Frado, a mixed race girl abandoned by her mother, is bound into years of unpaid servitude in a household in the supposedly free North, where cruelty does not require slavery’s name to do slavery’s damage.
Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig in 1859, making it the first novel by a Black woman to appear in North America. Largely forgotten for over a century before its rediscovery, it complicates the tidy story of North versus South with an account few history books tell.
