Milford, New Hampshire, is well known to students of abolitionist history as the home of the Hutchinson Family Singers, often hailed as the country’s first protest singers. This celebratory history shows up the state’s whitewashing of its own engagement with slavery, because Milford was also the hometown of Harriet Wilson, the first African American woman to publish a novel in the United States. Our Nig (1859) was the semi-autobiographical account of a young black woman’s abuse in indentured servitude. Controversial in its own time, it evidently continues to challenge a New England ideal that would prefer to ignore the racism in its own midst. Although the novel itself was recovered in the 1980s—to considerable academic fanfare—it wasn’t until 2006 that Milford welcomed a modest memorial statue in honor of Wilson. As of this date, the Harriet Wilson Project is still struggling to find a permanent, local place to explore and maintain Harriet Wilson’s legacy. Across the state, in Portsmouth, a 2003 city infrastructure project was halted by the discovery of the intact remains of eight women and men of African descent. According to a 1705 map, this cemetery was once swampland on the city’s outskirts; ground-penetrating radar indicates that it includes as many as two hundred burials. For the past eleven years, the African Burying Ground Committee has fought to reclaim this contested space, now a residential street close to the center of modern Portsmouth, containing a black history marginalized, then