Speaking of the body's pain: Harriet Wilson's 'Our Nig.' - Women's Culture Issue

African American Review, Fall, 1993 by Cynthia J. Davis

a handsome mulatto woman about 18

or 20 years of age, whose independent

spirit could not brook the degradation

of slavery. . . .she had been repeatedly

sent by her master and mistress to be

whipped. . . . This had been done with

such inhuman severity, as to lacerate

her back in a most shocking manner;

a finger could not be laid between the

cuts. But the love of liberty was too

strong to be annihilated by torture;

and, as a last resort, she was whipped

at several different times, and kept a

close prisoner. A heavy iron collar,

with three prongs projecting from it,

was placed round her neck, and a

strong and sound front tooth was extracted,

to serve as a mark to describe

her, in case of escape. (Lerner 18)

Surely, this is as dire an indictment of the cruelties inflicted in the South as is Wilson's testimonial to the cruelties inflicted in the North, "showing that slavery's shadows fall even there" (title-page). And yet, notice that this unnamed mulatto does not speak for herself; it is another (white) woman who feels compelled to describe this black woman's bodily pain. Grimke's testimony provides an excellent example of the way racial difference between women is reinscribed through descriptions of pain: Here a disembodied white voice can speak for the abused black woman who cannot speak. As I go on to demonstrate, however, Our Nig uses descriptions of pain not to reinscribe racial difference but to transcend it.

Few were the black women who lived to tell of such beatings, and many of those that did survive were often silenced in the process. Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) includes the story of "Patsey," "a joyous creature, a laughing, lighthearted girl, rejoicing in the mere sense of existence," despite the frequent beatings she received from a jealous mistress. One particularly severe whipping, however, left Patsey less than "what she had been. . . . The bounding vigor, the sprightly . . . spirit of her youth was gone. . . . She became more silent than she was, toiling all day in our midst, not uttering a word" (Lerner 50-51; emphasis added).

Our Nig differs from these narratives of physical suffering in that, rather than allowing pain to silence her, it is precisely her pain which compels Wilson/Frado to speak. Before delving further into how pain functions in Our Nig, however, I would like to take a brief detour through some of the images of black women in nineteenth-century writings in order to pave the way for an examination of Our Nig, its images, its possibilities.

Bodies . . .

In the period during which Our Nig was written, the focus--when and if black women's bodies were addressed in literature--was usually upon either their sexual exploitation or their sexual appetites. Whether the writer believed black women to be exploited objects or promiscuous sluts, the discourses describing black women were predominantly sexual(ized) ones.

In the white-authored and -authorized racist scripts, black women were cast as the seducers, (white) men rendered helpless in the face of their exaggerated animal sexuality. In White Over Black, Winthrop D. Jordan explains the logic behind this myth: "If she was that lascivious--well a man could scarcely be blamed for succumbing against overwhelming odds" (151). As Gerda Lerner contends,