Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial, and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson's Our Nig.

Harriet Wilson's 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) is considered to be the first novel published by an African American woman. Set in a New England farming village, Our Nig tells the story of Frado, the child of an African American father, Jim, and a white mother, Mag. After the death of her husband Jim, Mag decides, along with the black man who becomes her new lover, to abandon her six-year-old daughter. Frado is left at the house of the white Bellmont family, where she is taken in as an indentured servant. Within this space, Frado is subject to the physical and verbal abuse of the tyrannical Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary and to the apparent kindness of other members of the Bellmont family, particularly Mary's brothers Jack and James, their invalid sister Jane, and their Aunt Abby. The narrative follows Frado's trials, tracing her development to adulthood, when she leaves the Bellmont household, only to find she is too physically incapacitated from her treatment there to support herself. The final chapter documents Frado's marriage to a black man, the birth of her child, and her husband's abandonment of her, concluding with an appeal to the reader for support. Together with the preface, this appeal suggests that Frado, the narrator, and the author are one, and that Our Nig was produced in a final effort on the part of "Frado" to achieve financial security.

This essay considers the effect of dwelling in a house marked by divisions of class and race on both Frado and the white Bellmonts, and it probes how Wilson's authorial strategy in depicting the house of oppression contests the very assumptions that serve as the foundation for the racial and spatial practices in that house. Our Nig exposes how the racial dynamics of slavery are replicated in interracial encounters outside of slavery, in part through the spatializing of hierarchies of power within the private home. Analyzing this fictional dwelling reveals that social constructions of race are articulated, enforced, or challenged through the occupation of specific domestic spaces. My reading begins with a delineation of the assumptions about Frado's literal and metaphorical place in the house, contextualized in terms of the history of racialized domestic service and in terms of competing nineteenth-century racial ideologies about how blackness serves whiteness. In addition to examining the physical spaces of t he house, as described in the novel, I consider how these multiple spaces produce multiple narratives about Frado and the Bellmonts. Locating the house in a conjunction of ideologies of race and labor circulating in the mid-nineteenth century, I then consider how Wilson's position differs from Frado's, as the author dwells literarily on this house of oppression in order to liberate herself from the very forces of domination to which the novel's protagonist is subjected.

Our Nig reveals not simply that the shadows of the house of slavery fall upon the white house, North, but that the latter replicates the former: The model home for American society is built according to the spatial imperatives of slavery. Despite Frado's attempts to manipulate domestic space to ensure her own protection, the treatment she receives in the Bellmont house, from those who befriend her as well as those who berate and beat her, delimits her physical freedom and her emotional well-being. Slavery's shadows, the narrative implies, will continue to fall not just in the North during slavery but in any post-slavery America that does not directly counter the understanding of space, race, and labor that evolved through slavery. The novel itself initiates such a change, and Wilson's position as novelist suggests a possibility for a black woman both to exert her authority over domestic space by telling her version of what happens there and to escape the limitations of domestic service by becoming a writer.

The subtitle "Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There" frames the novel with a complicated set of relations and disjunctions. The derogatory "Our Nig" would seem to be at odds with the status of a "free black" (Breau 456). The narrative reconciles this seeming discrepancy by revealing the process through which the despised identity of "nig" is assigned to a free black. Through inclusion in the possessive our, the reader is implicated in this process of rendering Frado a collectively owned object rather than a self-owned subject--although Wilson's use of "Our Nig" as her authorial signature reinvests that entity with subjectivity. Of particular interest, given my focus on the dwelling itself, is the contrast that occurs in the yoking of "free black" to "white house." By extending the antonymic relationship between "black" and "white," the phrases suggest an associative opposition between "free" and "house" as well, implicating th e domestic as the space in which the free black is rendered a "nig." That is, inasmuch as a black seems out of place in a "white house," the very designation of that individual as "free" seems nullified within the confines of the house, a nullification that the narrative indeed depicts. Both the disjunction of "our nig" against "free black" and "free black" against "white house" are further underscored by the invocation of "slavery" as relevant within this specific house, in the geographical context of the North, and over the physical body of the free black. The information conveyed in this richly descriptive subtitle, then, provides not closure or certainty but rather an uneasy series of contrasts and contradictions to initiate the reader into the text.

What is this "free black" doing in the "white house, North"? This question involves not merely the physical labor she performs for those whose racial identity creates the distinction of "white house" but also the psychic or emotional labor she performs, for them and for readers of the text, the burdens she embodies of identity and place, of identity as determined by and determining place. The American equation of the private home with individual identity gained widespread acceptance with the emergence of the cult of domesticity in the 1830s. Our Nig reveals how this equation positions an African American female, and it challenges assumptions about the home as a site of security by revealing who is and is not protected there. Explicating what Frado is doing in the house and in the text requires pursuing a range of related questions: How can a "black" body occupy a "white" house? How does a house gain and retain the identity of "white" not despite but through the presence of a black body within it? How does the presence of this black body affect the relationships among the white inhabitants of the house, as well as each of their relationships to the house itself? What relationship does the eponymous "Nig" have to that house and its occupants? And what's slavery got to do with it?

The relevance of slavery to Our Nig is textually inscribed via a letter appended to the narrative upon its initial publication, in which Margaretta Thorn attests to her familiarity with the author and declares, "She was indeed a slave, in every sense of the word" (139). Despite the undeniable rhetorical power of asserting that free Northern servants could be as much enslaved as those who were legally chattel in the South, it is important to consider how Frado's status as free should shape our reading of Our Nig. Barbara White's research on the Hayward family, the real-life model for the Bellmont household in the narrative, reveals that the family members were intimately aware of and in some cases involved in the abolitionist movement. Such information might lead modern readers to consider Our Nig a critique of the hypocrisy of abolitionist racism. While this view would not be invalid, Our Nig should be read not simply as a text decrying the treatment of African Americans in the North contemporary with Southe rn slavery but also as an indication, a fictional prediction and condemnation, of the conditions of African Americans in the post-slavery society that, by the time of Our Nig's publication in 1859, many Americans believed was rapidly approaching. Frado's residence and labor in the Bellmont home indicates the abuse faced by free blacks, even as Wilson's authorship suggests a means of liberation from the house of oppression.

By underscoring how Frado's position differs from that of a slave, Our Nig inscribes a troubling message concerning the fate of African Americans "post-slavery." I concur with Hazel Carby's assessment that "the domestic realm, within which Wilson represented Mrs. Bellmont as the ultimate power, was the terrain of struggle over the treatment of Frado in which debates about the position and future of blacks in the United States are recreated" (44). Whereas Carby equates the "two-story white house" with "the Southern plantation" and suggests that Mrs. Bellmont's power is a symbol of "the power of the South," however, I see Wilson as entering the debate about the status of free(d) blacks rather than formulating an argument solely attacking the institution of slavery. I am not suggesting that Our Nig bears no resemblance to slave narratives. (1) Rather, Frado's status as free reveals how the spatial and racial limitations that initially developed under slavery were already being imposed on free blacks and were li kely to continue long after slavery had ended. While the "white house" may be read as a metaphor for the nation, the spatial and racial practices contained in this particular dwelling are important indicators of the specific material conditions in which Wilson places her character. (2)

Upon Frado's initial arrival at the house, the Bellmont family engages in a debate that evidences prevailing assumptions about race, class, and domestic space. Mary, the daughter who shares much of Mrs. Bellmont's personality, is horrified at the thought of cohabiting with Frado, proclaiming, "'I don't want a nigger 'round me.'" Her mother replies pragmatically," 'I don't mind the nigger in the child. I should like a dozen better than one.... If I could make her do my work in a few years, I would keep her. I have so much trouble with girls I hire, I am almost persuaded if I have one to train up in my way from a child, I shall be able to keep them awhile'" (26). While Mary's racism calls for physically segregated space, Mrs. Bellmont reads Frado's presence through the belief that her blackness will benefit the white household--hence, she tolerates, and eventually demands, Frado's presence in her home. In articulating her assumptions about the relationship among race, age, and labor, the fictional Mrs. Bellmon t voices a desire that was not uncommon among white Americans. Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose family had black indentured servants during her childhood and early adulthood, expressed in 1863 a desire to dismiss her household servants in favor of a bound girl she could train to her liking (Hedrick 311), evidencing the ease with which even white abolitionists distinguished between the status of African Americans who suffered as slaves in South and those they would suffer to serve whites in the North. In the early nineteenth century, free black children were frequently indentured, and race was a crucial factor in delineating the class status of American household servants throughout that century.

Early in the century, young white women were frequently hired for short periods of time by neighboring families to perform specific duties. Paid in room and board with small monetary recompense and regarded as equal to members of the household, such women were referred to as "help." During the course of the century, "help" were gradually replaced by "domestics," immigrant women for whom service was an ongoing occupation and who were considered by their employers to occupy a lower status than the families they served (Dudden 6). Even early in the century, however, African Americans were generally not considered "help," since that category implied a relatively egalitarian position. A more rigid hierarchy of power, and an assumption that serving might be an indefinite arrangement, distinguished free blacks from white "help" long before the influx of immigrants enabled the general shift to employment of "domestics" (Dudden 8; Litwack 158-59). This distinction was articulated in part through the spatial occupation of the house: White "help" would generally eat at the table with the family, but black servants would not be allowed to do so (a practice reflected in Our Nig). The white girls Mrs. Bellmont employed prior to Frado's arrival would have been perceived by her and by themselves as being "help," a distinction that would empower them to leave the household when subject to her cruelty. Performing both domestic and farming chores on the Bellmont homestead, Frado is differentiated from these predecessors by race and also by the labor required of her.

Frado's position recalls a third category, that of the white orphan who would be bound to a family until she reached her eighteenth year. Such girls were treated not only as workers but as "objects of charity and tutelage" to be provided "with proper religious instruction and schooling" in order to ensure their virtuous behavior upon reaching adulthood (Dudden 20). By the 1830s, the period in which the narrative is set, this practice had gone into decline (Dudden 22), and Frado's position as an African American child clearly differs from that of a white bound orphan because the Bellmonts refuse to assimilate her into their household. Mrs. Bellmont specifically opposes sending Frado to school or allowing her religious education, and she assumes that Frado will always occupy a serving role, even upon adulthood. (3) The more sympathetic family members share this view--several of the sons consider taking Frado away to be their own servant--and the aborted efforts Frado makes to enter manufacturing rather than dom estic service after leaving the Bellmonts seem to confirm that no other possibilities are available to her. Frado in fact is never formally indentured, yet throughout her residence in the Bellmont house, her race, class, and age seem to relegate her to the de facto status of a bound worker, or even a slave, although she could not legally be considered either.

Even contextualized historically, the fictional Mrs. Bellmont's desire for trainable "nigger" girls is striking for the elision of race, class, and childlike status in the definition of a perfect servant, an elision that is spatially inscribed upon the Bellmont house. Despite Mrs. Bellmont's declaration that Frado's potential labor renders her a valuable commodity in the Bellmont house, the presence of a black body within that space requires negotiation, as the ensuing conversation among Mrs. Bellmont, Mary, and the sympathetic Bellmont son Jack evidences. Mary reiterates her opposition to proximity with African Americans when she demands to know where Frado will sleep, vehemently asserting, "'I don't want her near me.' "When Mrs. Bellmont suggests an attic chamber, Jack objects," 'She'll be afraid to go through that dark passage, and she can't climb the ladder safely.' "Mrs. Bellmont's reply evidences how race determines Frado's place in the house: "'She'll have to go there; it's good enough for a nigger'" (26).

When Jack succumbs to his mother's spatialization and leads Frado to her new quarters, their movement through the house emphasizes how the class distance, like the racial difference, between Frado and the Bellmonts is spatially inscribed with her installation in the attic. Jack and Frado pass through "nicely furnished rooms, which were a source of great amazement to the child," then proceed through "a dark, unfinished passageway" to arrive at "her apartment,--an unfinished chamber over the kitchen, the roof slanting nearly to the floor, so that the bed could stand only in the middle of the room. A small half [-]window furnished light and air" (27). The tour through the house is constructed to frame for both Frado and the reader how the room Frado occupies marks her subordinate status.

Just as age combines with race and class to render Frado the perfect servant in Mrs. Bellmont's view, age is invoked along with these other aspects of her identity as linking Frado physically to this inferior space. Jack returns to the living room to protest that Frado will soon outgrow the confines of her quarters, and Mrs. Bellmont retorts that when she does" 'she'll outgrow the house'" (28), a response which posits the house as a privilege that can be taken from Frado. Implying the threat of expulsion, the statement constructs the house as something that she must earn not solely through her labors but also by embodying physical confinement, by denying herself full adulthood and restricting herself enough to fit within the racially- and class-constructed spatial limitations imposed upon her.

Although the spatial arrangements and Mrs. Bellmont's recurring statements about Frado's race, class, and age imply an undeniable certainty about Frado and her place in the house, Our Nig emphasizes the indeterminacy of Frado's position among the Bellmonts, an indeterminacy to which the harsh and arbitrary demands of Mrs. Bellmont seem a response. After a year passes without Mag returning for her daughter, the narrator explains, "It was now certain Frado was to become a permanent member of the family" (30). But the narrative denouement, in which Frado finds herself impoverished and homeless after leaving the Bellmonts, negates this assumption that she can become part of the family. Mrs. Bellmont challenges Frado's place in the household more immediately by seeking to distinguish between Frado and the Bellmont daughters, particularly Mary, the mother's favorite. Because Frado is "not many shades darker than Mary," Mrs. Bellmont determines to increase the physical sign of racial difference by forcing Frado to l abor outside without "shield[ing] her skin from the sun" (39). Denying Frado the protection of the house, even as she underscores the value of that protection, Mrs. Bellmont invokes Frado's class difference to increase the mark of her racial difference and lessen the ambiguity of her position in the household and her status as a female of mixed race.

When Frado is not forced out of the house, she is instead subject to spatial segregation within it. Housed in the "L chamber"--also called the ell, the section of the building jutting out at a right angle to the rest of the structure--above the kitchen, Frado is literally put at spatial odds with the white family. The reference to the ell is the only specific architectural detail of the house described in Our Nig; the room the narrator/protagonist occupies is the one space that demands description. While a Southern plantation kitchen was typically a building entirely separate from the Big House, the kitchen in which Frado works and the attic room above it in which she sleeps are attached to the white family's house yet distinguished architecturally from it. As architectural historian Nora Pat Small documents, from the 1790s through the 1830s, New England farmhouses evolved from small, single-story cottages to two-story structures with ells: "The two-story-with-ell rural dwellings signaled their occupants' mod ern attitude toward the organization of space and work, an organization driven by new market demands and strategies" (43). Including spaces designated strictly for formal occasions, the emerging housing form's physical division of work and leisure evidences the successful farm family's aspirations to a bourgeois organization of time and space. In Our Nig, these spatial divisions have racial meaning as well.

Placement in the ell reifies Frado's connection to, but also her difference and her distance from, the family, and Mrs. Bellmont continuously strives to increase the difference and deny the connection. Surprised at her husband's sympathy for Frado, Mrs. Bellmont declares, "'Why, according to you and James, we should very soon have her in the parlor, as smart as our own girls'" (89). Confining Frado to the kitchen and the attic quarters above it, Mrs. Bellmont asserts spatial distinctions between (white) master and (black) servant. The narrator thus describes Frado's continuing labors and Mrs. Bellmont's infliction of physical abuse, which is regularly meted out in the kitchen: "It is impossible to give an impression of the manifest enjoyment of Mrs. B. in these kitchen scenes. It was her favorite exercise to enter the appartment [sic] noisily, vociferate orders, give a few sudden blows to quicken Nig's pace, then return to the sitting room with such a satisfied expression, congratulating herself upon her thor ough house-keeping qualities" (66). Mrs. Bellmont's contented occupation of the sitting room is predicated on, even as it effaces, her mistreatment of Frado in the kitchen and the household's dependence on Frado's labors within that space. (4)

Our Nig offers two responses to the spatialized manifestations of race and class difference: The first, exhibited by James, a kindly Bellmont son who returns home for several visits during the course of the narrative, directly challenges spatial segregation, whereas the second, undertaken by Frado, involves a subversive occupation of racially designated spaces. James contests his mother's spatial authority, first by inviting Frado into the parlor to meet his wife and child, and then by insisting that Frado be allowed to take her meals sitting with the family in the dining room (67-68). Rather than adopting this rejection of spatial segregation, Frado enjoys being separated from Mrs. Bellmont. As a servant, she benefits from her mistress's habit of avoiding domestic work space, "In Mrs. Beilmont's presence she was under restraint; but in the kitchen . . . the pent[-]up fires burst forth" (38)-at least during those periods when Mrs. Belimont remains within the sitting room. When Frado's presence in the family dining room leads to a conflict with Mrs. Belimont, the latter demands that James whip Frado. James first seeks out "the kitchen version of the affair" (71-72), and, upon hearing it, he determines that his mother is in the wrong and refuses to punish Frado. Despite Mrs. Belimont's efforts to dictate Frado's actions, Frado uses the space to which she is confined, appreciating its advantages along with its shortcomings, a practice that occurs in her cramped attic quarters as well as in the kitchen:"...there was one little spot seldom penetrated by her mistress' watchful eye: this was her room, uninviting and comfortless; but to herself a safe retreat" (87). These passages evidence Frado's reliance on the spatial divisions of the house to refute Mrs. Bellmont's efforts at absolute control.

In subtitling Our Nig"Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North," Wilson punned, whether consciously or not, in implying that the multi-storied structure houses multiple narratives. Although a house's facade presents a seemingly unified front to those who view it, the internal divisions of domestic space reflect and refract divisions among the house's occupants, as the novel reveals. The narrator's initial description of the Bellmont homestead, made as Mag approaches to abandon Frado there, includes the type of upright family history that a proper house is meant to convey:

Two miles beyond lived the Bellmonts, in a large, old-fashioned, two-story white house, environed by fruitful acres, and embellished by shrubbery and shade trees, Years ago a youthful couple consecrated it as home; and after many little feet had worn paths to favorite fruit trees, and over its green hills,... the sire became grey-haired and decrepi[t], and went to his last repose. His aged consort soon followed him. The old homestead thus passed into the hands of a son. (21)

This passage establishes the Bellmont family's place in the tradition of New England yeoman farmers. The narration continues: "John, the son, had not in his family arrangements departed from the example of the father. The pastimes of his boyhood were ever freshly revived by witnessing the games of his own sons as they raffled about the same goal his youthful feet had often won; as well as by the amusements of his daughters in their imitations of maternal duties" (22). The extension of the delineated history through another generation seems to affirm the permanence implied in the homestead. Between these two descriptions, however, the narrator pauses to identify John as the one "to whose wife Mag [Frado's mother] had applied the epithet 'she-devil'" (21-22). This deviation from the story of the Belimont patriarchy contradicts the larger delineation of the idyllic family home. Frado's presence in the house continuously exposes such discrepancies, both by suggesting how her story competes with Mrs. Bellmont's an d by revealing the discord within the Beilmont family to the reader.

The very spatial divisions Mrs. Bellmont invokes to enforce racial domination determine the way multiple narratives function in the house. As I have already observed, Frado learns to use the spatial differentiation to her advantage, and within the narrative the circulation of the "kitchen story" among sympathetic members of the Bellmont family provides Frado with an important means of self-assertion and garners her some support. Further, the narrative itself presents her version of life in the Bellmont household to the reader. As I noted earlier, after Frado is placed in the eli chamber on her first night in the house, Jack returns to the sitting room and declares that she will soon outgrow the space, and his mother responds with the threat of expulsion from the house. Mrs. Bellmont's authoritarian tale of the house as a privilege that she may deny Frado is undercut as the narrator immediately reveals the concurrent actions in the "second story" of the house:

While this conversation was passing below, Frado lay [in her chamber], revolving in her little mind whether she would remain or not until her mother's return. She was of wil[l]ful, determined nature, a stranger to fear, and would not hesitate to wander away should she decide to. She remembered the conversation of her mother with Seth, the words "given away" which she heard used in reference to herself; and though she did not know their full import, she thought she should, by remaining, be in some relation to white people she was never favored with before. So she resolved to tarry, with the hope that mother would come and get her some time. (28)

In this story, Frado is the protagonist, and the act of deciding whether to "remain or not" emphasizes her agency as a subject. Although this passage seems illogical in the assumption of real possibilities for an abandoned child, it makes sense when read in terms of the psychic function it fulfills for Frado, particularly when we consider her role as the retrospective narrator of Our Nig. (5) Frado's story preserves her agency and thus opposes Mrs. Bellmont's tale of the house as simultaneously a privilege she extends to Frado and the site in which she may oppress the girl.

The tension between Mrs. Bellmont and Frado, and between their respective stories, indicates just one of the many divisions within the house. Frado's presence exposes schisms between Mrs. Bellmont and the other members of the family, rifts that are played out in terms of spatial control. Despite the sympathy some members of the household express for Frado, none of them seems able to ensure her safety, and examining the family's reactions to Frado's suffering reveals the role that each of the Bellmonts assumes in the system of power operating within the house. While nine-year-old Frado performs chores in preparation for a visit home by James, a favorite Bellmont son, Mrs. Bellmont beats the girl, who then rushes from the house just as Mr. Bellmont and his sister Abby enter the kitchen, where the beating occurred. Removing themselves to Aunt Abby's room, a spatial retreat from Mrs. Bellmont's tyranny, the two discuss Frado's fate. Mr. Bellmont's unwillingness to stand up to his wife and to protect Frado in part icular is evident throughout the text, although he clearly pities Frado. On this occasion, he expresses a hope that "'the child would never come into the house again.'" Aunt Abby cannot imagine "'what would become of [Frado]'" if she left the presumed protection of the house forever. Mr. Bellmont asserts that the house offers no such protection: "'The child does as much work as a woman ought to; and just see how she is kicked about!'" Aunt Abby's challenge to this exclamation seems initially to be a call for him to assert authority and ensure justice for Frado, yet it exposes the tenuous nature of the protection offered in a house, as well as demonstrating how gender functions in creating--or denying--that protection:

"Why do you have it so, John?" asked his sister.

"How am I to help it? Women rule the earth, and all in it."

"I think I should rule my own house, John." (44)

Recognizing that Frado needs both the protection of the house and protection in it, Abby assumes that a different authoritarian system--one under her rule or her brother's--would necessarily prove more just and caring.

Without her own house, however, the purported benevolence of Abby's rule is of no use to Frado. Watching the beaten child leaving the yard, Abby considers offering to "shelter her" but hesitates because doing so would only bring more of Mrs. Bellmont's violence upon Frado. At this point, the narrator explains Abby's residence with the Bellmonts and Mrs. Bellmont's hatred of her as results of the fact that Abby "did not give her right in the homestead to John, and leave it forever" (45). Although she and her brother are heirs sharing their parents' bequeathed estate, the unmarried woman's stake in a home is rendered illegitimate under the matriarchy of Mrs. Bellmont, whose marriage grants her authority over the homestead. (6) Thus, her partial ownership of the house renders Abby incapable of aiding Frado. Indeed, Mrs. Bellmont frequently enacts spatial restrictions on Aunt Abby, denying hex access to rooms of the house to underscore her peripheral status in the family (67, 91, 100).

The cruelty with which Mrs. Bellmont exerts the power of matriarchy defies the ideal of the sentimental home. Mrs. Bellmont, "self-willed, haughty, undisciplined, arbitrary and severe" (24), is the inverse of true womanhood. In this house, female authority results not in the ideal home promised by the cult of domesticity, or in a proto-feminist space, but in an authoritarian sphere as oppressive as any patriarchal household. Even other women cannot challenge Mrs. Bellmont's rule. The impotence of female sympathy first demonstrated through Aunt Abby is repeated when the invalid Bellmont daughter Jane learns of Frado's flight: "She would gladly have concealed . . . [Frado] in her own chamber, and ministered to her wants; but she was dependent on Mary and her mother for care, and any displeasure caused by attention to Nig, was seriously felt" (46). Occupying the role of delicate angel child impedes Jane from aiding Frado, in sharp contrast to the sentimental power invested in characters such as Stowe's Little Ev a, and Frado's presence reveals the tenuous position of both Abby and Jane within the household. Nor can the male family members disrupt Mrs. Bellmont's villainous matriarchy to care for Frado. The sentimental depiction of the death of James later in the novel symbolizes the emasculation of the men within this house and nullifies James's longstanding promise to remove Frado from his mother's rule by installing her as a servant in his own home. The divergence of the Bellmont household from the presumed protection of the sentimental home calls into question the faith that Abby--or the reader--might put in that cultural ideal.

The system of power that entraps Frado within the Bellmont household might seem manifested specifically in Mrs. Bellmont's and Mary's cruelty toward and abuse of Frado, yet the apparent sympathy and aid of the other members of the family effect a somewhat more sinister, because less overt, mechanism of domination. Their benevolence to Frado enacts her imprisonment, as the conclusion to the episode in which she runs away after a beating evidences. Frado, recognizing that no one can ensure her safety in the house, remains outside for several hours, eluding the family's search for her. Jack and the newly arrived James finally discover her, in an odd revision of the hunt for the fugitive slave familiar from slave narratives and pro-slavery accounts. Sometime earlier, Jack had given Frado a dog as a "protection from Mary and his mother" (37); although the dog does not seem to avert their physical attacks on Frado, it does serve as a companion to her. Now Jack enlists Fido to track Frado in a nearby swamp. The typi cal scene of dogs hunting a fugitive slave hiding in a swamp ends either with the slave eluding the trackers or with physical capture that enables the trackers to return the fugitive for exemplary punishment. This search, by contrast, ends when the brothers proclaim sympathy and promise shelter to coax Frado to return.

This conclusion to the episode might appear to underscore the superiority of Frado's position to that of a slave, since she is sought out by caring members of the white household and seemingly restored to the comfort of home: "They persuaded her to go home with them, warmed her by the kitchen fire, gave her a good supper, and took her with them into the sitting-room" (50). In a larger sense, however, the termination of Frado's escape simply returns her to the site of abuse and replaces her as the object of Mrs. Bellmont's power, furthering her abject status in the house. As soon as the brothers lead Frado into the sitting room, their mother commands, "'Take that nigger out of my sight,'" revealing that the dynamics of race, space, class, and power within the house remain unaltered.

The role the sympathizing family members play in Frado's return reveals the malevolent paradox at the heart of Our Nig. While the villainous Mrs. Bellmont and Mary directly abuse Frado, it is the sympathetic whites who rigidly enforce her entrapment in the house. During this episode, Mrs. Bellmont urges her family not to search for Frado and repeatedly threatens to beat the child further should she return to the house. The supposedly caring Bellmonts obstruct Frado's efforts at escape and ignore her protests that the continued torture she faces in the house is unbearable.

Frado's status as a free black ironically suggests that no challenge to her oppression is possible because, within the power structure depicted in Our Nig, her race renders her an object of abuse outside of slavery. When she contemplates running away on a later occasion, her " determin[ation] to flee" is hampered as she ponders where she might go and who might take her in: "Mrs. B. had always represented her ugly. Perhaps every one thought her so. She was black, no one would love her. She might have to return, and then she would be more in her mistress' power than ever" (108) (7) Returning from an unsuccessful effort at escape would mean acknowledging the totality of her dependence on the Bellmonts and thus would authorize even greater inflictions of Mrs. Bellmont's power. For enslaved African Americans, flight was a northward journey to free states or Canada, but born in a free state and abused as a "free black" in a "white house, North," Frado has no certain course of escape. The absence in Our Nig of textu al descriptions of neighboring homesteads creates an aura of geographical isolation, heightening both Frado's and the reader's sense of Frado's entrapment.

Repeating her query, "But had she not better run away? Where? She had never been from the place far enough to decide what course to take," Frado "resolve[s] to speak to Aunt Abby." The seeming resource of a sympathetic white counsel offers only further subjection, as the white woman effectively terminates Frado's plan: "She mapped the dangers of her course, her liability to fail in finding so good friends as John and herself" (108). Once again, her "good friends" among the Bellmonts keep Frado within the perimeter of authoritarian rule. Even her sympathizers tacitly accept that Frado's proper place is as the servant in the house, and they offer her little protection from the physical attacks or verbal abuse that are normalized within that space. Mrs. Bellmont is most pernicious in her racial and spatial domination of Frado, but the other family members also participate in Frado's subordination. Frado's entrapment and the success of the system of subordination depend as much upon their seeming benevolence as u pon Mrs. Bellmont's overt abuse.

The oppression that operates within the house reflects economic and racialized forces in the larger society. As I have already noted, putting the free African American woman in her place works so effectively that, even though no mention is made within the narrative of a legal indenture, Frado is bound to stay with the Bellmonts until she reaches age eighteen. Although hardly as totalizing and terror-ridden as legal enslavement, Frado's status as a de facto indentured servant typifies the "indebted servitude" of free(d) African Americans enacted through "constraints of conscience (discipline internalized and lauded as a virtue) [and] the coercion and compulsion of the free labor system" (Hartman 126). For many African Americans, these forces rendered "freedom" concurrent with and immediately after slavery a state of constant subjugation.

Abandoned at the Bellmonts' house, Frado is ever-indebted to them, and she must not only work but suffer to earn her keep. Moreover, Frado cannot escape her debt but must fulfill it until she turns eighteen, the age her oppressor assumes as the termination of her bond. "Debt was at the center of a moral economy of submission and servitude" that could flourish outside and after slavery (Hartman 131), and the sympathetic members of the Bellmont family neither challenge this economy nor resist it.

As I suggested in the reading of the novel's paradoxical subtitle offered at the beginning of this essay, it is the very presence of a black body that defines the privilege of the "white house, North." Safely outside the institution of slavery, the putatively benevolent whites can accept for themselves the privilege of having a "nig" in the house, a privilege that elevates their class status. Indeed, it is Frado's self-proclaimed protector Jack who first labels her "our nig," as a counter to Mary's initial refusal to cohabit with an African American: " 'Miss Mary; if she should stay, it wouldn't be two days before you would be telling the girls about our nig, our nig!' "(25-26).

Although he ventriloquizes the phrase as his sister's utterance, labeling Frado "our nig" implicates Jack in the system of ownership by which whites simultaneously reduce even free blacks to objects of property. When Jack first urges his mother to keep Frado, he notes, " 'She's real handsome and bright, and not very black, either'" (25), indicating his own ascription to the belief of black inferiority. Having recognized the presumed superiority of light-skinned African Americans, however, Jack immediately transforms the "not very black" mulatta into a "nig," sealing her fate among the family.

Frado's blackness makes her more valuable to the family: Not only does it differentiate her position from that of the earlier white help, but her occupation of the category a conflation of race and class positions, distinguishes by contrast the privileged status of the white family. The rendering of Frado as a collectively owned "nig" works so effectively that all the characters--and at moments even the narrator--adopt Nig as a name for her. The horrific lesson of Our Nig, then, is not just what can happen in a household under white female rule but also that the seeming kindness on the part of some household members works with the aggressive and abusive power of others to entrap the free black woman. As Saidiya Hartman asserts, "By disassembling the 'benign' scene, we confront the everyday practice of domination, the nonevent, as it were" (42). Thus, Mrs. Bellmont's satisfied return to the sitting-room is as important an element of domination as the brutal beating of Frado that engenders the satisfaction. Mor eover, interrogating the "nonevent" of terminating Frado's flight from the house, the repeated scenes of benign "caring" manifested as a failure to protect Frado, reveals the pernicious practices of domination that as everyday events render the "free black" a" "nig."

Drawing on the legal sense of enjoyment as the possession, use, and/or benefit of something, as well as the colloquial sense of enjoyment as pleasure, Hartman links the pleasure whites took in nineteenth-century racist entertainments to the legal rights over African Americans with which whites were invested during slavery. Our Nig clearly evidences the extensian of white "enjoyment" of slaves to free blacks in its depiction of the "domestication" of Frado. The white members of the Bellmont household all "enjoy" Frado's "performance" of blackness, although the nature of that enjoyment varies. Examining these differences reveals the value of the presence of a free black to the various white occupants of the house.

Mrs. Bellmont enjoys (i.e., benefits from) Frado's performance of domestic labor, even as she and Mary enjoy (i.e., take pleasure in) Frado's failure to perform to perfection (perhaps a calculated performance of insolence on Frado's part or perhaps only an indication of the impossible demands made of her), because such failure authorizes their violent attacks on Frado, attacks that are themselves pleasurable to these women. Jack and other white members of the household, including the adult male farm hands, "enjoy" Frado's performances, her stunts and acts of resistance. Jack may particularly enjoy Frado enacting a surrogate rebellion against the mother whose authority he seldom seems willing to challenge directly himself. On one occasion, Jack takes such pleasure in a fight between Frado and his mother that he rewards Frado with a half-dollar; clearly, Frado's performance of vulnerability to physical harm (Mrs. Bellmont wishes to have her whipped for this fight, and when the men refuse to do so, she beats Fra do herself and then enforces her silence through threats of further abuse) is the very aspect of her status Jack enjoys. (8) Although whites enjoy her in different ways, they do all enjoy her, in ways that increase their overall enjoyment of their home. This collective enjoyment is what renders Frado "our Nig," in the collective possession-as-enjoyment of her and in the concomitant reduction of her to "Nig," an object of enjoyment who embodies black subjection and is denied any subjectivity. This capacity for enjoyment explains the ease with which the Bellmonts all assume control over Frado, an ability to keep her or cast her out as they wish, upon her initial entry into the house.

The function of Frado's black body in the white house is not merely to perform the labor that benefits, whether directly or indirectly, all members of the Bellmont family. A less tangible yet ultimately more beneficial service is performed by her on behalf of the Bellmont children: In embodying victimization and absorbing most directly and graphically the force of their mother's tyranny, Frado in effect protects the white children from their mother's abuse and eventually liberates them from the house while remaining trapped there herself. Barbara White, in researching the family of Rebecca Hutchinson Hayward, on whom she believes the character of Mrs. Bellmont was based, uncovered evidence that Rebecca's father beat Rebecca's brother. Interpreting this evidence with a modem understanding of patterns of familial violence, White hypothesizes that the daughter may have been similarly brutalized, and thus suggests that the violent attacks on Frado indicate how Wilson was initiated into a family economy of violenc e (31). As White notes, parental violence against children was perceived very differently in the early nineteenth century; such control was a normalized element of the relations within houses. In such intrafamilial economies of violence, it is not race and/or class but age that marks the relative power of individuals in a single household. The presence of Frado as the designated "nig" and thus object of abuse, however, may have saved the Bellmont children from becoming--or perhaps continuing as-- objects of their mother's violence. (9) Despite the interesting implications of this conjecture, Our Nig contains no definitive evidence of how Mrs. Bellmont treated her children before Frado's arrival. What is evident in the text is that witnessing Frado's continued suffering--suffering they perpetuate by urging her to remain in the house--motivates the kindly Bellmont offspring to leave that house themselves.

Jane, the invalid daughter, initially becomes engaged to a man she does not care for, in part because "when witness of her mother's and Mary's tyranny, she felt any change would be preferable, even such a one as this" (56). When Jane later meets a man she can love, she breaks this engagement, with the aid of her father, whose assistance in Jane's escape from Mrs. Belimont's despotism contrasts sharply with his continuing refusal to intervene to protect Frado. Asked by his wife to whip Frado when he believes the girl does not deserve to be punished, Mr. Bellmont "left the house, as he usually did when a tempest threatened to envelop him. No sooner was he out of sight than Mrs. B. and Mary commenced beating her inhumanly" (34). The abuse of Frado liberates even Mr. Bellmont from the space dominated by his wife's temper, and his departure enables Mrs. Bellmont and Mary to beat her. Although Jane and her husband later retum to the Bellmont house--to care for her aging parents following the deaths of both James an d Mary--because of Mrs. Bellmont's continuing domination they cannot remain there long and instead follow Jack's earlier flight from the house "to the West." The narrator at this point concludes that "there seemed no one capable of enduring the oppression of the house but [Fradol" (109). This statement paradoxically designates Frado's continuing residence not as an entrapment but as an achievement, an ability in which she supersedes the white Bellmont children. Nevertheless, her presence as the laborer and sufferer within their parents' house clearly serves those children, not only in motivating their own exits from the family homestead but in directly enabling their escapes, as becomes evident after Jack returns home.

Having given up his job in the West, Jack brings his wife and child to his parents' house and then departs to join his brother Lewis's business in Baltimore. Mrs. Bellmont, deeply disliking Jack's wife Jenny, immediately plots to undo their marriage. Frado perceives her own presence in the house as a sign of triumph over Mrs. Bellmont and believes that Jenny can similarly respond to such villainy: "Many times would Frado steal up into Jenny's room, when she knew she was tortured by her mistress' malignity, and tell some of her own encounters with her, and tell her she might 'be sure it wouldn't kill her, for she should have died long before at the same treatment' "(115). Frado's ability to withstand abuse, however, is apparently neither shared nor desired by Jenny, who "fade[s] in health and spirits" (114), thereby assuming the sentimentalized role of frail white womanhood.

The dependence of such sentimental constructions on the labor of black women soon becomes clear. The Bellmonts' neighbors realize that Mrs. Bellmont is keeping Jack's letters from Jenny and hers from him, so that Jenny's requests that Jack liberate her from his mother's house go unanswered. When one neighbor suggests that Jenny enlist someone to sneak a letter out of the house and thus past Mrs. Bellmont's range of interception, Frado is employed and "succeed[s] in managing the affair so that Jack soon came to the rescue, angry, wounded, and forever after alienated from his early home" (115). Frado's mediation ensures permanent removal from the realm of Mrs. Bellmont's tyranny for both Jenny and Jack, inverting the process by which Jack and other sympathetic members of the family impede Frado from leaving the house. The liberation of the Bellmont children into marriages and households of their own underscores the lack of such an escape for Frado, even as it renders her increasingly isolated in the house itsel f.

Even Frado's own departure from the house at the end of her service fails to liberate her to safety. In discussing the status of emancipated Southern blacks during Reconstruction, Hartman delineates "the double bind of freedom: being freed from slavery and free of resources, emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject" (117). Despite the difference in geographical location and historical moment, this explication proves useful in considering Frado's status both in the Bellmont house and after she leaves it. At the close of Frado's term of service, Mrs. Bellmont attempts to transform her bond from indentured servitude to indebted servitude, even imploring a neighbor to tell Frado "'how ungrateful it would appear to leave a home of such comforts--how wicked it was to be ungrateful!'" (116). Frado's refusal of "such comforts" as the Bellmont house represents contests Mrs. Bellmont's insistence on her debt to the family.

Despite this challenge, however, Frado is not and cannot become a fully liberated agent in a system of exchange between equals. What transpires when Mrs. Bellmont finally "dismissed her with the assurance that she should soon wish herself back again, and a present of a silver half-dollar" (117), undercuts Frado's bid for independence outside the house. Bestowing the half-dollar as a present implies Mrs. Bellmont's benevolence and obscures the absence of any wages during Frado's twelve years of service. The ongoing assumption that the black girl owed the white family labor negates the possibility that the white family owes her wages. Entering into a consensual agreement to work for other families further marks the limitations upon Frado, because in her physical labor, her body is mortgaged out as the product she can exchange. She easily finds employment in the house of one white family and then another, but, weakened from her years of toil and abuse in the Bellmont household, she finds herself too feeble to wo rk after leaving there.

As her increasing infirmity reveals, liberation from Mrs. Bellmont's domestic tyranny thrusts Frado into a state of homelessness: "She could not feel relentings that her former home was abandoned, and yet, should she be in need of succor could she obtain it from one who would now so grudgingly bestow it?" (118). Fulfilling Mrs. Bellmont's prophecy and her own fears, Frado returns to the Bellmont homestead, where she is housed in a work shed, a spatial indication of the further reduction in her status. Still resisting Mrs. Bellmont's insistence on the debt of service, Frado perceives their relationship of debt very differently: "She felt sure they owed her a shelter and attention, when disabled" (120), and she remains with them, tended by Aunt Abby, until she can return to work for her new employers. When she falls ill again, Mrs. Bellmont refuses to allow her back. After recuperating while on public assistance, Frado finds residence with a kindly white woman and establishes herself as a hat maker. She leaves this position to marry, only to be abandoned by her husband (and eventually widowed) after she becomes pregnant.

The events of Frado's life after leaving the Bellmonts, reported in a few pages at the end of the text (most of the details are provided not by the narrator but in the letters from various friends of the author in the appendix of the original publication), read more as an itinerary of Frado's descent into poverty than as an integral part of the narrative. If Frado's troubled and tenuous position within domestic space, the combined result of her race and class, is apparent throughout her residence with the Bellmonts, these scant details foreclose the possibility that either a manufacturer's role in the marketplace (10) or the common female trajectory of marriage can offer her a stable home. Frado's relation to home can only come from her ability to exchange labor for housing or from dependence on her husband, but both her body and her husband prove unreliable sources of support. The narrative of Our Nig might therefore seem to confirm that a free black body cannot be at home in nineteenth-century America, a vi ew Frado herself voices at several points in the narrative.

Frado internalizes the limitations placed on African Americans in her own understanding of blackness. When James initiates a catechism-style exchange about God as Creator to implore her to behave, she exclaims "'I don't like [God]' "because" 'he made [Mrs. Bellmont] white, and me black. Why didn't he make us both white?'" (51). James instructs Frado to understand racial difference as divinely inscribed rather than the result of biological factors invested with meaning through social constructions, and Frado's response evidences her acceptance of this paradigm of racial difference as God's will. Later, James eavesdrops on Frado, who is lamenting her condition when she thinks no one can hear her:" 'Work as long as I can stand, and then fall down and lay there till I can get up. No mother, father, brother, or sister to care for me, and then it is, You lazy nigger, lazy nigger--all because I am black!'" (75). Trapped within the system of oppression housed in the Bellmont residence, Frado accepts her blackness as the determinant that demands her constant physical labor and authorizes white people's verbal and physical abuse of her. The absence of Frado's white mother is integral to the racialization that places her in the abject position of the "lazy [yet paradoxically always laboring] nigger." So too must her sibling--Mag's other mulatto child, whom she does not abandon--be absent, since the presence of a similarly phenotypically marked body might enable Frado to perceive her own race in a manner other than the one espoused by the Bellmonts.

Socialized in the Bellmonts' house, Frado reads blackness through the window of their racism. Because she never occupies a home of her own, she has no space, social or physical, in which she can construct a different understanding of race. She assumes such racism flourishes in all Northern houses, as in the passage I cited earlier in which she ruminates, "Mrs. B. had always represented her ugly. Perhaps every one thought her so. She was black, no one would love her" (108). The novel as a whole, however, offers an alternative view into the Bellmont household, one that challenges the essentializing equation of blackness and poverty with inferiority.

Mag, when first considering abandoning Frado at Mrs. Bellmont's house, notes," 'She can't keep a girl in the house over a week; and Mr. Bellmont wants to hire a boy to work for him, but he can't find one that will live in the house with her; she's so ugly, they can't'" (18). Here, ugliness is a factor of individual personality, not an essential racial characteristic--a matter of one's deportment rather than one's appearance. If Mrs. Bellmont's personality impedes pleasant cohabitation, Mary's declarations of disgust at living in the same house with Frado seem unfounded. Indeed, while Frado's poverty and her embodiment of free blackness as being free of resources impede her enjoyment of domestic space, Mrs. Bellmont's personality prevents her from enjoying such space either. By the end of Mrs. Bellmont's life "no one, even her own children, could remain with her" (130), and she is left to "an agony in death unspeakable" at the hand of Wilson as author.

Wilson's ability to frame the events of the narrative and the actions of both white and black characters marks Our Nig's challenge to the very oppression it depicts. To publish means 'to make public,' and by offering Mrs. Bellmont's sitting-room racism to readers, Wilson makes the cruelty that operates behind the facade of the happy home public knowledge. The evolution of room distinctions within American houses designated the downstairs, front rooms as public and the upstairs rooms as private. When Frado embraces the attic room to which she is assigned, she in effect seizes private space for herself. This process parallels Wilson's negotiation between making her life public in an appeal for aid and obtaining the privilege of privacy so often denied to African American women. "I do not pretend to divulge every transaction in my own life," she declares in the preface, the signature of which identifies her as "H. E. W." rather than the "Our Nig" of the title-page. Despite the authority Mrs. Bellmont wields in t he household, the revelation that Frado is the narrator--made in slippages between the third and first person throughout the text--and the implication that Frado is but a slightly fictionalized manifestation of the author underscore how Wilson's position as writer ultimately allows her to dominate all the spaces of the house, dictating the very speech and actions of the white Bellmonts in the parlor, even as she depicts the system of power that confines Frado to the ell.

Wilson seized on writing in an effort to author an alternative relationship to domesticity for herself. Upon arriving at the county poor housea-- house that is no home--during her pregnancy, Frado writes a poem asking for God's favor, which includes this stanza:

Though I've no home to call my own,

My heart shall not repine;

The saint may live on earth unknown,

And yet in glory shine. (136)

Claiming a religious invocation of the heavenly home, the poem implicitly denies that Frado's earthly homelessness is a sign either of her moral failing or of God's having forsaken her. The poem is included in the testimonial letter signed "Allida," where it is described as having been received by another of Frado's white benefactresses. This positioning of the poem twice removed from its author evidences the success she has had in circulating her story. The inclusion of the poem is also an effort to ensure similar success for Our Nig, a fuller attempt by Wilson to author her own story. Achieving this success would enable Wilson to attain a viable alternative of support for herself, in an exchange of nonphysical labor to secure a home for herself and her child. Within the narrative, Frado's suffering liberates the Bellmont children from the house dominated by their mother's cruelty, but ultimately Wilson crafts the tale of the fictional Frado's abuse to liberate herself from such circumstances in her own life .

Even in articulating this reading, it is difficult to determine when to refer to Frado and when to refer to Wilson. The tension between Wilson's "two stories," that of her own life and the fictional narrative she creates, permeates the text. Just as the move between the first- and third-person narration marks that tension, so does the duplication of the novel's title as the pseudonym of the author: The original title-page identifies the text as "Our Nig... by 'Our Nig.'" The author is her story, it would seem, yet a pseudonymous author is always a fictional creation rather than a factual being. Through authorship of the text Wilson establishes her agency, just as the narration of Frado's story establishes the narrator's control over the domestic space and the whites within that space by presenting her version of what has transpired. The very materiality of the text, like the sign of the quotation marks enclosing "Our Nig" in the title-page's designation of the author, marks the impossibility that the writer c ould be a "nig," a being whose inferiority is written on dark skin and read as her categorical assignment to embody physicality in the metaphysical mind-body split. As author, she is the performer of intellectual labor, rather than the physical labor demanded of a domestic servant.

Wilson's novel asserts a place for the African American woman as author, yet it does so through the often disturbing representation of the domestic spaces in which the African American girl is reduced to a nig. This process distinguishes Frado from Wilson, as Frado's pursuit of her limited narrative possibilities within the Bellmont house establishes Wilson's authorship, her liberation from domestic labor. As I have demonstrated, the duality implied by the description of the "two[-]story" house quickly replicates into a multiplicity of binarisms housed not only in the Bellmont domicile but in the text itself: the idyllic homestead versus the she-devil who rules it; Mrs. Bellmont (and her version of events) versus Frado (and Frado's version); the "good" Bellmonts versus the "bad"; the entrapment of Frado versus the liberation of the Bellmont children. This multiplicity renders a definitive reading of Our Nig elusive, as the text resists closed readings. Frado herself is a figure of great ambiguity; despite her centrality in the text, it is difficult to know how to read her. (11) When Mag first delivers Frado to the Bellmont house, under the pretext of leaving her there for a few hours, the narrator comments, "Why the impetuous child entered the house, we cannot tell; the door closed, and Mag hastily departed" (23). This statement evidences that, contrary to the ideal of the sentimental home as a site of protection, this house offers only entrapment, yet the passage paradoxically locates Frado as the agent of her own oppression, in effect blaming her for entering the house at all.

The narrator's descriptions of Frado's initial entry into the Bellmont house and her thoughts about remaining in the house when she is in the ell chamber that first night emphasize Frado's role as an active subject choosing for herself (although she has no other options among which to choose), yet these two moments of seeming agency are precisely what initiate Frado's entrapment (and subsequent abuse) in the house. The declaration by the narrator that only Frado "seemed capable of enduring the house" and Frado's own citing, in conversation with Jack's wife Jenny, of her endurance of Mrs. Bellmont's malignity seem to complement rather than counter Mrs. Bellmont's assumption that as a black body Frado can be forced to perform intense amounts of labor and be subject to all manner of abuse.

Modern readers may find these passages problematic: We long for textual representation of a black female's agency, but we can hardly celebrate Frado's subjectivity if it results in her subjugation. Despite the important position Our Nig occupies as an early piece of published African American literature, it frustrates our desire for empowering narratives. (12) Why does Wilson, at the moment she accesses the role of author, create this story for the protagonist who is a fictionalized version of herself? What does the implication of Frado as an agent in her own suffering indicate about Wilson's agency as author? Why does Wilson dwell on past suffering in the house of oppression rather than imagining future happiness?

As I noted in discussing Frado's thoughts on her first night in the Bellmont house, within the diegesis of Our Nig. it is difficult to discern what benefit Frado obtains by dwelling among the Bellmonts, but when Our Nig is considered in its entirety as a literary production, the import of Frado's staying and the story of the house is clear. Dwelling as a narrator/protagonist in the literary construction of the Bellmont house, Frado simultaneously occupies and stands outside of that domestic space. Moreover, Frado's residence in the Bellmont house serves Wilson herself, as she asserts her authorial control.

As the production of Wilson's intellectual labor, Our Nig stands in sharp contrast to its own depiction of Frado's physical labor and physical suffering. Wilson, writing in a state of economic uncertainty, created the narrative she believed her potential readers desired, as her prefatory insistence "I have purposely omitted what would most provoke shame in our good antislavery friends" attests. Ironically, this narrative emphasizes the subjection of the black woman protagonist. Wilson crafts her ascension to the position of author, the performer of nonphysical labor, as a revisiting of the house of oppression. Why she reenters there we can tell, for the preface and the appendix make it clear: The story of her physical subjection is what she can sell in lieu of her physical labor. Her paradoxical position, like that of her fictionalized protagonist, evidences the limits placed on free blacks, even as her novel exposes and challenges the mechanisms of power that impose those limits. Wilson's literary return to this house is ultimately an effort to ensure she will not have to occupy such houses again, an attempt to find a means for the free black woman to be at home in nineteenth-century America.

Lois Leveen is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She has published articles in MELUS and Women's Studies. This essay is excerpted from her current project, a book-length study of spatial constructions of race and gender identity. Professor Leveen would like to thank Martha Banta, Chuck Barnes, Dominika Ferens, Karen Keely, Sylvia Lavin, Valerie Smith, and the anonymous readers for African American Review for their helpful feedback on drafts of this essay.

Notes

(1.) Much of the critical attention that Our Nig has received since being reissued in 1983 has considered Wilson's invocation, adaptation, and/or parodying of the slave narrative, as well as other established literary genres of the nineteenth century. Gates, whose documentation established for twentieth-century readers that Our Nig was written by an African American woman and who edited the 1983 reprinting of the novel, asserts that "Our Nig stands as a 'missing link,' as it were, between the sustained and well-developed tradition of black autobiography and the slow emergence of a distinctive black voice in fiction" (lii). Jones, Foreman, and Tate all argue that Wilson drew on conventions of both sentimental fiction and slave narratives to authorize her text. Breau asserts that Wilson carefully negotiates these conventions to craft a satire of both genres. Stern maintains that Our Nig synthesizes not just sentimental and slave narrative traditions but also the Gothic.

Given my focus on domestic space, I am extremely interested in the way the depiction of the Bellmont household concomitantly invokes and refutes conventions of sentimental domesticity. This aspect of the narrative has already been discussed at length by scholars; rather than rehearsing their arguments, I briefly allude to this aspect of the novel while offering an analysis of Our Nig that supplements the scholarship to date.

(2.) I do not deny the importance of metaphoric equations of house and nation. The prevalence of this association is exemplified by Abraham Lincoln's 1858 biblical allusion "a house divided cannot stand." Although Lincoln's remark evidences the political as well as the social weight of domesticity in the mid-nineteenth century, it is important to interrogate such metaphors through an examination of the actual material conditions in which Americans live. As Rosalyn Deutsch observes, invoking "domestic space [as] the model of political space" concomitantly obscures and reinscribes the oppressive nature of the domestic. Deutsch focuses on how "the metaphorical house calls up images of the gender relationships that take place inside literal houses--the oppression of, and violence against, women." She asserts that "oppression and violence are not simply events occurring in the space of the house. The space of the house is constituted by--and therefore inseparable from--relationships [that are] themselves bound up with hierarchical constructions of sexual difference" (227-28). This insightful assessment must be expanded to include a consideration of how racial and class oppression function in the metaphorical house. Lincoln's description of the slavery conflict rendering the nation a house divided effaces how the presence of slaves or servants had long divided actual American houses. Lincoln's statement, while a moving metaphor, is not accurate on a literal level.

(3.) For examples of papers of indenture that bound African American children, see Sterling 87-89; she notes that indenture documents seldom included promises to educate African American girls.

(4.) For a general discussion of the kitchen ell in New England farm houses, see Stilgoe 160-64. He asserts that the physical prominence of the kitchen ell in New England house design evidences the importance of the farm wife and her labors to the New England household economy, but the assignment of Frado to this space suggests Mrs. Bellmont's rejection of the role of farm wife as Stilgoe defines it. Frado's presence relieves Mrs. Bellmont of her workload even as the white woman's treatment of Frado obscures the latter's contributions to the family's well-being.

(5.) Equally odd is the statement that Frado would, "by remaining, be in some relation to white people she was never favored with before," given that her mother is white. The disparity indicates that Frado participates in the elision of class into race, the racialization of the mulatta as black through the effacement of her white parentage, and, as her stay in the Bellmont house continues, the assumption that her blackness causes her to be abused. Bassard argues that Mag is posited as socially black yet racially white, further complicating Frado's identity (197).

(6.) As White demonstrates, Sally Hayward, the woman on whom the character of Aunt Abby is based, had a similarly ambivalent relationship to the property her father bequeathed to herself and her brother, presumably because of the ill will of her sister-in-law.

(7.) The positing of Frado as ugly and unlovable stands in contrast to the common trope of the beautiful mulatta, whose tragic position stems from her being the object of white male desire. This difference suggests the effectiveness of Mrs. Bellmont's equation of blackness with inferiority, her insistence on Frado's blackness, and the effacing of Frado's more ambiguous mixed-race status.

(8.) Tate suggests Jack and his brother James further enjoy the presence of an African American girl in the house by arguing that the text implies a pattern of sexual relations between Frado and the brothers (48, 243n45, 243n46). This reading is intriguing, but I think Our Nig lacks the textual evidence to make it convincing.

(9.) The narrator repeatedly indicates that other servants would not "endure the tirades of Mrs. Bellmont" (53), suggesting that it is not solely Frado's class position but also her status as an African American that forces her to bear what white servants would not, because her place in the house is marked by both race and class.

(10.) Free Northern blacks faced severely limited employment prospects. Under slavery, African Americans, especially those in the North, performed skilled as well as unskilled labor, but free blacks were almost always relegated to menial, low-wage jobs. Even as prejudice on the parts of employers and/or fellow workers impeded African Americans' access to skilled occupations, their absence from such jobs was cited by whites as an indication that blacks lacked the ability to perform skilled work and were suited only to menial tasks. The relegation of free blacks to menial labor not only minimized the need for whites to perform such tasks but also enabled even working-class whites to assume a sense of social and economic superiority over African Americans, a situation analogous to the Bellmont children's position in relation to Frado (Sterling 215; Litwack 153-57; Roediger 49-60). Litwack notes that 87 per cent of black workers in New York in 1855 were employed as unskilled laborers. In the smaller town that Fra do inhabits, the rate would likely have been even higher. For analyses suggesting that Our Nig attempts to transform the economy of wage labor, see Ernest; Lovell.

(11.) In discussing Our Nig's position as the founding text of African American women's fiction, Bassard examines the paradoxical prominence of the white Mag and Frado's biracial status. The ambiguity of the novel mirrors the ambiguous position occupied by the mulatta daughter of a white mother.

(12.) Six months after Our Nig was published, Wilson's seven-year-old son George died. This extradiegetic knowledge further frustrates the reader's desire for a "happy ending" to Wilson's/Frado's story. According to the preface of Our Nig, the author published the text in an effort to support her child; the irony of his early death is compounded by the fact that "George's death certificate helped to rescue his mother from literary oblivion" (Gates xiii), providing an historical document that established the race of Harriet Wilson and thus, upon its discovery, placed Wilson's novel firmly in the African American literary canon.

Works Cited

Bassard, Katherine Clay. "'Beyond Mortal Vision': Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig and the American Racial Dream-Text." Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 187-200.

Breau, Elizabeth. "Identifying Satire: 'Our Nig.'" Callaloo 16 (1993): 455-66.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT P, 1996.

Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1983.

Ernest, John. "Economies of Identity: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig." PMLA 109 (1994): 424-38.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. "The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig." Callaloo 13 (1990): 313-24.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Introduction. Wilson xi-lv.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.

Jones, Jill. "The Disappearing 'I' in Our Nig." LEGACY 13 (1996):38-53.

Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.

Lovell, Thomas B. By Dint of Labor and Economy: Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the Salutary View of Wage Labor." Arizona Quarterly 52.3 (1996):3-32.

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Versa, 1991.

Small, Nora Pat. "New England Farmhouses in the Early Republic: Rhetoric and Reality." Shaping Communities: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VI. Ed. Carter L. Hudgins and Elizabeth Collins Cromley. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1997. 33-45.

Sterling, Dorothy. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton, 1984.

Stern, Julia. "Excavating Genre in Our Nig." American Literature 67(1995): 439-66.

Stilgoe, John R. Common Landscapes of America, 1580 to 1845. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

White, Barbara. "'Our Nig' and the She-Devil: New Information about Harriet Wilson and the 'Bellmont Family.'" American Literature 65 (1993): 19-52.

Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. 1859. Intro. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Vintage, 1983.