pre-Civil War North of the United States (a household where she was abandoned by her mother at 3). This biography gives a general idea of what a Negro's life in the North was like -- and it was not much different from that life of a slave in the South. The mistress of the house was brutal beyond measure, but many of the other family members were reasonably kind (though not kind of enough to put a stop to the abuse), and it makes one shudder to think of what could have happened in a family who had nothing but Negro-haters in it. Still, Wilson recounts how she got a small measure of schooling, and how she eventually became a Christian (something which the lady of the house -- a Christian herself -- opposed) and her eventual marriage. An upsetting story, it is nevertheless of much more value than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it was told from the point of view of the victim and not a sympathetic white.

Author: R.J. Ellis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004487689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Addressed to all readers of Our Nig, from professional scholars of African American writing through to a more general readership, this book explores both Our Nig’s key cultural contexts and its historical and literary significance as a narrative. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern ‘free black’, yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson’s book combines several different literary genres – realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our Nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our Nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class. This study explores how, as a result, Our Nig tells a series of disturbing two-stories about America’s constitutional guarantee of ‘freedom’ and the way these relate to Frado’s farm life.

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781492311560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 74

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Book Description
First published in 1859, Our Nig is an autobiographical narrative that stands as one of the most important accounts of the life of a black woman in the antebellum North. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story about the resilience of the human spirit. This edition incorporates new research showing that Wilson was not only a pioneering African-American literary figure but also an entrepreneur in the black women's hair care market fifty years before Madame C. J. Walker's hair care empire made her the country's first woman millionaire.

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: New York : Random House
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
"A fascinating fusion of two literary modes of the 19th century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in 19th century Massachusetts."--Cover.

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 1400031206
Category : African American women
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Our Nig is a classic of African American Literature that has proven to be an enduring contribution to our understanding of free blacks in the nineteenth century. Originally published in 1859, it was neglected for over a hundred years and is now the subject of renewed scholarly interest. A fascinating fusion of two literary modes of the nineteenth century--the sentimental novel and the slave narrative--Our Nig traces the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl who grows up as an indentured servant to a white Massachusetts family. And now, as new scholarship sheds light on the author's life, our appreciation for Our Nig is enhanced. With a new afterword by Barbara A. White.

Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781978201842
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Harriet E. Wilson (March 15, 1825 - June 28, 1900) is considered the first female African-American novelist, as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African-American novel published in the United States. The novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, published for the first time in 2002, may have been written before Wilson's book. Born a free person of color (free Negro) in New Hampshire, Wilson was orphaned when young and bound until the age of 18 as an indentured servant. She struggled to make a living after that, marrying twice; her only son George died at the age of seven in the poor house, where she had placed him while trying to survive as a widow. She wrote one novel. Wilson later was associated with the Spiritualist church, was paid on the public lecture circuit for her lectures about her life, and worked as a housekeeper in a boarding house. Biography Born Harriet E. "Hattie" Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, she was the mixed-race daughter of Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry, and Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels." After her father died when Hattie was young, her mother abandoned Hattie at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer "connected to the Hutchinson Family Singers." As an orphan, Adams was bound by the courts as an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society at the time to arrange support and education for orphans. The intention was that, in exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could later make her way in society. From their documentary research, the scholars P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts believe that the Hayward family were the basis of the "Bellmont" family depicted in Our Nig. (This was the family who held the young "Frado" in indentured servitude, abusing her physically and mentally from the age of six to eighteen. Foreman and Pitts' material was incorporated in supporting sections of the 2004 edition of Our Nig.) After the end of her indenture at the age of eighteen, Hattie Adams (as she was then known), worked as a house servant and a seamstress in households in southern New Hampshire, and in Marriage and family Adams married Thomas Wilson in Milford on October 6, 1851. An escaped slave, Wilson had been traveling around New England giving lectures based on his life. Although he continued to lecture periodically in churches and town squares, he told Hattie that he had never been a slave and that he had created the story to gain support from abolitionists. Wilson abandoned Harriet soon after they married. Pregnant and ill, Harriet Wilson was sent to the Hillsborough County, New Hampshire Poor Farm in Goffstown, where her only son, George Mason Wilson, was born. His probable birth date was June 15, 1852. Soon after George's birth, Wilson reappeared and took the two away from the Poor Farm. He returned to sea, where he served as a sailor, and died soon after. As a widow, Harriet Wilson returned her son George to the care of the Poor Farm, where he died at the age of seven on February 16, 1860. She could not make enough money to support them both and provide for his care while she worked. After that, Wilson moved to Boston, hoping for more work opportunities. On September 29, 1870, Wilson married again, to John Gallatin Robinson in Boston. An apothecary, he was a native of Canada born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Robinson was of English and German ancestry; he was nearly 18 years younger than Wilson. From 1870-1877, they resided at 46 Carver Street, after which they appear to have separated....

Author: R. J. Ellis
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042011571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Harriet E. Wilson's Our nig (1859) is a startling tale of the mistreatment of a young African American mulatto woman, Frado, living in New England at a time when slavery, though abolished in the North, still existed in the South. Frado, a Northern free black', yet treated as badly as many Southern slaves of the time, is unforgettably portrayed as experiencing and resisting vicious mistreatment. To achieve this disturbing portrait, Harriet Wilson's book combines several different literary genres - realist novel, autobiography, abolitionist slave narrative and sentimental fiction. R.J. Ellis explores the relationship of Our nig to these genres and, additionally, to laboring class writing (Harriet Wilson was an indentured farm servant). He identifies the way Our nig stands as a double first: the first separately-published novel written in English by an African American female it is also one of the first by a member of the laboring class about the laboring class.