FEELING DISOBEDIENT: A FEMININST ANALYSIS OF BLACK FEMININE

FUGITIVE AND INSURGENT ACTS IN HARRIET WILSON’S OUR NIG (1859)

By

Kiersten King

A capstone project submitted for Graduation with University Honors

May 5, 2016

University Honors University of California, Riverside

APPROVED

Dr. Emma Stapely Department of English –––––––––––––––––––––––––– Dr. Richard Cardullo, Howard H Hays Chair and Faculty Director, University Honors Associate Vice Provost, Undergraduate Education

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Abstract This paper explores how Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical novel, Our Nig; or,

Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), re-appropriates and subverts minstrel

traditions, sentimentality, and the objectification of Black pain in 19th century American

cultural representations of Blackness. By turning to weeping and what Wilson calls the

protagonist, Frado/Nig’s, “jollity,” Our Nig enters into the 19th century literary canon as a

conceptually rich theorization of freedom that forces us to rethink the ways in which the

politics and poetics of “resistance” emerges on the periphery of intelligibility and

representation. When self- representation is a dead-end for those who are denied legal

forms of recognition and freedom in antebellum U.S. society, this paper wonders how

what we might call “feminine” non-representational, unintelligible, and nonsensical

resistances reconstitute freedom instead as an act of fugitivity: a freedom that refuses to

be located in the domain of reason and rational comprehension. I argue for a

reconsideration of Frado/Nig’s silent and noisy weeping and her nonsensical

performances of jollity throughout Our Nig as provisional acts of freedom that unsettle

masculinist narratives of resistance and fugitivity, creating in the process alternative

feminist epistemologies of insurgency.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my profound gratitude to my faculty mentor, Dr. Emma

Stapely of the English Department at UC Riverside, for guiding and supporting me

throughout this entire research process. Thank you for your persistent dedication,

kindness, encouragement, and trust. This project would not have been possible without

you.

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Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..…....iii

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..……1

Section I: Disobedient Weeping…………………………………………………………12

Section II: Nonsensical Jollity...........................................................................................33

Works Cited.......................................................................................................................50

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Introduction

“‘Stop!’ shouted Frado, ‘strike me, and I’ll never work a mite more for you’; and

throwing down what she had gathered, stood like one who feels the stirring of free and

independent thoughts.”

--Harriet Wilson

Harriet Wilson’s autobiographical novel, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a

Free Black (1859), is a story about a young biracial girl, Frado/Nig, who is indentured to

the Bellmont family in the antebellum north. During her servitude in the Bellmont home,

her mistresses, Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter, Mary Bellmont, frequently torture

Frado/Nig until she is almost completely debilitated by the conclusion of the text. The

quotation above thus marks a climactic moment for Frado/Nig. In this scene, she has been

sent out to gather wood by her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont. Failing to return in the time Mrs.

Bellmont has “calculated” (Wilson 58), Frado/Nig arrives with the wood to her angry

mistress who, taking a stick from the pile, raises it over Frado/Nig’s head with the

intention of beating her. For the first time in the narrative, Frado/Nig shouts, “Stop!” and

threatens to “never work a mite more for [Mrs. Bellmont]” if she is subjected to another

one of Mrs. Bellmont’s violent beatings. For most scholars, this moment represents what

successful, intelligible resistance looks like: “this act of resistance is Frado’s most

successful one”1 and it characterizes a key moment in the text when Frado/Nig, “as a

young woman discovers her voice and the power of her will.”2 But I question whether

self-representation is a viable measure of freedom for those whose freedom is denied to

1 John Ernest, “Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” PMLA 109, no. 3 (May 1994), 433. 2 Beth Maclay Doriani, “Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women’s Biographies,” American Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1991), 216.

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them by the law itself? What happens when self-representation–– in this instance,

intelligible speech–– is a trap and a dead-end for the indentured and enslaved in

antebellum U.S. society? How might non-representational, unintelligible, and

nonsensical resistances reconstitute freedom instead as an act of fugitivity: a freedom that

refuses to be located? Although set in the “free” north, juridical notions of freedom and

unfreedom are unsettling and unsettled terms throughout the length of Our Nig.3

What is ultimately at stake in this line of inquiry is that intelligibility and

representation stand in as the only measures of personhood. For instance, some literary

scholars conflate Frado/Nig’s personhood with her ability to speak out against abuse in

the domain of intelligible speech. In interpreting the woodpile scene, DoVeanna S. Fulton

argues that Frado/Nig, “employs orality to retrieve not just her womanhood, but her

personhood as well.”4 This implies that normative language, such as we hear in the

demand, “Stop!” is fundamentally linked first to Frado/Nig’s gendered self and then to

her personhood (at least in the logic of Fulton’s statement). “Retrieving” gendered

womanhood and personhood through Frado/Nig’s “restored voice”5 appears to be one

way in which confining personhood to the limits of intelligible speech consigns Our Nig

to a narrow formulation of freedom and unfreedom: personhood has to be “retrieved” and

therefore constantly maintained by intelligible speech in this logic. This begs the question

3 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions: New York, 2013), 97. Moten and Harney write: “Never being on the right side of the Atlantic is an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others.” I use this word “unsettled” in the body of my paper to reflect both the un-settling historical displacement of Afro-American people across the Middle Passage and as a way for thinking about how to be “unsettled” is to also always be moving like waves in the currents of the sea. So to be “unsettled” may also be a kind of fugitivity from “settled” historical narratives of colonization, while also referencing a site of ongoing trauma and violence. 4 DoVeanna S. Fulton, “Tale-Bearing and Dressing Out: Black Women’s Speech Acts that Expose Torture and Abuse by Slave Mistresses in Our Nig, Sylvia Dubois, and The Story of Mattie J. Jackson,” Speaking Power: Black Feminist Orality in Women’s Narratives of Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 47. 5 Fulton, 48.

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as to whether Frado/Nig constitutes an alternative form of personhood than one mediated

through normative structures of recognition? By relying on modes of intelligibility and

representation to assert the meaning and recognition of personhood, other possibilities––

alternative touch, sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of personhood–– are exited and erased

out of the purview of what it means to feel, speak, and live in the flesh.

Similarly, some scholars undermine the ways in which Frado/Nig takes up

unintelligible and non-representational insurgent affects and performances that play out

as a kind of hybrid personhood. Cynthia J. Davis, for instance, also focuses on the power

of intelligible speech at the woodpile scene when she posits that, “by speaking,

[Frado/Nig] effectively protests Mrs. Bellmont’s definition of her as beast and asserts

instead […] that she is a thinking, feeling human being…”6 By drawing in on the

presence of intelligible speech as an “effective” affirmation that Frado/Nig is a “thinking,

feeling human being,” Davis overlooks how personhood manifests through thinking and

feeling in a variety of ways, spoken and unspoken. In this sense, personhood may be

improvisational and therefore contextually constituted and reconstituted over and over

again. What if personhood asserted itself in a momentary hesitation? What if it was partly

enveloped in the act of “scampering home as fast as possible” (Wilson 20) from an

enemy?

These scholars have yet to identify how Frado/Nig’s hybrid personhood manifests

through unintelligible, noisy protests and non-representational, yet disruptive

performative acts. As a hybrid text with a hybrid character, I propose that Frado/Nig’s

personhood is provisional, situational, and fragmentary–– in the continuity between being

6 Cynthia J. Davis, “Speaking the Body’s Pain: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993), 400.

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both Frado and Nig. Frado/Nig cannot choose when she is “Frado” and when she is “Nig”

in any given moment. Therefore I further contend that her hybridity leads us to a reading

of Our Nig that calls attention to silenced, noisy, and disruptive affects and performances,

such as in weeping and jollity, as radical expressions and sounds of personhood that

might experience freedom in the liminal gaps or crevices of social life that takes place

even when one is unrecognizable by the law.

I am interested in finding alternative ways for talking about insurgency that are

not drawn through normative, articulate speech. My project thus departs from scholars’

interest in verbal resistance and moves toward an analysis of articulated, yet

unintelligible sounds of weeping and performative acts of jollity as sites of insurgency.

This paper asks: can language rooted in unintelligible, non-representational sounds and

performances manifest insurgency? What if we considered weeping and jollity––

behaviors that Mrs. Bellmont and Mary perceives as criminal and deserving of

punishment–– within traditions of Black revolutionary acts?

I am also drawn to weeping and jollity throughout Our Nig as acts one may

identify as feminine–– acts typically thought to be non-threatening–– because they induce

the potential of far more violence from Frado/Nig’s abusers than her verbal protests do.

The risk of weeping, for example, is immediately introduced the moment Frado/Nig

enters the Bellmont home. She is subjected to “‘words that burn’ and frequent blows on

the head” (Wilson 18) by Mrs. Bellmont. In response to these abuses, “at first

[Frado/Nig] wept aloud, which Mrs. Bellmont noticed by applying a raw-hide, always at

hand in the kitchen. It was a symptom of discontent and complaining which must be

‘nipped in the bud’” (Wilson 18). By drawing close attention to Mrs. Bellmont’s violent

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reactions to Frado/Nig’s weeping, I suggest Wilson implies there is something more

threatening in the act of weeping than scholars have allowed. In fact, Mrs. Bellmont’s

impulse to hit Frado/Nig actually confirms that weeping bears political force by

criminalizing it through punishment. Weeping is therefore not a political failure or a

feminine weakness; it is a subversive statement communicating discontent through

sorrow that needs to not only be punished and silenced, but ‘nipped in the bud’––

permanently plucked from Frado/Nig’s spirit.

Although I argue that weeping and jollity are resistant in the body of Our Nig,

representations of Black sorrow and joy are of course highly controversial in 19th-century

U.S. literature, especially for Afro-American subjects. Wilson thus turns to weeping and

what she calls Frado/Nig’s “jollity” to critique and subvert minstrelsy, sentimentality, and

the objectification of Black pain within 19th century American culture. Wilson is partly

responding to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely acclaimed novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

(1852)7, where weeping is coopted as an act that justifies the objectification of Black

people, denying them subjectivity.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the character Topsy, for example, is portrayed as either

insensible, a minstrel caricature and performer, or indebted to a white child forever (and

thus non- or partially human) through the acts of weeping and sorrow. In Chapter XX

titled, “Topsy,” Stowe writes that Topsy “was one of the blackest of her race”8:

The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked

drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an

odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands

7 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003). 8 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 235.

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and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her

knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and

producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which

distinguish the native music of her race.9

Topsy’s “glassy” eyes are supposed to indicate a kind of insensateness and lifelessness in

their almost doll-like appearance; moreover, the “odd[ness]” and “wild[ness]” of Topsy’s

song and dance register for white readerships of the 19th century as minstrelsy, and

therefore as a site of economic and social capital.10 Through an invocation of sentimental

politics, Stowe’s racist caricaturing of Topsy ultimately popularizes the “pickaninny”

stereotype in American culture.11 This passage thus illustrates the ways in which

sentimental literature of the 19th century heavily relied on organizing racist structures of

domination through the lens and language of the “spectacular” as well as on the

insistency that Black children–– represented through the “pickaninny” figure–– are,

“always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain.”12

Wilson also keeps in mind the ways Stowe capitalizes on Black sorrow as she

spreads the insidious notion that white sympathy, sentimentality, and Christian morality

will emancipate the enslaved. Briefly, Topsy’s young mistress, Eva, is dying and tells

Topsy that it, “grieves [her], to have [Topsy] be so naughty”; so, “in that moment, a ray

9 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 235-236. 10 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 3-12. Importantly, the entire plot of the novel was catalyzed by the spectacle of a Black child, Harry Washington, performing minstrel acts for a slave trader who, after seeing the performance, insisted on purchasing Harry. 11 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2011), 34. In tracing cultural representations of the “pickaninny” figure, Bernstein argues: “the pickaninny was an imagined, subhuman black juvenile who was typically depicted outdoors, merrily accepting (or even inviting) violence.” 12 Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 35.

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of real belief, of heavenly love, had penetrated the darkness of [Topsy’s] heathen soul!”13

Because Topsy will agree to “be good” upon Eva’s wish, Topsy’s moral indebtedness can

never be discharged, especially after Eva dies. The “darkness of [Topsy’s] heathen soul”–

– a place where, reading against the grain of the text, Topsy might emerge as a resistant

subject–– is overpowered by a “ray” of white sympathy. Topsy’s moral indebtedness to

Eva is thus deeply undergirded by white supremacist values and their demand for “good,”

submissive, and obedient Black subjects.

As an abolitionist text during the time of its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin uses

an image of white childhood and femininity to invoke feelings of sympathy and

sentimentality in white readers. As Lauren Berlant posits in her essay “Poor Eliza”

(1998), “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an archive people come to out of a political optimism that

the revolution in mass subjectivity for which it stands might be borrowed for the

transformation of other unjust social institutions.”14 Sentimentality is thus presented in

Stowe’s novel as the most effective and widely available tool for white abolitionist

politics, projecting the idea of a “mass subjectivity”–– one created through notions of

what Berlant identifies as “true feeling”–– onto a scene more critically identifiable as

subjection.15

Instead of emancipatory possibilities, sentimentality and sympathy reinforces

hierarchy and the subjugation of the enslaved. In order to delve into the nuances of

Wilson’s critique of these three interweaving patterns of violent representations of Afro-

American people in 19th century American culture–– minstrelsy, sentimentality, and the

13 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 279. 14 Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature, 70 no. 3 (Sep.1998), 640. 15 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). I use the phrase “scenes of subjection” in reference to Hartman’s book throughout the body of this paper.

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objectification of Black pain–– I engage with scholars such as Robin Bernstein and her

book, Racial Innocence (2011) and Lauren Berlant in her essay, “Poor Eliza” (1999).

With Bernstein and Berlant’s works in mind, I argue that Wilson “works on and against

dominant ideology,” 16 against representations of Black suffering and pleasure within

antebellum American culture by unsettling notions of Blackness and whiteness as they

were dispersed across popular cultural fictions of the 19th century. For Wilson, it is not

about gaining recognition within available languages of sentimentality or minstrelsy,

because both fundamentally rely on objectification. Instead she engages both weeping

and jollity but plays them off each other, never committing to either absolutely.

Our Nig thus enters into the 19th century American literary canon as a powerful,

conceptually rich theorization of freedom that forces us to rethink the ways in which the

politics and poetics of “resistance” emerges on the peripheries of representation and

intelligibility. My argument draws inspiration from Black feminist scholars, such as from

Saidiya Hartman and from Alexander G. Weheliye’s recent work on Hortense Spillers

and Sylvia Wynter. Weheliye, while interpreting “the sweets of [Mary Prince’s]

freedom” in his monograph, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and

Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), argues that, “to banish these articulations

of freedom and/or pleasure into exile in the precinct of inhumanity or prelanguage […]

not only denies the possibility of life in extreme circumstances but also leaves intact the

16 José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11. In the same sense that Muñoz defines disidentification as “work[ing] on and against dominant ideology,” I also consider the way in which Wilson disidentifies with racist representations of Black personhood in 19th century America as a means of subverting them. She does not fully distance Frado/Nig’s character from these representations or assimilate into them. Rather, she plays and performs dominant ideological constructions of Blackness to critique their underlying assumptions and contradictions within 19th century American cultural society.

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ruling definition of the human as Man.”17 “These articulations of freedom” refer to “the

sweets of freedom”: “the (almost) unlimited capacity for opiate-inducing syrupy tastes

and textures” as a “hunger that moves in survival as freedom.”18 In other words,

Weheliye argues there is something liberatory in craving and tasting the “sweetness of

freedom” when the law denies it to you. From here, Weheliye recognizes what the

Politics of Man tend to cognize as zones of weakness, inefficiency, failure, and death as

radical manifestations of social life. When Wynter talks about the human as Man and the

Politics of Man, she is highlighting the ways the category of the Human is constructed by

proprietary subjectivity, gender, and intelligible language.19 Weheliye thus is working

with Wynter’s theory to open the boundaries of personhood by turning to sounds,

gestures, tastes, touch, etc., as having insurgent force within a language of freedom that

resists intelligibility. These “articulations of freedom and pleasure” arise from within the

domain of unintelligible, non-representational speech and performances in what we may

call an alternative feminine subjectivity.

Therefore Frado/Nig enters into what Hortense Spillers formulates as, “the

insurgent ground as female social subject” in her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe:

An American Grammar Book” (1987).20 In her essay, Spillers is refiguring understanding

of both Blackness and femaleness that cannot be reduced to identitarian terms. Spillers

writes:

17 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 130. 18 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 129-130. 19 Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis (Duke University Press, 2014). 20 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987), 80.

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Only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and

mother dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places

her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female

gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different

social subject. 21

By redrawing Black femaleness as a site of insurgent politics, Spillers’s female social

subject enters as a critical intervention into questions around gender, the flesh, and

empowerment. The female social subject’s insurgent force is aimed at unsettling cultural

representations of Blackness, such as we see in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by “claiming the

monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”) which her culture imposes in

blindness,”22 such as in a subversion of the “pickaninny” figure. Frado/Nig thus plays

with and resists these cultural representations by turning to feminine non-

representational, unintelligible acts in her weeping and jollity that can and do manifest

insurgency.

Following from Spillers’s theorization of the “insurgent ground as female social

subject,” I further propose that all of these other aspects of Frado/Nig’s spirit–– the

sounds, gestures, and performances of weeping and jollity–– engage in what may be

posited as feminized acts of fugitivity. Frado/Nig’s fugitive acts are not exclusive to

physical escape or a singular, triumphant arrival to freedom. Instead, feminized acts of

fugitivity are rooted in temporary affective, spiritual, and spirited resistances and retreats,

along with the realization that there is something emancipatory in the process of fleeing

and returning–– whether physically, affectively, or through performative acts. These

21 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80. 22 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80.

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retreats do not necessarily lead to anywhere in particular, nor do they exit systems of

domination already set in place. Rather, feminized acts of fugitivity signal the power and

political importance of “craving” or desiring a freedom that may be unobtainable.

Feminized acts of fugitivity might find liberation in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), call “being shipped”:

“To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home

with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the

ones who consent not to be one.”23 As a hybrid and layered text, Our Nig is about what it

means to navigate what has already occurred and is occurring–– “to have been shipped”–

– to move and live in the currents of uncertainty and homelessness, in a constant state of

fugitivity that leads to nowhere and everywhere.

In Wilson’s Our Nig, I thus suggest that small and seemingly insignificant

moments of weeping and jollity are politically charged articulations of freedom. Thinking

back to Frado/Nig’s verbal resistance at the woodpile in relation to when she “weeps

aloud” in the kitchen or “scampers” away from punishment, how may freedom reveal

itself when it is neither defined as a final outcome nor as an absolute possibility for the

enslaved? If Wilson is constantly moving along a continuum of very brief moments of

freedom and even longer intervals of unfreedom in the text, what else may feminine

resistances demand? What other linguistic registers, whether verbal or non-verbal, does a

performance rooted in sorrow and jollity open up for her readers? These questions are

meant to invite interpretations of Wilson’s text that read the most feminine of defenses––

weeping and jollity–– ultimately as the grounds on which Black feminine insurgency

takes its course. 23 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 97.

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Section I: Disobedient Weeping

“Stung by unmerited rebuke, weak from sorrow and anxiety, the tears rolled down her

dark face, soon followed by sobs, and then losing all control of herself, she wept aloud.

This was an act of disobedience. Her mistress grasping her raw-hide, caused a longer

flow of tears, and wounded a spirit that was craving healing mercies.”

--Harriet Wilson

In Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in

Nineteenth-Century America (1997), Hartman takes up scenes of Black pain and sorrow

through what has been represented in 19th-century American literature as the, “spectacular

nature of black suffering and, conversely, the dissimulation of suffering through

spectacle.”24 In her book, she argues that these “scenes of subjection” are produced and

reinforced in the spectacle of Blackness–– of Black suffering and pleasure–– within

traditions of minstrelsy and the objectification of Black pain. Moreover, her book draws

on the ways in which Black suffering and pleasure within the context of chattel slavery

are inextricably bound to what she identifies as a “web of domination.”25 In her

theorization of (non)-freedom acts among the enslaved, this web of domination leaves

little to no room for Black suffering and pleasure to emerge as insurgent politics of

dissent, of protest, or as a call and doing of freedom.

So what does it mean when feeling sorrow or pain is labeled as “disobedience”? Is

disobedient weeping a political failure, or can we consider it alongside other political acts

of resistance? I consider how Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) broadens our collective

understanding of Black feminine resistance by including feminine affective behaviors and

24 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 22. 25 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 49.

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performances, such as weeping, within the larger scope of Black revolutionary acts. By

resituating weeping as a form of resistance to the objectification of Black sorrow in the

sentimental novel, Wilson allows room in the form of unintelligible noises and stolen

retreats for Frado/Nig’s insurgent disruption of “the spectacular nature of black

suffering” to take on resistant and fugitive force.

Weeping is immediately set up in Wilson’s narrative as feminized insurgency

located in the domain of heard, but unintelligible speech. Expected to labor for countless

hours and exposed to physically exhausting work conditions, Frado/Nig at first, “wept

aloud, which Mrs. Bellmont noticed by applying a raw-hide, always at hand in the

kitchen. It was a symptom of discontent and complaining which must be ‘nipped in the

bud’” (Wilson 18). Through non-representational speech such as “we[eping] aloud,”

Frado/Nig is able to communicate “discontent” and “complaint[s]” to her tormentor, who

seeks to “nip” out this channel of resistance by wounding the body. Although attempting

to restrain Frado/Nig’s spirit by violently beating her, Frado/Nig’s body continues to

aurally assert itself as an affective–– and therefore still spirited––entity. Furthermore,

Mrs. Bellmont fails to realize how her reactions to Frado/Nig’s weeping participate in a

process of reorganizing visible and aural fields of recognition and non-recognition. What

Hartman rightly identifies as the “spectacular nature of black suffering and, conversely,

the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle” partly collapses in this reorganization

and appropriation of the visual, of being made into a spectacle.

First and foremost, the political content of weeping can be found in the

linguistically intelligible sounds “silent” weeping creates, allowing for insurgency to

manifest as disruptive noise. As a consequence of being “noticed” by weeping, Frado/Nig

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must “silently weep over her sad fate” (Wilson 18) rather than verbalizing her internal

outcries of sorrow. In the poetics of the phrase “silently wept over her sad fate,”

Frado/Nig’s “discontent” and “complaint[s]” are carried across the aural “s” sounds in

“silently” and “sad” as well as in the “t” sounds of “silently,” “wept,” and “fate.” When

articulated aloud, the consonants “s” and “t” block off the airway in the throat, thus

mimicking the sounds and the feeling of being choked-up when one weeps, inserting this

response into the language of the text itself. When vocalized, we can also hear Frado/Nig

sniffling in the “st” “st” sounds of the phrase. Literary devices such as consonance

heighten this effect so that the soft “s” and hard “t” sounds clash together, linguistically

transferring “silent[ly] weeping” into noise. To articulate the language of the text aloud––

to listen to the sounds the words make–– is to therefore resist the denotative meaning of

the phrase itself. The visual spectacle and “annoyance” of Frado/Nig’s weeping to Mrs.

Bellmont is thus partially counteracted by Wilson’s skillful accentuation of weeping’s

sonic intonations as protest, as a call and response to freedom.

Although otherwise registered as linguistically intelligible speech, “silent

weeping” aligns with Weheliye’s claims in Habeas Viscus where he argues that fleshly

pains and desires are communicated in ways that do not conform to normative linguistic

structures. In another example, Frado/Nig is found sitting instead of working because she

feels sick. In defiance of Mrs. Bellmont’s demand for her to stand up and keep working,

Frado/Nig replies, “I am sick […] and cannot stand long, I feel so bad” (Wilson 46). Mrs.

Bellmont, “excited by so much indulgence of a dangerous passion, seemed left to

unrestrained malice; and snatching a towel, stuffed the mouth of the sufferer, and beat her

cruelly” (Wilson 46). Even as Mrs. Bellmont goes to extreme lengths to silence

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Frado/Nig by literally stuffing her mouth, there are still sounds of resistance

reverberating from within the almost anagrammatic and homophonic pairing of the words

“stuffed” and “suffered,” linking the pain of the flesh to feelings of suffering that breaks

noisily through the flesh.

The words “stuffed” and “suffered” exist within what Weheliye calls the “space-

ways of the flesh,” where pain is communicated through linguistically intelligible speech

but received as unintelligible noise. Weheliye posits that, “for language, especially in the

space-ways of the flesh, comes in many varieties, and functions not only–– or even

primarily–– to create words in the service of conforming to linguistic structures

transparent in the world of Man.”26 Through consonance and assonance in the words

“stuffed” and “suffered,” the flesh begins to speak: the barely audible and unintelligible

sounds, utterances, and groans of suffering and pain can be read as something that is full

and loud. It is “stuffed” with so much “suffer[ing]” that it cannot remain silenced for

long. As an unintelligible noise that is non-transparent to the world of Man, weeping

resists meaning and resists the idea of intelligible personhood. If her flesh can speak and

we can hear it as noise, how else may we imagine what personhood is and who/what has

it?

Frado/Nig’s silent weeping can be further considered as feminine resistance

rooted in acts of endurance. For instance, Giorgio Agamben theorizes in his essay “Notes

on Gesture” (2000) that, “the gesture is, in this sense, communication of a

communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-

26 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 126.

16

language of human beings as pure mediality.”27 Frado/Nig’s sorrow quite literally has

“nothing to say” in the domain of normative linguistic structures because its meaning is

received as unintelligible noise to the Bellmont family. But even more so, silently

weeping has “nothing to say” insofar as the sounds of weeping are articulated in the most

basic structures of the English language, such as in the phonemic “s” and “t” sounds and

“uff” pairings, thus showing how little meaning can actually be extracted from

Frado/Nig’s pain if one is only listening for intelligible speech. For Frado/Nig, “being-in-

language” is to partly endure and survive by relating needs and desires in the song-like

articulations of weeping–– in the often improvisational, fragmentary, and spasmodic

noises and gestures weeping lets out.

Alongside Wilson, I argue for this place where linguistically articulated, yet

unintelligible sorrows can flow forth as a temporary fugitive escape from the “scene of

subjection” where “the spectacular nature of Black suffering” occurs. As Weheliye

suggests, silent weeping, “construe[s] ‘cries and groans,’ ‘heart-rending shrieks,’ ‘the

mechanical murmurs without content’ as language that does not rely on linguistic

structures, at least not primarily, to convey meaning, sense, or expression.”28 Feminized

resistant acts are at times a process of fleeing from intelligible language, finding retreat in

weeping (or other forms of unintelligible protest), and again returning back to the

confines of normative speech. Silently weeping is certainly not a permanent or ideal state;

it may not necessarily be the triumphant models of resistance or revolution we are used to

reading about; and it is certainly not a sustainable act. Yet it is still important to draw

attention to the ways Frado/Nig resists being under total physical, affective, and linguistic

27 Giorgio Agamben. “Notes on Gesture” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2000), 58.9. 28 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 126.

17

restraint by disobediently weeping. These unintelligible and non-representational

protests–– the sounds of weeping and pain–– swell noisily into a call we might identify as

the sound of feminine insurgencies. Wilson thus insists that in these silences, noise can be

heard; life takes place, just not always in linguistically intelligible terms. In so doing,

Wilson refuses to conform to notions of personhood where the human is always Man,

always a proprietary subject who uses intelligible language to assert mastery over himself

and others.

While there is something fugitive in the articulately intelligible sounds weeping

makes, it is also important to analyze what happens when weeping inevitably comes in

contact with visual and aural fields of recognition. Throughout the text, Frado/Nig’s

weeping is “noticeable” as an annoyance, as “disobedience,” or as pity by white

observers. Beginning with an analysis of unsympathetic white women in Our Nig, Wilson

narrates in one particular scene that Mrs. Bellmont, “found [Frado/Nig] weeping on

[James Bellmont’s] account, shut her up, and whipped her with the raw-hide, adding an

injunction never to be seen sniveling again because she had a little work to do” (Wilson

43). In this scene, Frado/Nig appears to be mourning over the slow death of her most

sympathetic friend in the narrative and son of Mrs. Bellmont, James Bellmont. But Mrs.

Bellmont “found,” not heard, Frado/Nig weeping over James, implying that her cries

were unintelligible even as noise; or, as another possibility, deceptively and purposefully

made inaudible to Mrs. Bellmont’s ears through her own decision to ignore them as

expressions of sorrow.

As a double text, Our Nig plays with what is seen and heard by white observers in

order to combat scenes of Black objectification in 19th century American cultural

18

traditions. In the above example, for instance, Mrs. Bellmont receives Frado/Nig’s

weeping as a visual nuisance that must be punished into silence, into inaudibility. The

word “notice” connotes both “to see” and “to respond,” linking the visual to subsequent

impulsive acts of physical violence. Although Mrs. Bellmont “notices” Frado/Nig’s

weeping, witnessing Black pain and sorrow does not nurture white feminine sympathy, as

the rubric of the cult of true womanhood would have us believe. 29 Rather, Wilson draws

attention to the ways in which the cult of domesticity and true womanhood reinforces

white supremacist values by complying with the Politics of Man–– a politics that upholds

notions of proprietary subjectivity, patriarchal values, and reason over (non)sense.

The contradictory formulations of white womanhood and sympathy that run

throughout Our Nig are made evident in Wilson’s added detail of a “raw-hide, always at

hand in the kitchen.” This image syntactically blurs the physical boundary between Mrs.

Bellmont’s hand and the rawhide. Wilson therefore depicts white feminine bodies as

instruments of torture: as bodies with hybrid rawhide/hand hands specifically invented

for violent purposes. The rawhide also seems to be casually lying around the kitchen such

as any common domestic object, like a dish or eating utensil. White supremacist

ideologies expect Mrs. Bellmont to maintain racial hierarchy through her abusive and

violent relationship with Frado/Nig. Frado/Nig’s weeping therefore threatens to unravel

the intricacies and dangers of white women’s feminine and domestic performances,

29Susan M. Cruea, “Changing Ideals of Womanhood During the Nineteenth-Century Woman Movement,” ATQ 19, no. 3, (2005), 190. Cruea posits that a, “True Woman was known as the ‘Angel in the House’ whose primary purpose was to impart moral guidance to her family.” The Cult of True Womanhood required women to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic as part of a larger social, “moralizing” project. Depictions of violent white womanhood, as we see in Mrs. Bellmont’s character, thus exposes the underlying contradictions of these logics in a white supremacist society where Christian morals often produce and reinforce a racial hierarchy.

19

which antebellum U.S. national discourses presume to be sites of apolitical, weak

behaviors solely contained in the domestic sphere.

Through her critique of white femininity and domesticity, Wilson also reveals

how sympathy has greater political weight than the ideology of separate spheres allows.

In actuality, sympathy was deployed as a tool of domination against enslaved and other

disenfranchised people of color in literature and social life.30 To expand, in “Poor Eliza”

(1998), Lauren Berlant tracks how sentimental politics are often a tool of domination. For

instance, she notes how sentimental politics are insidiously coded in American cultural

texts as sites of transformative, systemic change when she writes:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an archive people come to out of a

political optimism that the revolution in mass subjectivity

for which it stands might be borrowed for the

transformation of other unjust social institutions.31

Berlant draws out the stakes of sentimentality as a means of creating the fiction of “mass

subjectivity”: a subjectivity that seeks to combat hierarchy through a universalization of

feeling, and thus of difference. Instead what happens is that sentimentality produces

hierarchies and systemic violence in American cultural discourses and representations of

minority subjects, such as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where a white child, Eva, leans over a

pitiful, merciful, and abject image of Black childhood, Topsy, like a “bright angel

stooping to reclaim a sinner.”32

30 See Lauren Berlant “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.” Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, (The University of Michigan Press,1999). 31 Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 640. 32 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 279.

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Rather than modeling 19th century traditions of sentimentality to invoke universal

“truths” about subjection and freedom, Wilson instead experiments with feeling–– with

weeping in particular–– for two seemingly contradictory purposes: one is to use

sentimentality to attract a white readership; the second is to produce a counter-narrative

of Black pain that contradicts assumptions about the “the spectacular nature of black

suffering” in antebellum literature. Feeling, for Wilson, is empowering in very different

and subversive ways than what sentimentality allows in that she resists any universalizing

effects of feeling onto her personal and historical narratives of displacement and

dispossession. This is performed in the various silences, sounds, gestures, and noises of

disobedient weeping throughout the text. They are multiple and varied as opposed to

singular and cohesive, sliding in and out of aural and visual ranges, in and out of “sense.”

And yet, because James and other sympathizers buy into the universalization of feeling,

the polymorphic expressions of Frado/Nig’s disobedient weeping only register to

sympathizers as a call for sympathy.

This is illustrated in Our Nig insofar as white sympathizers in the narrative can

only seem to either see Frado/Nig’s sorrow or hear the sound of Mrs. Bellmont’s blows

against Frado/Nig’s body. For instance, James, similarly to Mrs. Bellmont, can only see

Frado/Nig’s grief rather than hear or feel it: “I have seen Frado’s grief, because she is

black, amount to agony. […] Mother pretends to think she don’t know enough to sorrow

for anything; but if she could see her as I have […]” (Wilson 41, my emphases). Wilson’s

emphasis on sight and racial physicality in this passage begins to flesh out, so to speak,

the doubleness of James’s own complicity in white supremacist thinking and white

21

abolitionists’ deafness, blindness, and their own insensateness to enslaved people’s

desires for something beyond what sympathy has to offer.

With traditions of sentimentalism and sympathy in mind, Wilson turns again to

unintelligible articulations of speech, only this time as inaudible background noise to

expose the limits of sympathy and sentimental values. In Chapter VIII of the text,

Frado/Nig is brutally punished for feeling sick: although her, “mouth was muffled, and

the sounds much stifled, there was a sensible commotion, which James’s quick ear

detected” (Wilson 46). Similar to previous passages, even when Frado/Nig’s “mouth was

muffled” and “the sounds much stifled,” the sounds of weeping are still articulated to a

degree. Yet James, a sympathetic character in the text and Frado/Nig’s closest human

companion, can only access what is “detectable” as a “sensible commotion.” The word

“sensible” connotes “reasonable” or “intelligible” and “to sense.” For this reason, James

cannot register Frado/Nig’s unintelligible articulations of pain as political protest because

he is confined to what he hears as intelligible speech while all other noise falls out of

range. Wilson illustrates how the unintelligibility of the sounds of weeping is inaccessible

to white ears, even (or perhaps especially) to sympathizers. Even James’s sympathy goes

as far as to “mediate” Frado/Nig’s personhood by only responding to what is “sensible,”

or worthy of attention. The limits of sympathy are thus quite numerous and often

participate in the violence that sympathy purports to understand and to alleviate.

Limited to expressions of sympathy, Aunt Abby, Mrs. Bellmont’s sister, can also

only register the sound weaponry produces against Frado/Nig’s body. In one instance,

after being told to bring a “little wood,” Frado/Nig continued to bring the smallest piece

she could find. As punishment, Mrs. Bellmont, “kicked her so forcibly as to throw her

22

upon the floor […] and then followed kick after kick in quick succession and power…”

(Wilson 25). In response, “Mr. Bellmont and Aunt Abby, hearing the noise, rushed in,

just in time to see the last of the performance” (Wilson 25). Wilson places emphasis

around the “noise” of Mrs. Bellmont’s foot against Frado/Nig’s body, textually leaving

out the possibility that this noise was accompanied by the sounds of Frado/Nig’s shrieks

or cries. The performance of white feminine violence is captured by the theatricality of

the spectacle: the “actress” being Mrs. Bellmont; the action being repeated kicks against

Frado/Nig’s body; and the audience being Mr. Bellmont and Aunt Abby. While the visual

field is a primary site of violence, a site of the “spectacular nature of Black suffering” in

antebellum U.S. northern and southern society, and a site of white sympathy/pity, the

aural field, in similar ways, is also a site of violence when all that is heard is the whip or a

kick against the flesh–– a noise and not a cry, nor both simultaneously.

Aunt Abby only arrives at Frado/Nig’s side to “see” if she could hinder the blows,

further illustrating the limitations of white sympathy when it defaults to visual fields of

cognition. In a similar scene, after, “placing the wedge of wood between her teeth, she

[Mrs. Bellmont] beat her cruelly with the raw-hide. Aunt Abby heard the blows, and

came to see if she could hinder them” (Wilson 52). As illustrated above, Aunt Abby’s

aural range is limited to the sound of the rawhide against Frado/Nig’s flesh. Although we

can read this moment as an act of resistance on Frado/Nig’s part insofar as all of the

tactics Mrs. Bellmont uses to silence Frado/Nig essentially backfire, there is still a

miscommunication between what potential sympathizers see or hear and what

Frado/Nig’s silent weeping or silenced cries of pain communicate before and while the

rawhide hits her flesh. Even while Mrs. Bellmont attempts to silence Frado/Nig’s bodily

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pain by restraining her mouth, Frado/Nig’s body continues to produce sound for Aunt

Abby and others to hear, suggesting that the unintelligible noises of Frado/Nig’s flesh is

also protesting–– it’s speaking her pain where Frado/Nig is denied speech.

Similarly, in Chapter VII, entitled “Spiritual Condition of Nig,” white

sympathizers cannot locate the sounds of Frado/Nig’s weeping as protest, instead

claiming them to be signs of pity and loneliness. James Bellmont narrates: “in the

summer, I was walking near the barn, and as I stood I heard sobs” (Wilson 42). He hears

her ask, “why was I made? why can’t I die? […]. And as she ceased speaking, buried her

face in her hands and cried bitterly” (Wilson 42). The sounds of weeping can be heard

and felt, to a degree, by James Bellmont. Her weeping is not inaudible or invisible; it

does not disappear from aural and visual fields. James can hear and see her weeping, but

he never understands his own complicity in Frado/Nig’s servitude as, at least partly, the

cause of her tears. James interprets Frado/Nig’s weeping as, “a notion she seems to

entertain respecting the loneliness of her condition and want of sympathizing friends”

(Wilson 42) without realizing that her weeping enacts her yearning for something far

beyond what sympathy demands of the sympathizer. To reiterate Berlant’s argument in

this context, the mission of sentimental politics––a politics James and other sympathetic

characters of the text are confined to–– “is to see the individual effects of mass social

violence as different from the causes, which are impersonal and depersonalizing.”33

James does not realize that disobedient weeping is a “call and response” to freedom: a

way of expressing the need for relief, and in so doing, imparting acts of fugitivity (an act

33Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” 641.

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of freedom in itself) in the sounds, sobs, cries, and inquiries Frado/Nig releases when she

weeps.

The sight/site of Frado/Nig’s weeping by the Bellmont family operates in the

visual field like a mirror, making Mrs. Bellmont’s and even white sympathizers

conscious and subconscious “denials” of Frado/Nig’s suffering a question of visible

“truths.” To exemplify, literary scholar Robin Bernstein argues that Wilson “brilliantly

deconstructs the libel of black insensateness, showing it to be […] a black performance

that white people coerce out of their own pathological desires simultaneously to cause

pain and to deny that they are doing so.”34 Such “black performances” of “black

insensateness” may be staged in literary form in the 19th century, but they are clearly not

realistic depictions of enslaved or indentured persons’ ability to feel. If we think about

the Bellmont household as a microcosmic representation of white supremacist values,

then regulating the visual field–– what can or cannot be seen–– is one method for

sustaining the power of “denial” until it’s fully masked as truth.

Wilson critiques the limitations of visibility-as-“truth” by gesturing toward

potential loopholes in non-visible, but audible weeping. For example, after receiving yet

another whipping, Frado/Nig, “was very careful never to shed tears on his [James’s]

account, in her presence, afterwards” (Wilson 43, my emphases). On the one hand,

weeping aloud in Mrs. Bellmont’s presence forces her abuser to hear the pain she is

inflicting, even as she denies being the cause. On the other, weeping outside of Mrs.

Bellmont’s visual field allows for that which cannot be seen partly to deny Mrs. Bellmont

the sadistic pleasure of denial (through more whippings), because sorrow can gush forth

34Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 57.

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uncontrollably and unpunished when it is not seen. Mrs. Bellmont is blindsided by her

own imagined mastery over Frado/Nig’s affective faculties, never considering the idea of

visual mastery to be the disease from Frado/Nig’s “symptoms” of “discontent[ed]”

weeping originate.35

There are, nevertheless, alternative spaces in Our Nig where Frado/Nig’s affects

can flow forth without the threat of punishment or the mocking presence of sympathy.

One such space is James Bellmont’s funeral, which serves as a venue for acts of

collective weeping and solidarity on a single issue: a death. For instance, when Frado/Nig

is allowed to attend James’s funeral, “Susan provided her with a dress for the occasion,

which was her first intimation that she would be allowed to mingle her grief with others”

(Wilson 54). While Frado/Nig appears to be upset over James’s death, it actually

occasions an opportunity that can be teased away from what he, as an individual, may

represent. In this space, Frado/Nig can “mingle her grief with others” rather than

experiencing it in isolation, which she has done up to this point in the narrative. The word

“mingle” has a double meaning: the first is a literal intermixing and sharing of grief or a

blending of affect around a shared feeling of sorrow; the second implies communitarian

practices where touch is also exchanged in the “mingling” of grief between bodies. While

the first implication is more of a metaphorical and atmospheric blending, the second is

tactile, where “mingling” temporarily breaks down barriers between bodies and brings

them together. Touching other bodies in solidarity with their grief is also a gesture

towards a “communication of communicability,” as Agamben theorizes, where normative

35 Mrs. Bellmont’s imagined mastery over Frado/Nig’s affects is important because I argue Frado/Nig doesn’t even have full mastery over her own emotions. Often when Wilson illustrates a moment when Frado/Nig is about to cry, for instance, her tears are usually “fast flowing” or “overcome[ing]” implying that any form of mastery and restraint (even over one’s own body) are harmful to that body when it is in need of release.

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linguistic structures cannot convey the grief Frado/Nig feels. Therefore Frado/Nig

repurposes the funeral as a kind of open subversion where “undisciplined” weeping is

allowed: where Frado/Nig can weep really loudly with other bodies in a way that partially

disintegrates the scene of the “spectacular nature of Black suffering.”

***

So far I have tracked where Frado/Nig disobediently weeps in the public eye: in

front of Mrs. Bellmont, in front of white sympathizers, and in a collective funeral

atmosphere. While the visual and aural (non) recognition of Frado/Nig’s sorrow critiques

the cult of domesticity and 19th-century traditions of sentimentality, I am also interested

in tracking spaces where Frado/Nig’s weeping leaks out of the flesh across time and

space. Where does Frado/Nig appropriate space to nurture her sorrows? What are the

potential political significances of these retreats, of moments I tend to think about in

relation to Hartman’s readings of “stealing away” on the site of slave plantations?36 And

lastly, how do these manifest as specifically feminine acts of resistance and fugitivity?

To begin answering these questions, I concentrate on two different spaces to

which Frado/Nig retreats. The first is her assigned room inside the Bellmont household,

referred to in the text as the L chamber; the second is outside of the Bellmont home, an

“outbuilding” or barn of sorts. Both of these spaces offer a place for Frado/Nig to survive

by allowing her sorrows to flow forth, to resist the “scenic” and “picturesque” exchanges

of feeling we see in 19th century sentimental literature.

Frado/Nig is expected to make her home in the Bellmont household’s “L

chamber”–– a small space that descriptively recalls the history of the Middle Passage.

36See Chapter 2 of Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection titled, “Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice.”

27

The door of the chamber is connected to a, “room by a dark, unfinished passageway. [It

was] an unfinished chamber over the kitchen, the roof slanting nearly to the floor, so that

the bed could stand only in the middle of the room. A small half window furnished light

and air” (Wilson 17). The L chamber is neither an inhabitable part of the house nor

outside of the domestic space: it is a kind of unfinished space that is neither nor cannot be

enclosed as private. The word “unfinished” is repeated twice, emphasizing the openness,

vulnerability, and risk of occupying a space still under construction. Even the window is

described as if incomplete: it’s “small” and “half,” just big enough to provide a little light

and fresh air. Mrs. Bellmont stations Frado/Nig in this tiny attic room to remove her from

the internal domestic fabric of the home while simultaneously continuing to keep her at

an accessible distance to fulfill her expected duties as an indentured servant.

By metaphorically placing Frado/Nig back into an initial site of racializing

violence–– the Middle Passage––Wilson contextualizes Frado/Nig’s own split naming

and the cause of her condition and sorrows within a very specific history. This is where

Harney and Moten enter into their own theorizations of fugitivity: Frado/Nig has already

“been shipped” and must, “feel at home with the homeless, be at ease with the

fugitive…” and be at ease with her double history that is both partially lost but very

presently felt. Even the shape of the “L” quite explicitly illustrates a violent turn out of a

given direction. That is, it appears orthographically to render the Middle Passage’s

violent spatial and temporal dislocations. The hybridity of Our Nig thus challenges linear

temporal narratives of insurgency (by resisting projecting linearity onto Frado/Nig’s

experiences) and the private/public dialectic through which insurgency is historically

28

configured by revealing how inadequate this language is for defining where and why

Frado/Nig’s weeping (and her jollity) occur.

Wilson understands that linearity and public/private spheres wed us to a dialectic

that is produced out of the suffering that the L chamber presences. Nevertheless, her

illustration of the L chamber begins to sketch the textual layout of weeping in private as a

public, and therefore political, act. In the chapter titled “Visitor and Departure,”

Frado/Nig’s small room is described as a place to which Frado/Nig can steal away: “there

was one little spot seldom penetrated by her mistresses’ watchful eye: this was her room,

uninviting and comfortless; but to herself a safe retreat” (Wilson 48). This private space

is not secure, not “private,” but an entrance into fugitive life. For Hartman, “stealing

away was synonymous with defiance because it necessarily involved seizing the master’s

property and asserting the self in transgression of the law.”37 This domestic space,

“uninviting and comfortless” as it may seem to white occupants, is for Frado/Nig a “safe

retreat,” one where Frado/Nig repetitively and willingly returns to in order to avoid Mrs.

Bellmont’s violent tirades and further objectification of her pains and sorrows.38

The room even partially escapes Mrs. Bellmont’s “watchful eye,” thus locating

small loopholes in surveillance politics when a space is considered too abject for white

people to inhabit. As a space where Frado/Nig must make her home in a state of what

feels like perpetual homelessness, she uses the L chamber in all its practical possibilities:

it can be used to retreat; it is a place where grief can be expressively and even excessively

performed in order to feel relief; and it has a kind of temporary shield against white

37 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 67. 38 Her retreat into the L chamber is not “safe” in the sense that it is defended from pain. In some ways it provides a retreat into pain, both personal and historical, yet still offers some relief from ongoing traumas of “subjection.”

29

surveillance and physical violence. The L chamber is thus never detected, suspected, or

discovered as anything but a site of punishment and degradation by the people who put

her there; while for Frado/Nig, it marks a space of radical possibility.

Thinking about the possibilities the L chamber offers for feminized acts of

fugitivity–– a fugitivity rooted in non-representational and partially non-physical modes

of flight–– Frado/Nig repurposes the chamber by allowing her grief to flood within and

linger outside its literal boundaries. In the chapter appropriately titled “Death,” the

narrator explains: “The next day [Frado/Nig] would steal into the chamber as often as she

could, to weep over his [James’s] remains, and ponder his last words to her” (Wilson 54).

Frado/Nig is forced to retreat into the L chamber to cry because Mrs. Bellmont has

deemed the sight of weeping an “act of disobedience” (Wilson 56). With the threat of the

rawhide constantly looming below, the L chamber offers spatial solace to Frado/Nig’s

pain, where neither aural nor visual fields will fully expose Frado/Nig to white eyes and

ears, to possible punishment. In this environment, fugitivity is the act of “steal[ing] into

the chamber” (my emphasis), a place already identified as belonging to Frado/Nig. This

suggests that the space itself does not represent resistance or fugitivity whereas the act of

weeping might.

Wilson plays on Mrs. Bellmont’s criminalization of affect–– weeping as

“disobedience”–– to instead imply that Frado/Nig partakes in weeping by “steal[ing]” it.

Retreating to weep is a specifically feminized act of fugitivity not because it is

oppositional to the web of domination: it does not seek to take it down or escape the un-

escapable. These acts, instead, are about fraying this web from within, by, “redefin[ing]

the political in the appropriation of space, the assertion of needs, desires, the critique of

30

subordination, and the use of pleasure as a vehicle of dissent and transformation.”39 For

Hartman, all of these possibilities are extinguished under layers and layers of subjection;

but for Wilson, pain and pleasure can transform ones’ relation to structures of domination

in transformative ways. Is it possible to say that Frado/Nig takes pleasure in stealing a

moment to express her sorrows? Is subjection so totalizing that joy is impossible for the

enslaved or indentured? What if sorrow and joy were taken as hybrid pairings: can

Frado/Nig express both in insurgent and resistant ways? By linking the act of “stealing

away” with weeping, Wilson begins to obscure the boundaries between joy and sorrow

for the enslaved. Experiencing both may be in itself a manifestation of feminine insurgent

politics.

By appropriating the L chamber to weep, Frado/Nig’s “assertion of needs [and]

desires” eventually transforms into desires for other affective activities. For example,

reading and weeping over the Bible quickly becomes a pleasurable and mournful escape.

At first, Frado/Nig would attend church with Aunt Abby. Here she experiences, “such a

pleasant release from labor. Such perfect contrast in the melody and prayers of these

good people to the harsh tones which fell on her ears during the day” (Wilson 38).

Frado/Nig specifically listens to the “melody” and “prayers” of the congregation, the

sounds of which momentarily emancipate her from the “harsh tones” of her abusers. The

prayer melodies quite literally interfere with the “harsh tones” of her mistress, suggesting

these sounds have the power to penetrate and linger outside the spaces in which they are

produced. These sounds even saturate and animate the L chamber, where Frado/Nig,

39 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 72. For context, Hartman’s argument is specifically located in southern plantations and enslaved person’s juba practices and physical retreats/meetings away from the plantation. Nevertheless, Frado/Nig partly engages in different versions of some of these practices. The “use of pleasure” will be further elaborated on in the section on “jollity.”

31

“would listen to the pleadings of a Saviour and try to penetrate the veil of doubt and sin

which clouded her soul” (Wilson 48). Spiritual “pleadings” break through the exterior

walls of the Bellmont home as well as from the L chamber within.

The L chamber ultimately provides Frado/Nig with “a Saviour” (Wilson 48) as a

willing listener to her sorrows. For Frado/Nig, her Saviour can be a very materially

present kind of listener–– Frado/Nig is able to “listen” to, and thus physically (through

voice/prayer) and affectively respond to “the pleadings of a Saviour.” As a space where

“a Saviour” both imparts advice and listens to her sorrows, and as a space where

Frado/Nig steals away to weep, the L chamber becomes a place where Frado/Nig can feel

and hear between the Spirit and the flesh. There is again a double working of joy and

sorrow mingling together through weeping, song, and prayer that subverts the spectacle

of Black sorrow by addressing what cannot be seen–– spiritual entities–– along with what

is made spectacular––the flesh–– as possible sites of historical inquiry, of places where

meaning is imparted to Frado/Nig in a kind of departure from linear constructions of time

and space.

Ultimately, Frado/Nig’s feminine, disobedient weeping points to a different

relationship to temporality and spatiality than ones we receive in the world of Man. Early

in the narrative when Frado/Nig is already physically and emotionally worn down by

Mrs. Bellmont’s and Mary’s abuses, she simply decides to disappear for awhile: “Frado

had not appeared. Mrs. B. made no inquiry or search. Aunt Abby looked long, and found

her concealed in an outbuilding” (Wilson 26). When Aunt Abby discovers her, Frado/Nig

says, “I’ve got to stay out here and die. I ha’n’t got no mother, no home. I wish I was

dead,” to which Aunt Abby, “slyly providing her with some dinner, left her to her grief”

32

(Wilson 26). The irony of “grieving” life and “wish[ing]” for death challenges temporal

and historical discourses of freedom for Black people living in the “free” north.

Frado/Nig’s isolated grieving historically locates her nowhere in a kind of pre-existence:

she says she has “no mother” and “no home,” no origin to refer to. Frado/Nig cannot

locate herself (her identity, her history) with the Bellmont family so she “wish[es]” she

were dead. The promise of a dead future, though far from ideal, imaginatively situates

Frado/Nig’s personal and historical narratives in relation to a radical reordering of time

and space. Grief, in others words, is both to acknowledge an unknowable past while

imagining lost or dead history (the futurity of death) into existence.40

By utilizing affective communicative faculties alongside resistant speech acts,

Frado/Nig feels sorrow in a series of repetitive doings of freedom and fugitivity. Weeping

aloud, silently, inside, and partially apart from visual and aural fields of recognition and

non-recognition are never intended for the complete escape from systems of domination.

Yet they can and do reimagine alternative possibilities and counter-narratives that trouble

the totalizing effects of subjection Frado/Nig and Wilson face in the text.

40 See Saidiya Hartman’s “Lose Your Mother,” A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, 2007) and Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby.”

33

Section II: Nonsensical Jollity

“Her jollity was not to be quenched by whipping or scolding. In Mrs. Bellmont’s

presence she was under restraint; but in the kitchen, and among her schoolmates, the pent

up fires burst forth.”

--Harriet Wilson

The previous section on disobedient weeping has tracked the multitudinous ways

Frado/Nig engages in feminine resistant and fugitive acts in and outside the Bellmont

household’s boundaries. Yet Frado/Nig’s resistances not only manifest through weeping.

Frado/Nig also engages in performative pranks at school, on the farm, and against Mary

Bellmont in particular. With these various “outbursts of merriment” (Wilson 22) cleverly

scattered throughout the text, is it possible to place Frado/Nig’s pleasure, or as Wilson

calls it, her “jollity,” on the continuum of feminine resistant and fugitive acts this paper

has traced so far? Or is Frado/Nig’s jollity too entangled with the pleasure received by

white spectators to the point that, as Saidiya Hartman argues, “enjoyment in turn

define[s] the meaning of subjection”?41

Frado/Nig’s double naming throughout Our Nig undergirds and resists Hartman’s

notion that “enjoyment in turn defines the meaning of subjection.” On the one hand,

“Frado” emerges as a narrative presence from her first introduction into the text; “Nig,”

on the other hand, emerges when she enters the Bellmont home. Jack is the first to give

Frado/Nig the name, “Nig,” when he teases his sister, Mary, for being upset that

Frado/Nig will be living in the Bellmont home. Jack says to Mary: “if she [Frado/Nig]

should stay, it wouldn’t be two days before you would be telling the girls about our nig,

our nig” (Wilson 16). From this moment onward, “Frado” and “Nig” can be considered 41 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 25.

34

as double roles performed by the same performer in the same play. But these roles are

projected onto Frado/Nig to the point that she cannot choose when to be Frado and when

to be “Nig” at any given moment–– is she Frado or is she Nig? Yet the name “Nig” is, at

times, reclaimed as a revolutionary actant in the text through acts of nonsensical jollity,

indeed “claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”) which her

culture imposes in blindness.”42 It is a name both re-possessed and dispossessed, while at

the same time, starts to name someone who may not be adequately described as human

(Man) or object.

Frado/Nig’s jollity is immediately described as intrinsic to her character. In the

beginning pages of Our Nig, we learn that Frado/Nig is, “a beautiful mulatto, with long,

curly black hair, and handsome, roguish eyes, sparkling with an exuberance of spirit

almost beyond restraint” (Wilson 11). This very early attention to Frado/Nig’s “spirit”

foregrounds her performative pranks later on in the text. Her spirit is “almost beyond

restraint;” it is uncontained and at times unrestrained. Spirit gives origin, life, and history

to Frado/Nig insofar as the spirit nurtures moments of jollity and allows those feelings to

be released across spatial and temporal boundaries. The spirit also implies that

Frado/Nig’s jollity is not contingent on the presence of white spectators and the pleasures

they receive in what appear to be her minstrel-like performances. Frado/Nig’s

experiences of jollity may be partially teased away from her subjection, and thus may be

considered resistant and fugitive.

In the above quotation, Wilson stresses that the fire of Frado/Nig’s jollity

overpowers Mrs. Bellmont and Mary’s attempts to “quench,” or extinguish, its flames. In

Chapter III titled, “A New Home for Me,” the narrator writes: “her jollity was not to be 42 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 80.

35

quenched by whipping or scolding. In Mrs. Bellmont’s presence she was under restraint;

but in the kitchen, and among her schoolmates, the pent up fires burst forth” (Wilson 22).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “jollity” has a double meaning

connoting both “pleasure; enjoyment” and to “joke; jest,” both of which are taken up

throughout the text. As a hybrid text, Wilson plays with this notion of jollity through

Frado/Nig’s double naming. It is unclear who is experiencing the pleasure and who is

doing the jest: is it Frado and/or Nig? These small details indicate various other sources

of resistance available to Frado/Nig that destabilizes the seemingly antagonistic

relationship between sensing pleasure and being made into property.

Hartman argues that, “sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated

subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the

soul.”43 For Hartman, any pleasure induced in the enslaved was always inextricably

linked with violence: in fact, pleasure and desire constitute the “web of domination”44

that keeps white supremacy in place. The question, rather, is whether pleasure is simply

reducible to violence under these conditions. This leads to one of Hartman’s major

points, which is that, “the rights and privileges of white citizens were undergirded by the

subjection of blacks […] that enjoyment in turn defined the meaning of subjection.”45 Yet

for Frado/Nig, enjoyment is not an externally stimulated affect. Her spirit longs to “burst

forth” expressions of enjoyment. In the schoolhouse, for instance, Wilson explains that,

“they [the schoolchildren] enjoyed her antics so fully that any of them would suffer

wrongfully to keep open the avenues of mirth” (Wilson 22). The schoolchildren are

willing to risk punishment to “keep open [Frado/Nig’s] avenues of mirth,” suggesting

43 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 5. 44 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 49. 45 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 25.

36

these “avenues,” or roads, may temporarily play the scene of subjection through scenes of

tactical obscurity rather than reinforce the constant, looming presence of subjection. As

such, her jollity is a feminine resistance to subjection because these tactics are partially

undetectable as a threat to order, as fugitive acts. It is because Frado/Nig’s pleasure

derives from “the flesh, the heart, and the soul”–– what Wilson calls her “spirit”––that

Frado/Nig often resists “subjugation, domination, and terror” through performative acts

of jollity.

Wilson begins drawing out the contradiction between sensing pleasure and being

made into property in the context of the educational institution. For instance, systemic

racism re-creates itself on a micro-level among the schoolchildren at Frado/Nig’s local

schoolhouse: multiple voices shout, “‘see that nigger,’ ‘Look! Look!’ ‘I won’t play with

her’ and ‘Nor I either’” (Wilson 19). Their first impressions of Frado/Nig are constructed

through visual economies of race, specifically targeting racial physicality and concluding

with a collective decision “not to play with her.” Mary Bellmont, “evidently relished

these sharp attacks, and saw a fair prospect of lowering Nig where, according to her

views, she belonged” (Wilson 19). Mary seems to take sadistic pleasure in witnessing and

participating in the degradation of Frado/Nig among their schoolmates. In fact, Frado/Nig

is more commonly called “Nig” rather than “Frado” in these scenes as a consequence of

this mini-structure of white supremacy. Moreover, Mary’s “views” are both ideological

and visual, revealing the extent to which ideological structures of racialized inequality are

limited and bound by visual and discursive forms of power. Mary’s pleasure is deeply

embedded in making Frado/Nig a spectacle and an outcast. She also attempts to reinforce

the notion that Frado/Nig’s spirit is something that needs to be made into property––

37

made into a minstrel performance for the entertainment and pleasure of white audiences–

– and thus mastered within racist logics of power.

Yet as a resistant subject, Frado/Nig subversively transforms the minstrel stage

and the spectacular scene of her jollity by performing nonsensical acts. I use the word

“nonsensical” to indicate the ways in which Frado/Nig’s joyful acts are, at times,

unavailable to the audience’s senses–– their sense of sight, sound, and touch–– and

therefore cannot register in the domain of sense by refusing representation and

intelligibility. In Chapter III, for instance, Wilson illustrates a scene in which Frado/Nig

plays a prank on her schoolmaster. Frado/Nig, “had provided herself with cigars, and

puffing, puffing away at the crack of the drawer, had filled it with smoke, and then closed

it tightly to deceive the teacher, and amuse the scholars” (Wilson 22). The text itself is

doing the performative work necessary to sustain the deception of smoke: Frado/Nig was

“puffing, puffing away.” As a jest, the language forces one to inhale short, quick breaths,

mediated by the comma between “puffing, puffing,” thus playing a jest against the reader

in addition to the schoolmaster.

The act of “puffing, puffing,” also functions as something we might claim as

feminine non-representation: the puffing is in itself a nonsensical act because it does not

articulate insurgency within normative linguistic structures. More specifically, the

pleasure Frado/Nig takes in puffing the cigar into the drawer challenges how one might

conceive navigating personhood and resistance inside the web of domination by using

tactical obscurity. The prank registers as nonsense; it is quite literally a joke and not

insurgency or an act of freedom from the perception of white audiences. Therefore

Frado/Nig’s audiences–– her schoolmates, the schoolmaster, and the reader–– are denied

38

the spectacle of Frado/Nig “puffing” because “puffing” is impossible to see, hear, or

touch; it is impossible to make into a spectacle before it’s released as smoke.

The comedic climax to this particular prank is when the schoolmaster is terrified

by this seemingly logical connection that the smoke is a fire. For instance, he, “opened a

drawer to take the book the occasion required; when out poured a volume of smoke.

‘Fire!’ ‘Fire!’ screamed he, at the top of his voice. The scholars shouted with laughter to

see the terror of the dupe…” (Wilson 22). Interestingly, the word “volume” is playing on

the original intention of opening the drawer–– to remove a “volume,” or book–– while

also playing on the word “volume” in reference to the mass of the smoke, and further,

“volume” as the intensity of a sound or voice. And in this sense, Frado/Nig’s “puffing”

enters as a spectacular event, and a disruptive event, by producing visible smoke. The

word “volume” plays on the ways in which Frado/Nig’s smoke disrupts teacher/student

productivity as it gains so much mass that the teacher perceives it as hazardous and a

danger–– as a full flaming fire––thus upping the volume of the audience in a mixture of

screams and shouts of laughter.

Recalling when Wilson earlier writes that Frado/Nig’s “pent up fires burst forth,”

the prank thus lends itself to multiple readings of the literal and figurative meanings of

fire. For the teacher, the threat of her “pent up fires” takes literal form. But behind the

curtains, so to speak, Frado/Nig’s “fires” are really just puffs of smoke taken for fire:

both are capable of inducing “terror” in the one who imagines a fire in the smoke. The

double purpose of Frado/Nig’s prank–– to “deceive” and “amuse”–– is similar to the

double experience of the fire and smoke, and to Frado/Nig’s double experience of jollity.

The smoke is again a kind of feminine non-representation that, similar to Hartman’s

39

rather resistant reading of juba practices on southern plantations, “involves using the

body [in this case the lungs and breath] for pleasure and protesting the conditions of

enslavement.”46 The fire and the smoke thus operate as a performative manifestation of

feminine insurgency that uses the breath–– as opposed to the voice–– to protest against

order and labor.

Likewise, in Chapter V of Our Nig titled, “Departures,” Frado/Nig’s jollity

disrupts spaces that are supposed to host “productive,” disciplined subjects: the Bellmont

farm. While suffering the daily monotony of farm work, Frado/Nig finds ways to

entertain her and other laborers. In one instance she was, “found on the roof of the barn”

where, “some repairs having been necessary, a staging had been erected, and was not

wholly removed” (Wilson 30). The space of the roof is imagined as a makeshift

amphitheater: a “staging had been erected” from which Frado/Nig can stage a resistance

for herself and audiences below. As a counterpart to the loopholes in which weeping

transpires, the Bellmont farm’s spatial and temporal landscapes are thrown into disorder

by being appropriated into a theater––into a space of play as opposed to productivity.

There is again a performative doubleness to the roof scene whereby the laborers

spectatorship and Frado/Nig’s jollity can be read in contradictory terms as subjugation

and resistance–– as a combination of experiencing pleasure in the midst of being made

into property. In an effort to begin the performance, Frado/Nig, “availing herself of

ladders, was mounted in high glee on the topmost board. […] Jack and the men laughed

at her fearlessness” (Wilson 31). On the surface, her jollity is entertaining to Jack and the

other laborers. They all stop mid-labor to “laugh” and “nurture [her] inclination” to play.

In Hartman’s interpretation of pleasure in the context of chattel slavery, this response–– 46 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 71.

40

the spectacle of Frado/Nig’s jollity at the risk of her safety–– participates in a “coercion,”

to use her term, of Black pleasure because white audiences conceive of Black joy as a

minstrel performance. More specifically, “the relation between pleasure and the

possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal senses, can be explained in

part by […] the joy made possible by the virtue of the replaceability and

interchangeability endemic to the commodity…”47 The precariousness of Frado/Nig’s life

within these systems of domination is, to some extent, also at the core of the men’s

laughter and pleasure in watching her mount the very topmost plank of the roof.

However, Frado/Nig cleverly plays on the spectacle of her subjection to reverse

the very effects Hartman lays out. Even as a commodity to the Bellmont family, she is

disrupting productivity and capitalizing on the men’s laughter to create alternative

“avenues” through which her jollity can gush forth. It may be said that Frado/Nig again

“steals away” from her position as property–– an act that, “was synonymous with

defiance because it necessarily involved seizing the master’s property and asserting the

self in transgression of the law.”48 This act is happening on multiple possible registers:

the repurposing of space, stealing of time, and the provisional seizure of self.

Frado/Nig’s jollity on the roof is further resistant because the pleasure she

experiences in the doing of the act can be partially teased away from the effect it has on

white spectators. Wilson again alludes to Frado/Nig’s spirit as a vehicle for her pranks

and jollity when she writes: “strange, one spark of playfulness could remain amid such

constant toil; but her natural temperament was in a high degree mirthful…” (Wilson 31).

The words “spark” and “high degree” align with Wilson’s previous metaphorical

47 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21. 48 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 67.

41

description of Frado/Nig’s jollity as a “fire.” Her fire, though, is rekindled over and over

again by the “spark” of her spirit, not by the presence of an audience and their response to

her performances of jollity. As a “fire” that cannot be “quenched” by Mrs. Bellmont or

Mary, it may be considered as an act of stealing away, in which expressions of pleasure

and jollity are themselves fugitive and liberatory, even if never fully exited from

surveillance politics or the always-already spectacle of Black performativity in racist,

white supremacist society. Importantly, Wilson calls attention to the fact that the “spark”

is always “amid such constant toil,” not necessarily outside of regimes of power.

Nevertheless stealing away through jollity remains an act of, “transforming pleasure, and

investing in the body as a site of sensual activity, sociality, and possibility”49 which,

again, Hartman both highlights and undermines as resistance deeply entangled in a web

of domination.

Frado/Nig performs another prank on the farm in Chapter V without consciously

knowing she has an audience besides the sheep she is pranking. This moment further

broadens the scope of Frado/Nig’s subversive tactics within traditions of minstrelsy when

spectators are, from her point of view, absent participants of her jollity. In this very

nursery rhyme-like scene of events, the “willful sheep” and leader of the flock

metaphorically represents her abusers, Mrs. Bellmont and Mary. Wilson writes: “the first

spare moments at her command, she ran to the pasture with a dish in her hand, and

mounting the highest points of land, nearest the stream, called the flock to their mock

repast” (Wilson 31). The internal rhyme of this opening description–– “command,”

“hand,” “land,” and “flock” with “mock”–– emphasizes the performativity of Frado/Nig’s

playful game with the sheep and presences another way in which unintelligible noise 49 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 66.

42

comes through as insurgency in jollity. Because the prank begins and partly continues

with a nursery rhyme-like form, Wilson infantilizes white spectators and readers by

subjecting them to a simple narration and performance of white supremacist, capitalist

values. The “flock” who is called to their “mock repast” is also a mocking of organized

“productivity,” of the disciplined/disciplining laborers who both reinforce and are

subjected to the web of domination in place.

The internal rhyme at the start also foregrounds the inevitability of the sheep’s fall

by playing on the common familiarity of the nursery rhyme form. These descriptions

share slight similarities with the English nursery rhyme that reads:

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jump’d over the moon,

The little dog laughed to see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

As nonsensical as this rhyme appears to be, it mirrors Frado/Nig’s prank on the sheep:

“the willful sheep came furiously leaping and bounding far in advance of the flock. Just

as he leaped for the dish, she suddenly jumped one side, when down he rolled into the

river […]” (Wilson 31). The “cat and the fiddle” is keeping time and rhythm to the

rhymes in the former paragraph, whereas the “cow jump[ing] over the moon” is similar to

the sheep “leaping and bounding” and “jump[ing]” across the fields for the food

Frado/Nig is dangling before him. Frado/Nig is the “little dog laugh[ing]” at the absurdity

of the easily deceived, “willful sheep,” and the entire rhyme ends with the tools used to

feed one’s hunger (or desires) exiting the scene altogether. Just as, “the content of juba

songs examined the relations of captivity, appropriation, and domination that defined

43

slavery and addressed the needs of the enslaved,”50 Wilson re-appropriates the nursery-

rhyme form to situate Frado/Nig’s performative jollity alongside similar instances of

protest–– such as in practices of juba–– that took form on southern plantations. In other

words, Wilson establishes a continuum between experiences of Black insurgent acts by

indentured persons in the north and enslaved persons in the south through song and

jollity.

Wilson is further interested in what it would mean for Frado/Nig to deploy jollity

as a double performance–– a resistance that is performed through a series of

contradictions. For instance, Frado/Nig’s triumph is met by the laborers’ “convulsed with

laughter” (Wilson 31) in what is a subsequent disruption of social relations and economic

productivity. The laborers have a difficult time fully capitalizing on Frado/Nig’s

performance with the sheep, as evinced by their failure to see that nonsense constitutes

insurgency. Not only does the scene freeze in temporal and physical suspension when the

laborers “watch in breathless silence” (Wilson 31) at the performance–– a feminine

insurgency that actually steals their breath from them, forcing the spectator to endure a

kind of death––but pranking the sheep also serves as social and political commentary on

the web of domination’s vulnerability to enduring a radical suspension of order. The

laborers cannot commodify Frado/Nig’s jollity or her body in this moment; in fact, the

laborers seem to be the ones that take on a lifeless form in their “breathless silence.”

Watching Frado/Nig’s performance has made them into objects, into “breathless”

observers of her jollity, which stands in stark contrast to how, “Nig [is] the only moving

power in the house” (Wilson 35). Considering minstrel traditions of the 19th century, the

double play on the objectification of Frado/Nig’s jollity and her jollity’s power to 50 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 70.

44

objectify white audiences supports and exceeds Hartman’s reading of pleasure as a web

of domination when, despite the fact that the scene of subjection is always mediated

through violence and degradation, Frado/Nig’s jollity manifests as a powerful living and

moving force. I do not disagree that pleasure is bound up with subjection; however, it is

important to highlight how Frado/Nig uses her jollity to navigate through the sticky web

of domination without falling prey to the notion that her body (and with it, her spirit) is

made completely lifeless as a result.

Frado/Nig herself understands the political significance of her jollity as a

disruption of power, as an unintelligible performance that “slides” out of white observer’s

periphery and reason into mere nonsense. For example, Mr. Bellmont ironically warns

Frado/Nig against “exposing herself to such danger” (Wilson 31). He does not link the

“danger” of her performance to the dangers of racism and being made into property: of

always being “exposed” under these systems of domination. Frado/Nig responds by

“hopp[ing] about on her toes” and replying that, “she knew she was quick enough to

‘give him a slide’” (Wilson 31). To “give him a slide” is, for Frado/Nig, a momentary

sliding in and around commodification/property relations with the Bellmonts and into a

reclaiming of jollity as an emancipatory state. Her performance is also satirically

mocking the ignorance of the laborers and the Bellmonts because they all fail to

acknowledge that they are the sheep “leaping” and “bounding” for the bowl. Wilson

therefore cleverly critiques the relationship between pleasure, power, and subjection for

all.

We also receive glimpses of more indirect representations of Frado/Nig’s

expressions of jollity. More specifically, there is something mischievous, or “resistant,”

45

in the performance of “struggling” against one of her abusers, Mary Bellmont, throughout

the text. At school and in the work fields, Frado/Nig finds ways to either literally or

figuratively prank, embarrass, or induce pain in Mary. One example is on their way home

from school in front of their peers, “a field intersected by a stream over which a single

plank was placed for a crossing. It occurred to Mary that it would be a punishment to Nig

to compel her to cross over; so she dragged her to the edge, and told her authoritatively to

go over” (Wilson 20). This scene is slightly reminiscent of when Frado/Nig climbs the

roof of the barn later in the text. In this instance, Frado/Nig is confronted by her abuser

and is unable to control the scene of her performance. The threat of death is almost more

present on this plank than with the one on the roof, forcing Frado/Nig to improvise a way

of sparing her life. In response, “Nig hesitated, resisted. Mary placed herself behind the

child, and, in the struggle to force her over, lost her footing and plunged into the stream”

(Wilson 20). This is not necessarily jollity playing out as jest but as pleasure in the

refusal to obey a command that places her life in jeopardy. Also, it is specifically “Nig”

here who has the power of resistance and hesitation. Mary is confronted with Frado/Nig’s

double persona and is, to an extent, outnumbered: Frado is at risk of falling, of losing the

struggle; but Nig intercepts the struggle, quickly seizing an opportunity to hold Frado

steady as she teeters on the edge, and Mary falls instead into the stream.

The hybridity of Frado/Nig’s double name functions as a performative move on

Wilson’s part that destabilizes our notions of what personhood is and how feminine kinds

of resistances manifest in different contexts. To illustrate, in the above scene the narrator

says that, “some of the larger scholars being in sight, ran, and thus prevented Mary from

drowning and Frado from falling. Nig scampered home as fast as possible…” (Wilson

46

20). On this occasion, the name switching is improvisational and necessary, a

“resistance” and “hesitance” against crossing or occupying the “plank,” which

figuratively represents the narrowness of normative linguistic structures. By

appropriating racist language, Frado/Nig ends up confusing who has mastery and

ownership over her body and identity, giving her the ability to perform these jests.

Wilson also performs Frado/Nig’s jollity to the extent that the language used to exert

dominance and racial hierarchy–– the word “Nig” in particular–– is actually at some

points vulnerable to slipping off into “Frado” and into the river. Into mass confusion and

uncertainty.

Frado/Nig’s jollity is later amplified when Mary leaves the Bellmont home. Upon

Mary’s departure, Frado/Nig expresses her jollity by singing in “joyous notes” and

dancing around Aunt Abby’s room. In chapter VIII titled “Visitor and Departure,” when

Mary leaves, “Nig slyly crept around to Aunt Abby’s room, and tiptoeing and twisting

herself into all shapes, she exclaimed–– ‘She’s gone […] fairly gone’ […] I hope she’ll

never come back again’” (Wilson 45). It is worth noting that Nig is used in this moment

as opposed to Frado, implying that the web of domination is still intact despite Mary’s

absence, but also signaling Nig can and does express jollity despite these layers of

subjection. There is still social life: Frado/Nig’s jollity sends her into a seizure of

happiness. Without Mary’s presence, Frado/Nig’s body becomes mutable and takes on

performative skills and expressions that are unbounded and free to “twist into all shapes”

as she pleases.51 Furthermore, “her clear voice was heard as she went, singing in joyous

51 This scene is awfully reminiscent of the beginning pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harry is commanded to dance for a slave trader: Harry, “commenced one of those wild, grotesque songs common among the negroes, in a rich, clear voice, accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions of the hands, feet, and whole body, all in perfect time to the music.” Wilson takes this image and subverts it,

47

notes the relief she felt at the removal of one of her tormentors” (Wilson 45). Frado/Nig

only sings at church and in this specific moment, suggesting that her jollity has, again, a

larger double purpose: to disrupt the objectification of Black pleasure in 19th-century

minstrel traditions and to re-appropriate minstrel performances as temporarily

emancipatory acts, not solely sites of subjection.

When Mary dies in Chapter X titled, “Perplexities. –– Another Death,”

Frado/Nig’s jollity reimagines a scenario in which “the river” consumes Mary, making

her “as Black as [Frado/Nig].” For instance, Frado/Nig exclaims, “she got into the river

again, Aunt Abby, didn’t she; the Jordan is a big one to tumble into, any how. S’posen

she goes to hell, she’ll be as black as I am. Wouldn’t mistress be mad to see her a

nigger!’” (Wilson 59). In the explanatory notes of the text, the Jordan is analyzed as, “the

symbolic boundary between slavery and freedom reflected in Black spirituals” (Wilson

101). For this reason, the Jordan is also symbolically the northern United States, where

both “free” and indentured persons were neither legally enslaved nor socially free from

the violence of white supremacy. Therefore, as a feminine insurgent act, jollity enters into

this symbolic boundary between freedom and slavery: between sensing pleasure and

being made into property within the web of domination. The idea of Mary falling into the

river serves as the possibility that Mary (as well Frado/Nig’s other tormentors) will be

subjected to the same state of uncertainty and violence. In fact, she realizes that everyone

is stuck in this web of domination and may have already fallen into the river.

Hartman emphasizes that, “the limited means of redress available to the enslaved

cannot compensate for the enormity of this loss; instead, redress is itself an articulation of

allowing Frado/Nig’s pleasure to be expressed in ways that disrupt these kinds of representations of Black childhood.

48

loss and a longing for remedy and reparation.”52 Just as the river represents the

narrowness and fragility of normative language, especially in terms of freedom,

Frado/Nig articulates a “longing for remedy and reparation” by forcing Mary, the

laborers, and the schoolmaster into that space of violence and uncertainty, but also of

alternative possibility. In fact, her “longings” are not out of reach. They are partially

articulated in theatrical performances of jollity, mediated through minstrel traditions of

the antebellum period in which Wilson is writing, and received by those around her as

nonsensical acts. That they are received as nonsensical gives them the power of the

feminine: of the possibility that feminine non-representations of resistance are in

themselves fugitive acts that flee from the Politics of Man. Frado/Nig’s jollity is never

outside the web of domination; but she understands the extent to which her legal and

spiritual personhood is partly bound by the language of property, always inside of it, but

never fully under complete domination to the point that other kinds of life––such as

jollity and sorrow–– are impossible under these conditions.

***

In the introduction to The Undercommons, Jack Halberstam summarizes Harney

and Moten’s elaboration on the idea of “the call and response.” Halberstam writes: “for

Moten, you are always already in the thing that you call for and that calls you. What’s

more, the call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many

places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise.”53 We can think about this call to dis-order in

relation to Frado/Nig’s weeping and her jollity–– the call and response is expressed by

the sounds, noises, gestures, disruptions, and outbursts they produce throughout the text.

52 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 77. 53 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 7.

49

Frado/Nig calls for an insurgency in her weeping and jollity, in the improvisational and

noisy acts of disobedience and jests, through which she also responds. The call also rings

in the back-and-forth usage of Frado and Nig. The hybridity of Frado/Nig’s character

resists cohesiveness and resists order. Her naming, her weeping, and her jollity resist any

definitive beginning as much as they resist any definitive ending–– that which is

commonly conceived of as Freedom.

We can try to place these acts of resistance and fugitivity within models of

insurgency already available to us or along and against Hartman’s argument that pleasure

is always a site of domination for the enslaved. But weeping and jollity throughout Our

Nig continues to slide, to weave in and out of the text beyond rational comprehension,

beyond what seems reasonable. As Harney and Moten state, “to have been shipped is to

have been moved by others, with others,”54 and Wilson has indeed “been shipped” in

various ways. On this journey, she also ships the reader by telling her story, forcing us to

confront our own fear of uncertainty, of fragmentation, of sorrow, of pleasure; fear of our

own complicity and feelings of stuckness in this web of domination. By turning to

unintelligible modes of communication–– specifically within noisy weeping and

nonsensical jollity–– as possible signs of the “the insurgent ground as female social

subject,” Wilson radically transforms masculinist narratives of resistance and fugitivity,

creating in the process alternative feminist epistemologies of insurgency.

54 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 97.

50

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Hartman, Saidiya. “Lose Your Mother.” A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, 2007. ---. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. McKittrick, Katherine. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis. Duke University Press, 2014. Muñoz, José. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the Performance of Politics Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2, 1987. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003. Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.