My comparative study of Our Nig (1859) by Harriet Wilson and Dessa Rose (1986) by Sherley Anne Williams cannot begin without first examining the historical reality of America's societal views and perceptions of the black woman in slavery and servitude during the nineteenth-century; her actual history must precede her literary story. To be a black woman in nineteenth-century America was to be plagued with the label of belonging to a stigmatized race and gender. But devaluing of the black woman is not limited to the nineteenth-century; in fact its legacy persists in today's culture. I believe that one of the biggest dilemmas facing black women, slave and free, is that they have constantly had to define themselves in the face of a society that systematically debased and maligned black womanhood.