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

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

Perhaps Wilson was aware that the odds of a black woman escaping bodily oppression through spirituality were indeed slim: Not all black women were as fortunate as Janette Alston or Maria Stewart. For instance, in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Alice Walker describes Jean Toomer's encounter with

black women whose spirituality was

so intense, so deep, so unconscious, they

were themselves unaware of the richness

they held. They stumbled blindly

through their lives: creatures so abused

and mutilated in body, so did and

confused by pain, that they considered

themselves unworthy even of hope.

In the selfless abstractions their bodies

became to the men who used them,

they became more than "sexual objects,"

more even than mere women:

they became "Saints." Instead of being

perceived as whole persons, their

bodies became shrines: what was

thought to be their minds became

temples suitable for worship. These

crazy Saints stared out at the world,

wildly, like lunatics--or quietly, like

suicides; and the "God" that was in

their gaze was as mute as a great stone.

(231-32) Rather than achieve sainthood by transcending the flesh, Toomer's "Saints," tragically, get sainthood bestowed upon them as a direct result of the most severe bodily suffering. What's more, although others might have seen in these women a certain perverse yet "intense spirituality," the women themselves neither heard God's voice nor used their own.

As if heeding the warning embodied in these women, Wilson allows freedom and reward to come not through praying for one's soul to rise in the next world, but through speaking up on behalf of one's embodied self, in all its complex materiality, in this world.(7)

Our Nig

In light of these other nineteenth-century black women's attempts to either defuse or deny the black woman's sexualized body, Our Nig's detailed descriptions of the physical body appear all the more striking. What we are forced to witness throughout Wilson's tale (even more, perhaps, than we might wish) is a body whose primary and delineating experience is not sexuality, but pain. Frado's dominant bodily experience is of pain; the dominant motif in Our Nig not rape but torture. Pain defines both voice and body, the speaker and the spoken.

When we first begin reading Our Nig, it is difficult to envision how pain will ever figure as anything but a brutally silencing force. From the moment Frado enters the Bellmont's "Two-Story White House, North," we are confronted with scene after scene depicting her brutal torture at the hands of Mrs. Bellmont. As Wilson informs us,

. . . Mrs. Bellmont felt that [Frado's]

time and person belonged solely to

her. . . What an opportunity to indulge

her vixen nature! No matter what occurred

to ruffle her, or from what source

provocation came, real or fancied, a

few blows on Nig seemed to relieve

her of a portion of her ill-will. (41) Frado is repeatedly beaten (34-35, 110), kicked (43-44), whipped with the ubiquitous rawhide (30, 77, 101), forced to go shoeless even after the frost has set in (66), and made to eat and work standing, even when faint with illness (29,81-82). A wedge of wood is twice inserted between Frado's teeth, causing "her face [to become] swollen, and full of pain" (36, 93). Again and again in Our Nig, we are forced to read about and encouraged to empathize with experiences like the following: