Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig

Abstract

An early example of an African American novel, and earliest known novel by an African American woman writer, Harrie E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) has prompted ongoing excitement among modern scholars. Since Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered text more than a decade ago, contemporary criticism of Our Nig has for most part linked autobiographical novel to nineteenth-century tradition of slave narrative and sentimental novel. Wilson's adaptation of conversion narrative warrants further discussion,(1) however, because it represents a literary experiment more complex than mere imitation or synthesis of popular literary genres. Frado's failed conversion affords Wilson literary space to undermine prevailing social constructions of Christianity, race, and womanhood. Through Frado's narrative, Wilson demonstrates how Christian doctrine anchors popular notions of womanhood and domesticity, and how these concepts are limited by race and racial signifiers. Though Wilson manipulates well-known trappings of conversion narrative that date back to American Puritan tradition, Our Nig tells story of heroine's failed initiation into community of earthly saints. Moreover, Frado's rejection of Christianity's promised eternity demonstrates how race might interrupt Christian rite of passage for those black candidates who could not resolve ambiguities of popular racial myths. In both her worldly and spiritual quests, Frado faces limitations imposed by race. From moment Wilson introduces story of Jim and Mag's union, we begin to see an unsettling vision of Christianity and racial blackness as diametric opposites. black outside, I know,' Jim tells Mag, `but I's a heart inside' (12). For Jim, blackness stands in contradistinction to Christian images of goodness; moreover, with unfolding of Frado's narrative, we become increasingly aware that race stands as an obstacle to her religious conversion as well. Frado's inability to envision black souls as candidates for heaven thwarts her full submission to conversion process, and her failed religious conversion impels story's deviation from popular conventions of domestic fiction. A text that uses conversion narrative pattern, Our Nig ends as an anti-conversion experience. Unable to dispel inherited social images that equate whiteness with Godliness, heroine cannot envision blackness in divine hereafter. In a novel by a black woman writer more than a century after publication of Our Nig, we witness kind of narrative that can result a fictionalized black female heroine successfully resolves question of race and religious experience. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Celie finds God only after she expels whiteness that threatens her conversion. Celie shares with Shug her image of God as big and old and tall and graybearded and white (176). However, Celie confesses that vision of God leaves her uncomfortable: when I think about it, it don't seem quite right. But it all I got (176). As a confidant and mentor to Celie, Shug explains that this old man is same God she used to see she prayed (177). She then shares with Celie her vision of a God who is found in everything and everyone, and informs Celie that first step to finding God is to remove the old man, in order to see God who exists everywhere. This transformation is not an easy one. Celie reveals difficulty in trying to rid oneself of old man: Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to that old man out of my head (179). Again, she reveals seeming omnipresence of whiteness that makes it so difficult to chase away images of whiteness as inherently powerful: on your box of grits, in your head, and all over radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. …