Harriet Wilson: The First African American Novelist

Harriet E. Wilson was born a free person of color in New Hampshire in 1825. A source encapsulates her early life, noting that she was born Harriet, “Hattie” Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, and was the biracial dauther of Margaret Adams Smith, an Irish woman, and Joshua Green, an African American. Her father died when Hattie was still a child, and her mother left her at the home of a wealthy New Hampshire farmer, where she was indentured to his family. This indenturement was, at the time, “a customary way for society at the time to arrange support and education for orphans. In exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could make her way in society” (1).

Harriet Wilson is now considered by many scholars to have been the first African American to have published a novel in the United States. The novel, published anonymously in 1859, was entitled Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, but received little acclaim until it was discovered by scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1982 when it received widespread attention. Until this discovery, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or The President’s Daughter held distinction as the first novel to be published by an African American author; however Wilson’s was published in Boston, while Brown’s was published in the United Kingdom while he was still a fugitive slave. At the time of its publication, there was considerable controversy among Abolitionists as to whether or not Our Nig did not fit the profile of the traditional “Slave Narrative,” and therefore did not serve the propagandist purposes of the movement. Further, Wilson’s novel did not depict the image of the black woman as the submissive victim of miscegenation’s wicked consequences: the novel does not forecast freedom for its protagonist, and the heroine of the tale takes a stand against a white woman (2).

However, an interesting aspect of Wilson’s own life was her connection to the Spiritualist Church—an organization founded on the belief in contact with the spirit world. Its moorings can be found in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, whose lives’ works support the investigation of life after death. The Spiritualist Church also had connections with reform movements of the time, such as Abolition and Suffrage. At the time, women were disallowed from public speaking—that activity being one of the many components of the male sphere. Trance mediums, women who claimed to be able to communicate with the beyond, were often allowed audience in public speaking circuits because they were guided not by their own free will, but by the spirits who communicated through them. This practice, in its own way, became its own mode of signification: using performance as a means to surpass or subvert societal restrictions on behavior.

Cora L. V. Scott was a famous trance medium in the latter half of the nineteenth century. She wrote many books in which she attributed the writing to spirit guides

An active member of the Spiritualist Church, she was well-known and beloved among its members as an active participant in the Children’s Progressive Lyceum as an organizer and sponsor, participating in plays and singing in a quartet. Known as a spiritual healer and “clairvoyant nurse,” her reputation spread in Spiritualist circles as “the colored medium.”