Collect Day #30, HARRIET WILSON
O God, present to us in the embrace of the Holy Spirit: we remember today Harriett Wilson, daughter of Milford, New Hampshire and first African American novelist; we thank you for her voice, for her perseverance through hardship and for her exploration of the spirits that deepened her understanding of all that is seen and unseen in your creation; may we find in her heroic story the immeasurable value of all human life and repent of any trace of bigotry and racism that lurks in our souls; through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen
DAY #30, March 20, 2018
Portsmouth
HARRIET WILSON
(1825–1900)
David H. Watters
Harriet E. (Hattie) Adams was born in Milford in 1825. Her father, Joshua Green, was an African American, and her mother, Margaret Adams or Smith, was White. After her father’s death, Harriet was abandoned by her mother at the home of Nehemiah Hayward, Jr. and Rebecca S. Hutchinson Hayward. She attended the local district school for three years, 1832-34. She was probably indentured as a servant, and she remained in the Hayward household until turning 18 in 1843. She returned to the house during an illness later in 1846.
During these years, she would have been aware of the growing abolitionist sentiment in town, led by the Hutchinson Family Singers and Parker Pillsbury of Milford, climaxing in a massive rally in January 1843 attended by all the great abolitionists of the day: William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Parker Pillsbury, Nathan P. Rogers, C.L. Remond, Abby Kelley, Stephen S. Foster, George Latimer and Frederick Douglass.
For several years in the late 1840s and 1850s, Wilson alternated between employment in Milford and probably Ware or Worcester in Massachusetts, and periods as a pauper in New Hampshire at the Hillsborough County Poor Farm or boarding with Milford families. In Ware or Worcester, she improved her education and aspired to write, and she met Thomas Wilson, a professed fugitive slave and a mariner, whom she married in 1851. Their child, George Mason Wilson, was born in 1852. His absence at sea and then the death of Thomas in 1853, left Wilson and their son impoverished. Wilson made and sold hair products in the late 1850s and turned to authorship, publishing Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in 1859, in an attempt to support her son. But he died in 1860.
Wilson is considered the first African American woman — as well as the first African American of any gender — to publish a novel in the US. As the research of Gates, White, Ellis, Foreman and Pitts show, Wilson’s novel Our Nig, closely follows Wilson’s life, detailing the life and suffering of Frado, a mixed-race child who, abandoned by her mother, becomes a servant for a White family in the free North. Members of the novel’s Bellmont family have been identified as the Hayward and Hutchinson families of Milford. Other Milford people and individuals in other towns in which Frado/Wilson resided have also been identified, permitting readers to ascertain the veracity of her story and the artistry by which she transformed it into a novel.
Wilson became involved in the spiritualist movement during the 1860s, and for the rest of her life gained fame as a spiritualist medium and “doctor.” Spiritualists were at the forefront of New England reform movements — from abolitionism, women’s rights, and temperance to educational and economic reform.
Early in 1883, Wilson opened a new Sunday school for the children of “the liberal minded” in the parlors of members of the Ladies Aid Societies in Boston at a time when Black woman teaching White children in a private school such as Wilson’s was still quite extraordinary.
Wilson later married a White apothecary, John Gallatin Robinson, but this marriage did not last. Until the late 1890s, Wilson is listed in spiritualist publications and Boston city directories as a trance reader and lecturer. Her novel had long since disappeared from view, but she was celebrated and remembered at her death in 1900 as a spiritualist.
Harriet Wilson, who began her life as an indentured servant in the 1830s on a Milford farm, ended up writing an important piece of American literature. Our Nig is recognized for what it is: a remarkable literary achievement that offers a unique and important view of a turbulent — and often ugly — time in America’s past.
