2019 Reprint of 1859 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Our Nig is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. Originally published in 1859, it was rediscovered in 1981 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It is considered one of the first novels published by an African-American woman in North America. In the story of Frado, a spirited black girl who is abused and overworked as the indentured servant to a New England family, Harriet E. Wilson tells a heartbreaking story of another aspect of race relations in the U.S., namely the life of indentured servants in the Northern, abolitionist States of the Union. It follows the trials of Frado, a mulatto girl abandoned by her white mother after the death of her black father. Frado grows up as an indentured servant to a white family in nineteenth century Massachusetts. The novel has been referred to as a fusion of two literary modes of the nineteenth century, the sentimental novel and the slave narrative.