Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson; 2002. Softcover.

With a New Preface, Introduction, and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

New Afterword by Barbara White

A fascinating fusion of two literary models of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative, Our Nig, apart from its historical significance, is a deeply ironic and highly readable work, tracing the trials and tribulations of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of the child's black father, who grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.