He suggests they send her daughter Frado to live with and work for the Bellmonts, a lower middle-class white family who live nearby. Eventually, Mag and Seth decide they must leave town to search for work, and do not want to take both of the children. Embittered, she allows Seth, one of Jim's business partners, to become her common-law husband. Jim becomes sick and dies, leaving Mag to provide for their children. Jim and Mag marry and they have two children, a daughter, Frado, and an unnamed son. Impoverished, she soon realizes that she can either marry Jim or become a beggar. In this new town, she meets a "kind-hearted African" man named Jim who falls in love with her. After the child dies, Mag moves away to a place where no one knows her. She has been seduced and left with a child born out-of-wedlock. Our Nig opens with the story of Mag Smith, a white woman who lives in the northern United States. It was long considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in North America, though that record is now contested by another manuscript found by Gates, The Bondwoman's Narrative, which may have been written a few years earlier. Our Nig has since been republished in several other editions. and was subsequently reissued with an introduction by Gates (London: Allison & Busby, 1984). First published in 1859, it was rediscovered in 1981 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E.
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