Harriet Wilsons Our Nig PDF Download

"Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black" is the tale of Frado, a mixed-race girl who was abandoned by her white mother after the death of her black father. Frado became the servant of the Bellmonts, a lower-middle- class white family in the free North, while slavery was still legal in the South. Frado's story is a tragic one; she suffered many abuses in the Bellmont household. After leaving the Bellmonts, Frado eventually married a black fugitive slave, who later abandoned her. Strangely enough, Frado's oppressors were Abolitionists, leading some readers who have studied "Our Nig" to claim that the book was written by a white and was a novel, rather than a true story. Nonetheless, many Black women who have served as "wage slaves" since abolition have found a spokesperson in Harriet Wilson. "Our Nig" will help the reader not just to pity such individuals, but to understand their ability to fight back with their minds. Through "Our Nig," Harriet Wilson gives a general idea of what a Negro's life in the North was like, and, in many cases, it was not much different from that of a slave in the South. Frado's mistress was brutal beyond measure. Many of the other family members were reasonably kind, though not kind of enough to put a stop to the abuse. Despite the abuse, Frado did manage to obtain a small measure of schooling and eventually became a Christian, though her mistress opposed it. Harriet Wilson drew from her own life experience in writing "Our Nig." She also combined and subverted two literary styles, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative. Though rather unsettling, "Our Nig" is of more value than books such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" because it is told from the point of view of the victim, as opposed to a sympathetic white.