Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black | 
| Author: Harriet E. Wilson
Creators: Gabrielle Foreman, Reginald Pitts
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
Buy New: $7.34
You Save: $5.66 (44%)
New (30) Used (20) from $7.29
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 220887
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 4.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 0142437778
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780142437773
ASIN: 0142437778
Publication Date: December 28, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080820212438T
|
| Also Available In:
| • | Paperback - Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black | | • | Unknown Binding - 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 | | • | Paperback - Our Nig (Webster's English Thesaurus Edition) | | • | Kindle Edition - Our Nig (Girlebooks Classics) | | • | Paperback - 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 | | • | Hardcover - 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 by "Our Nig" | | • | Hardcover - Our Nig | | • | Paperback - Our Nig | | • | Paperback - Our Nig | | • | Paperback - Our Nig | | • | Unknown Binding - 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 | | • | Paperback - Our Nig (Webster's Spanish Thesaurus Edition) | | • | Hardcover - Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black |
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Our Nig is the tale of a mixed-race girl, Frado, abandoned by her white mother after the death of the childs black father. Frado becomes the servant of the Bellmonts, a lower-middle- class white family in the free North, while slavery is still legal in the South, and suffers numerous abuses in their household. Frados story is a tragic one; having left the Bellmonts, she eventually marries a black fugitive slave, who later abandons her. Wilson combined and subverted two literary styles, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, in writing Our Nig, which was drawn from her real-life experience. Her sardonic treatment of abolitionists in the novel has long perplexed scholars and readers; Foreman and Pitts explain this puzzle in their Introduction and recount Wilsons life and career after the 1859 publication of Our Nig.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Slave of Northern Abolitionist but free May 7, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was written by a woman who was supposed to be a free Black woman. In fact she was treated like a slave, a Black wage slave. She was oppressed by a family of who were Northern Abolitionists. Yet, she was treated like a slave. Succeeding generations of whites studying the book denied her and her class the ability to write such a book: they claimed the book had to have been written by a white person and that it was a novel, not real.
Millions of Black women who have slaved in white kitchens and cleaning white homes during and since slavery have a spokesperson in Harriet E. Wilson. This book helps us understand not just to pity them, but to understanding their ability to fight back with their minds.
buy it with the Foreman & Pitts introduction May 8, 2005
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Though I currently have the 1983 edition with the introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr (whose name is in the introduction for almost every important Af-Am text in circulation, it seems), I plan on getting this latest edition.
Until recently, biographical details on Wilson were limited. Indeed, they seemed to trail off soon after the publication of her book (a death certificate for her son six months after its printing has suggested to some that her call for support went unheard). This introduciton offers new and happier information, showing that Wilson lived a long life--in part as a successful lecturer on the Spiritualist circuit.
In any edition this is a great book. Really, "great" isn't superlative enough to cover how important and interesting it is. But if you're going to buy it, get this edition.
 The North Wasn't Much Better September 15, 2000
14 out of 22 found this review helpful
The female child of a white female outcast and a black freeman, the author gives a detailed account of what it was like being raised by a white family in the pre-Civil War North of the United States (a household where she was abandoned by her mother at 3). This biography gives a general idea of what a Negro's life in the North was like -- and it was not much different from that life of a slave in the South. The mistress of the house was brutal beyond measure, but many of the other family members were reasonably kind (though not kind of enough to put a stop to the abuse), and it makes one shudder to think of what could have happened in a family who had nothing but Negro-haters in it. Still, she recounts how she got a small measure of schooling, and how she eventually became a Christian (something which the lady of the house -- a Christian herself -- opposed) and her eventual marriage. An upsetting story, it is nevertheless of much more value than "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as it was told from the point of view of the victim and not a sympathetic white.
|
|
|
