Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts, and was not widely known.

The intention was that, in exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could later make her way in society.

)[3]: iii–xii After the end of her indentured servitude at the age of 18, Hattie Adams (as she was then known), worked as a house servant and a seamstress in households in southern New Hampshire.

Although he continued to lecture periodically in churches and town squares, he told Hattie that he had never been a slave and that he had created the story to gain support from abolitionists.

Wilson writes in the book's preface that she wrote the novel to raise money to help care for her sick child, George.

After 1863, she disappeared from records until 1867, when she was listed in the Boston Spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, as living in East Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Although the texts of her talks have not survived, newspaper reports imply that she often spoke about her life experiences, providing sometimes trenchant and often humorous commentary.

[11] Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. rediscovered Our Nig in 1982 and documented it as the first novel by an African American to be published in the United States.

[14][15] In 2006, William L. Andrews, an English literature professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Mitch Kachun, a history professor at Western Michigan University, brought to light Julia C. Collins' The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride (1865), first published in serial form in The Christian Recorder, newspaper of the AME Church.

[16] Examples include Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1854), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69), and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette (1797).

[16] The first known novel by an African American is William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), published in the United Kingdom, where he was living at the time.

[16] The critic Sven Birkerts argued that the unfinished state of The Curse of Caste (Collins died before completing it) and its poor literary quality should disqualify it as the first building block of African-American literature.

[17] Eric Gardner thought that Our Nig did not receive critical acclaim from abolitionists when first published because it did not conform to the contemporary genre of slave narratives.

He thinks the abolitionists may have refrained from promoting Our Nig because the novel recounts "slavery's shadow" in the North, where free blacks suffered as indentured servants and from racism.

The "white house" of the novel represents, as Leveen puts it: "The model home for American society is built according to the spatial imperatives of slavery."