Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Glossary
"
- "Our Nig"
- The dehumanizing nickname the Bellmont household gives Frado, used as the novel's own title — Wilson's deliberately confrontational choice, forcing readers to sit inside the era's casual racist language even as the narrative builds sympathy for the girl it names.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), The Bellmont Household
A
- Aunt Abby
- A relative living within the Bellmont household who offers Frado occasional comfort, religious counsel, and protection, representing one of the few consistently kind presences the girl encounters — though even her intervention cannot fully shield Frado from Mrs. Bellmont's abuse.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), Mrs. Bellmont
F
- Fido
- Frado's beloved dog, whose temporary loss and recovery cause the child great sorrow and relief — a small domestic detail that Wilson uses to show how thoroughly Frado's few sources of affection and comfort had been stripped away, making even a pet's presence disproportionately precious.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado)
- Frado (Alfrado)
- The novel's protagonist, a mixed-race girl abandoned by her white mother and left with the Bellmont family as an indentured servant — the fictionalized version of Wilson's own childhood. Called 'Our Nig' by the household, she endures years of grueling labor and abuse from Mrs. Bellmont while showing a defiant, spirited nature the narrative never lets the household crush entirely.
- Related: Mag Smith, Mrs. Bellmont, The Bellmont Household
H
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- The literary scholar who rediscovered and authenticated Our Nig in 1982, establishing it as the first novel published in North America by a Black woman and restoring Harriet Wilson to the American literary canon after more than a century of obscurity.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), The Appendix
J
- Jack Bellmont
- Another of the Bellmont sons, who along with James shows Frado occasional sympathy and protection against his mother's worst cruelties, though his intervention is inconsistent and limited by his own subordinate position in the household.
- Related: James Bellmont, Frado (Alfrado)
- James Bellmont
- The Bellmonts' son, who treats Frado with genuine kindness and to whom she becomes deeply attached, offering rare warmth in an otherwise hostile household. His prolonged illness and eventual death — narrated across several chapters — removes Frado's strongest protector within the family.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), Jack Bellmont, Susan
- Jim (Frado's Father)
- The hardworking Black laborer who marries the destitute Mag Smith, proud of his 'treasure, a white wife,' and provides for her comfortably until illness ends his life. His death leaves Mag without support and sets in motion the chain of events that leads to Frado being left with the Bellmonts.
- Related: Mag Smith, Seth Shipley
L
- Lewis
- James's brother, sent for as James's illness worsens and described as an especial favorite of Mary's, whose visit and reaction to his dying brother's Christian resignation deepen the novel's meditation on faith, mortality, and family duty.
- Related: James Bellmont, Susan
M
- Mag Smith (Frado's Mother)
- Frado's white mother, introduced in the opening chapter as a once-trusting young woman ruined by early betrayal and poverty, who marries the Black laborer Jim, bears his children, and after his death and a second doomed relationship, abandons young Frado with the Bellmont family rather than continue to support her. Wilson uses Mag's fall from respectability to indict the social system that punishes poor women for interracial love.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), Jim
- Mary Bellmont
- The Bellmonts' daughter, who largely shares her mother's contempt for Frado and participates in the household's mistreatment of her, serving as a foil to her more sympathetic brothers James and Jack.
- Related: Mrs. Bellmont, Frado (Alfrado)
- Mr. Bellmont
- The head of the household, described as 'a kind, humane man' unwilling to grudge hospitality even to the poorest wanderer, who initially takes Frado in but proves largely passive in restraining his wife's cruelty toward the girl — a portrait of the complicity of quiet decency in the face of ongoing abuse.
- Related: Mrs. Bellmont, The Bellmont Household
- Mrs. Bellmont
- The household's tyrannical mistress, whose escalating physical and verbal abuse of Frado — overwork, beatings, and constant humiliation — is the engine of the book's argument that Northern free-state racism could be as cruel as Southern slavery. She is the novel's clearest villain, contrasted sharply with her more sympathetic children.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), The Bellmont Household, Mr. Bellmont
S
- Seth Shipley
- Jim's business partner, who continues to support Mag with a weekly allowance after Jim's death and eventually enters a relationship with her, further isolating Mag from white society and setting up the desperate circumstances under which Frado is ultimately given away.
- Related: Jim (Frado's Father), Mag Smith
- Susan
- James's wife, who along with her husband Charles returns to Baltimore after James's death, part of the extended family whose grief and correspondence Wilson uses to mark the passage of time and the loss of Frado's protector.
- Related: James Bellmont
T
- The Appendix
- Three testimonial letters appended to the original 1859 edition — from a friend signing herself 'Allida,' from Margaretta Thorn, and from 'C. D. S.' — vouching for Wilson's character and the truth of her hardships, a device common to slave narratives that Wilson adapts to authenticate her free-Black novel.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado)
- The Bellmont Household
- The Massachusetts farm family Frado is left with as a child servant, dominated by the cruel Mrs. Bellmont, whose treatment of Frado forms the novel's central argument that Northern racism could be just as brutal as Southern slavery, despite occurring in a free state under a family that considered itself Christian and respectable.
- Related: Mrs. Bellmont, Mr. Bellmont, Frado (Alfrado)
- The Itinerant Colored Lecturer
- The traveling former-slave narrator mentioned in the novel's final chapters, whose public recounting of enslavement experiences was a common feature of antebellum abolitionist circuits and through whom Frado's own path to marriage and further hardship is set in motion — one of Wilson's several nods to the conventions of the slave narrative genre she is simultaneously borrowing from and complicating.
- Related: Frado (Alfrado), The Appendix