IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, I argued in con-
nection with Hildreth's The Slave and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
that far from its conventional image of victimized passivity, the
“tragic mulatto” figure can function as a serious challenge to the
prevailing social order. Nowhere is this more true than in Har-
riet Wilson's 1859 novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a
Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slav-
ery's Shadows Fall Even There. While from her first appearance it
becomes clear that the character of Frado is firmly rooted in the
“tragic” tradition, in many ways she also extends and counters
the convention from which she emerges. Wilson achieves this
result by dint of the political ambitiousness of what first appears
to be a rather simple tale. On the contrary, Our Nig is the first
“tragic mulatta” narrative to be explicitly concerned with issues
of class as they impinge upon race politics. More than that, the
novel subtly, yet decidedly, advances an allegorical brief for eco-
nomic and racial equity in an emerging interracial nation.

Indeed, by the 1830s comparisons were routinely being
made in the rhetoric of the emerging labor movement between
the status of the Northern worker and the Southern slave. By
1859, when Our Nig was published, Northern abolitionists were
embroiled in a heated controversy over the parallels that could

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