MARK TWAIN AND THE NEGRO

by

JAMES LOUIS HOLT, B.S.

A THESIS

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Technological College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Approved

^ .M v i ,A.l^JaM(i Director

Accepted

;p^^/ 0. ^. Dean of the Graduate Sfchool

August, 1967

T3 \%7 No. ) 33

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to Professo

Warren S. Walker for his learned assistance in the prepara­

tion of this thesis. Also I would like to thank Professor

Clyde L. Grimm for his commentary during the early stages

of my work. ' ,

11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION 1

II. BIOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCES 6

III. THE MAJOR DOCUMENT: PUDD'NHEAD WILSON . 37

IV. THE AMBIVALENT MORALITY OF ABOLITION;

"NIGGER" JIM AS TOUCHSTONE 6

V. CONCLUSION 92

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ill

111

CHAPTER I •

INTRODUCTION

To Mark Twain the fundamental rule for the fiction

writer, and the one from which all other rules stem, is

that he establish his material firmly upon experience and

observation. It is the contention of this paper, there­

fore, that his portrayal of the Negro slave was depicted

by realistically, though sympathetically, recalling his

earlier experiences--in the case of the Negro, those of

early childhood and youth in Florida, Hannibal, and on the

Quarles' farm. Since most of his writing was done after

the Negro v/as emancipated in I862 by President Lincoln, at

least outwardly. Twain was reticent enough to malign the

American Democrat for his ill treatment of the slave, with­

out any significant repercussions, and objective enough to

realize that the Emancipation Proclamation was not nation­

ally followed. Twain always insisted, moreover, that ex­

perience and observation be supplemented by fact which

would give fiction an authenticity unattainable by pure

invention. In a letter written in I89I he says, " . . .

I confine myself to life with which I am familiar when pre­

tending to portray life." This, then, is the basis for his

realistic portrayal of the Negro slave with vjhom he asso­

ciated intimately throughout much of his life.

More concerned with the Negro as an individual than

as a race. Twain logically believed that characters should

be realistically presented from observation and experience.-

In the first place, a character in a tale should be defined

to the extent that one could predict his future actions.

And, in the second instance, he required real dialogue ap­

propriate to the nature of the speaker and the given situa­

tion. Ti'jain's use of the Negro dialect has brought about

much critical appraisal, thus any further analysis at this

time would be mere repetition and therefore meaningless.

Instead, this paper will be strictly confined to an evalua­

tion of hov; and to what extent the Negro slave influenced

Sam Clemens, and as a consequence, how much of this influ­

ence Mark Twain utilized in his fiction.

That Tv/ain was able to see himself as a microcosm

of humanity is one plausible reason for his sympathetic at­

titude toward the down-trodden slave. But more feasibly,

it was the intimacy of his associations with various Negro

companions that prompted his social protests over the degra­

dation of slavery. "I have always preached," he says,

"That is the reason I have lasted for thirty years." Uni-

quivocally asserting that Twain was a "born reformer,"

Edward Wagenknecht states that there was never any time

when he was indifferent to injustice, or "when he was not

ready to smite the serpent wherever it should lift its ugly

head." Even while in Hannibal where he had no aversion

to slavery in general, young Clemens v/as becoming indignant

over individual cases of ill treatment. Knov/ing personally

that skin color did not conceal basic human characteristics,

he could not completely suppress these "Abolitionist" feel­

ings. M. M. Brashear, in appraising the overall effect of

Tv/ain's environment, concludes that "Ultimately, it was the

life he knev/ in Hannibal that gave his genius its charac­

ter."^

To be sure, then. Twain was concerned about the

slave as another human being struggling for equality. And

he v/as unquestionably a moralist who used his gift of humor

to emphasize his m.oral philosophy. "Why don't people under­

stand that Mark Ti jain is not merely a great humorist?" 7

Thomas Hardy once asked VJilliam D. Howells. The fact is.

Twain disliked any sham, any affectation--precisely the at­

titude of the white race for the black. But more than

this, he became highly indignant over injustice and wrong,

physical as well as mental. As he grevj older, this attitude

grew more pronounced, and he "waged an unwearied crusade

with all the earnestness of his moral nature against the „8

various forms of injustice and oppression." In short,

then. Twain always loved the black face. Captain Stormfielc

reveals vzhy when he says, "I have seen but fev7 niggers that „9

hadn't their hearts in the right place. This admiration

caused Tv/ain in his last years to prophesy Negro supremacy

in America by I985. Obviously, he exaggerated, but,

nevertheless, he felt that the white man was responsible

for the faults of the Negro by condoning, even perpetuating,

the institution of slavery. The overall evidence, then,

diverse and contradictory as it is, indicates that Mark

Tv/ain's biographical associations vjith the Negro slave had

a profound influence upon his life, as well as his fiction.

. FOOTNOTES

.Edgar H. Goold, "Mark Twain of the Writing of Fiction," American Literature, XVI (May, 195 )> p. 1^1.

^ Goold, p. 143. • * . . •

^ Gooid, p. 144.

4 .The interested reader may consult the following articles for an analysis of Twain's use of the Negro dialect James B. Hoben, "Mark Twain: On the Writer's Use of Lan­guage," American Speech, XXXI (October, 1956); R. I. McDavld and V. G. McDavid, "The Relationship of the Speech of Ameri­can Negroes to the Speech of Whites," American Speech,.XXVI (1951); James N. Tidwell, "Mark Twain's Represenatation of Negro Speech," American Speech, XXVIII (October, 1942); and Katherine Buxbaum, "Mark Twain and American Dialect," Ameri­can Speech, II (February, 1927).

5 Edward Wagenknecht, Mark -Tv/ain: The Man and His

Work, (Norman, I96I), p. 217-^ M. M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri,

(Chapel Hill, 1934), p. 195.

Mildred Howells, (ed.), William Dean Howells, Life in Letters, I, (Garden City, 192«), p. 349.

o Edwin M. Bowen, "Mark Twain," South Atlantic

Quarterly, XV (1916), 250-251.

Report From Paradise, (New York, 1952), p. I6. 10

Wagenknecht, p. 222.

CHAPTER II

BIOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCES

An examination of the biographical information per­

tinent to Tv7ain»s relationship with the Negro must begin

when he was twelve, as most of the prior data are vinre-

liable. His family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, in his

early infancy, and in that border village one can see the

life which served as the literary base for his treatment 2

of the Negro. Its only dependable outside source of com-

mvmication being the Mississippi River, Hannibal was at the

crossroads of an expanding America, the last stop in the

westward migration of .John and Jane Clemens. In I839, the

year the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, the town was

barely twenty years old with a population under five hun­

dred. It was not far from the border; therefore, Sam

Clemens knew border xvar and river men. For him, then, the

turbulence of a frontier society ran on the river just

three blocks from his house. The river attracted all types

of men (rogues, gold-seekers, immigrants. Mormons, slaves,

and slave traders) to Hannibal which was the outlet for

goods to the interior. Consequently, the town V7as remote

enough to induce into its citizens a mixture of horror and

hope. Only recently had the outlaw John Murrell been cap-3

tured; disputes were usually resolved with giins; the lynching and torture of Negroes were unusual but taken for

6

7

granted] medicine was ineffective against malaria; super­

stitions pervaded the countryside; and education, above all 4" else, was regarded as almost unimportant. This blending

of fear and ignorance was to have future influence upon

young Sam Clemens in his attitude toward the various slave

customs which he inherited.

Yet, as Cov/ie points out, Hannibal was not all evil.

The cruelties and brutalities of frontier life vjere there,

but so were the amusements. People could find diversity in

touring theater companies, shovjboats, dances, shooting

matches, folk tales, and (very important to Twain) Negro

spirituals. In the words of Alexander Cowie, "Crudity,

violence, superstitions v/ere there, but also amusements and

livableness. " And in all of these, the Negro v/as a vital,

inseparable part, that germ which would later give birth

to much of Mark-Tv/ain's fiction.

Hannibal was the master condition of his fiction, and fiction v/as the instinctual part of his work. His artistic creativeness, his phantasy-making, was rooted in his boyhood. . . . But we can recog­nize tv:o elements in that repeated invocation of Hannibal. One of them has been v/idely remarked: that his memory of boyhood was lyrical, a memory of freedom, irresponsibility, and security, is­landed in a countryside and a society as pleasant as any in the American past. That is true, but there is another element in that invocation v/hich has been less discussed. VJhen he invoked Hannibal he found there not only the idyl of boyhood but anxiety, violence, supernatural horror, and an un-crystallized but enveloping dread. Much of his fiction, most of his masterpiece, flows from that phantasy-bound an':iety.5

a-

In this Missourian slave town many of Twain's ma­

ture attitudes were formed--indeed, some of the significant

social, political, and moral issues of the nineteenth cen­

tury were mere facts of his boyhood experiences. Hannibal's

democracy had an aristocratic taint stemming from the in-• 6 •

grained Southern character of the tovm, which Bernard

DeVoto described as "easy and slow; and [without] extreme

wealth or poverty." Many incidents of class struggles thus

resulted from the acceptance of slavery, with specific

events being exposed in Twain's fiction. Because it had

7

always been present, people seldom thought otherwise. It

was practically impossible, therefore, for an uneducated

village boy named Samuel Clemens to be any different from

his elders. Twain corroborated this opinion in his Auto­

biography:

In my school days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.o

More than half of the citizens of Hannibal were Southern,

but the slaves were few in number, approximately thirteen 9

per cent with a few free blacks. Most of these slaves,

however, were domestic servants, content as such, and there­

fore treated better than those unfortunates on the large

plantations v/here they were mere tools of labor. In spite

of this good treatment, slaves were not considered indi­

viduals but types or things, much like Huck's opinion of

Jim as property of Miss Watson.

Thus, Hannibal was unable to discern the evil in­

herent in the institution of slavery. Having grov/n up

knowing personally the lives of slaves, young Sam, v7ho had

been exposed to Anti-slave attitudes, nevertheless remained

in distrust of abolitionists. Twain realized this paradox

of slavery in retrospect v/hen he said, "We were comrades,

and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a

subtle line which both parties were conscious of and which

rendered complete fusion impossible." Both slave and mas­

ter regarded this situation with equanimity. To be sure,

certain things were frov/ned upon: Negro families being

separated, physical cruelty to slaves, and, above all, any

attempt to sell the slave down the river. It v/ould be dif­

ficult to summarize the society of Hannibal better than

Twain has done:

There were grades of society--people of good family, people of unclassified family, people of no family. Everybody knows everybody, and was affable to every­body, and nobody put on airs; yet the class lines were quite clearly drawm and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class. It was a little democracy v/hich was full of liberty, equality, and Fourth of July, and sincerely so, too; yet you perceived that the aristocratic taint was there. It was there, and nobody found fault with the fact, or ever stopped to reflect that its presence v/as an inconsistency.

\

:y.-M

10

The last verses Sam Clemens wrote in Hannibal were

for the benefit of his latest girl friend, Ann Virginia

Ruffner:

. Good-by, good-by I bid you now, my friend; And though »tis hard to say the word. To destiny I bend.

In a sense this good-by was not a final valediction, since

he returned to Hannibal again and again as a transient

visitor. He emerged from the matrix of Hannibal to become

printer, pilot, miner, journalist, lecturer, and author--

but Mark Twain never said good-by to the golden days of his

childhood village. No Tngjov QV^+TO-F^ -jy fact, has ever

utilized his boY < < ^ ^:^ '''•p" f xtpnt nf Tv/ain. who watvJietter

flHap+.^H -i-.q Hannibal than any other environment he met.

And with the casualties and complexities of adulthood, he

loved' the golden age all the more. It gave, he wrote in

old age, the part of his life worth reliving, the romance

of youth that is "overwhelming valuable." That his nostal­

gia had a dual nature is apparent to one noted Twain scholar

On the one hand, Hannibal was associated with pre-industrial, pre-Gold Rush, pre-Civil War tranquil­lity- -the old halycon of small-tov/n America emerging from the rigors of the frontier yet retaining a spirit of adventure and unspoiled nature. And on the personal plane, Hannibal was linked with the age of innocence, before the unrest of puberty or the burdens of adulthood closed in. Hannibal forever was the symbol of security in days of frustration and disaster. Yet, he also gave along with the serenity and beauty of his idyl, the dangers and

11

terrors it had for a boy—drownings, corpses, ghosts, mobs, superstitions, feuds—even though in the end they are placated and transcended.il

Thus, Samuel Clemens—"Mark the double Twain" as Dreiser

called him--became a human philopena and took of both na­

tures.

Perhaps as much as Hannibal, described by Twain as

a "heavenly place for a boy," John and Jane Clemens in­

fluenced their son^s attitudes toward slavery. Born in

Virginia of a slave-holding class, John Clemens also owned

slaves, three inherited from his father along with a ma-12 hogany side-board. However, he would never have thought

of mistreating them. Instead, he would have freed them,

except that the consequent financial loss would have been 13 too great. Judge Clemens, a free-thinker in communities

where it was taboo, nevertheless exhibited a characteristic

Southern tendency in relation to abolitionists. In Septem­

ber, l84l, he sat on a circuit court jury and sent to prison

for twelve years three abolitionists v/ho had been trying to

aid five Negroes escape through the underground railroad.

The slaves, each valued at five hundred dollars, betrayed

their would-be rescuers; and although their testimony agains

whites was illegal in court, it was permitted. The stiff

sentence meted out by Judge Clemens and the other eleven men l4

was popular, receiving "considerable applause." Mark

Twain later wrote "A Scrap of Curious History" about the

manner in which martyred abolitionists enflamed pro-slavery

12

attitudes in Missouri in the l840»s. In the winter of l84l-

1842 Twain»s father travelled to the deep South in the

course of an arduous and unprofitable venture--Negro trad­

ing. Aboard a steamboat on January 5, l842, he commented,

"I still have Charley, the highest price I had affixed for

him in New Orleans was $50.00, and in Vicksburg $40.00.

After performing the journey to Tennessee I expect to sell

him for whatever he will bring where I take water again, 15 viz. at Louisville or Nashville." - Finding this letter in

the family papers nearly half a century later. Twain com­

mented wryly upon his father's mention of Charley, a slave

he got in Missouri in hopes he could increase the price

along the lower Mississippi, as if he had been

an ox--and somebody else's ox. It makes a body home­sick for Charley, even after fifty years. Thank God I have no recollection of him as house servant of ours; that is to say, playmate of mine; for I was play­mate to all niggers, preferring their society to that of the elect, I being a person of low-dov/n tastes from the start, notwithstanding my high birth, and ever ready to forsake the communion of high souls if I could strike anything nearer my grade.1^

Charley's fate is unknown, but a promisory note given Judge

Clemens by Abner Phillips "for value received this 24th day

of January, l842" suggests the possibility that he sold the

slave for ten barrels of tar to be delivered to Missouri on

17 or before Christmas.

The opinion of Jane Clemens, on the other hand, did

not positively influence her son but could have negatively

13

by offering him a clear example of contemporary society.

Schooled in the Old Testament texts and sermons sanctioning

slavery, she believed likewise. In this sense. Twain de­

scribed her in the Autobiography;

I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bold, grotesque and unwarrantable usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but she had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand, her ears were familiar with the Bible text that approved it, but if there were any that assailed it they had not been quoted by her pastor; as far

; as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for. Mani­festly, training and association can accomplish strange miracles. As a rule our slaves were con­vinced and content.lo

Mrs. Clemens, however, tempered her feelings with kindness

and taught her son one lesson he never forgot. After the

sale of Jennie, a house servant, the Clemenses hired a

black houseboy from "a master back in the coiintry." "He

sang the whole day long at the top of his voice," Twain

later recalled; "it was intolerable, it was unendurable.

At last I went to my mother in a rage about it. But she

said.

Think; he is sold away from his mother; she is in Maryland, a thousand miles from here, and he will never see her again, poor thing. When he is sing­ing it is a sign that he is not grieving; the noise of it drives me almost distracted, but I am always listening, and always thankful; it would break my heart if Sandy should stop singing.19

14

This same little singing boy Twain called Lewis in Follow­

ing the Equator, recalling how the boy's "trifling little

blunders and awkwa-dnesses" invoked John Clemens's occasional

cuffs. In the original manuscript Judge Clemens lashed him.

But when Li'vy Clemens wrote in the margin, "I hate to have

your father pictured as lashing a slave boy," Twain rejoined,

"It's out, and my father is whitewashed." Perhaps, though,

an earlier act of filial vindication caused Twain to state

that his father, a slave owner, held that "slavery was a

PI great wrong"; however, no further, proof of this conviction

is evident, excepting that he disavowed the clerical accept-

22 ' ance of it.

'The Southern element in Mark Twain's inheritance i and training is often overlooked because of his significance

as a western writer, but it nevertheless must be stressed

in any attempt to analyze his relationship vsrith the Negro,

as it accounts largely for the scope of his outlook and his 2^

aristocratic freedom. All of his paternal ancestors were

24 of old Virginia families. His mother, Jane Lampton, had

been a Kentucky belle, descended from the pioneer families

of Montgomery and Casey. John Marshall Clemens, his father,

was a pioneer struggling westward to newer colonies, stop­

ping in Columbia, Kentucky, to study law. Here he met and

married Tv/ain's mother. Thus, Twain's blood v/as Southern,

his paternal ancestry from Virginia, his maternal from Ken­

tucky, and his father and mother products of Tennessee. It

15

should be pointed out further that four of his five brothers

and sisters were born in Tennessee, and finally that the

family fortune was in Tennessee lands. One specific inci­

dent in Twain's family background is pertinent to his South­

ern training. Orion Clemens, an abolitionist, probably modi­

fied his brother's early acceptance of slavery. Twain thus • -^

wrote to Orion in I8531 "How do you like 'free soil'? I

„ f would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned negro.

For Twain, like many others, the war had offered startling

commentary upon the institution of slavery. True, he had

fought for the Confederacy and never apologized for his ac­

tions,^ but he fled the cause to join Orion in the free »

state of Nevada. Had Orion supported slavery, Mark Twain

may never have gone west, where his literary powers were

born. When the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Sam was

four years old. But his contact with his birthplace, Florida 26

Missouri, was not ended. Slavery was less harsh in

Florida than on most of the Southern plantations, it is true,

but primitive measures were still used for discipline. The

Clemens children recalled a runaway slave brought to Florida

by six white captors who tied his hands v ith ropes and left 27

him groaning in a deserted shack. They recall, too, the

time Jennie, scolded for her "uppity" behavior by Jane

Clemens, grabbed the whip used to threaten her. Guilty by

slave law, Jennie's wrists were bound, and she was flogged

16

with cowhide. A third example of white oppression occurred

when Sam was only ten years old. He vividly remembered the

time he saw a white overseer "fling a lump of iron-ore at

a slave-man in anger, for merely doing something awkwardly.

. . . he was dead in an hour . . . it seemed a pitiful

thing and somehow wrong. . . . Nobody in the village approved

of that murder, but of course no one said much about it." " •

More indicative of daily routine was the Negro in docile,

easygoing, happy moods--a friend and companion of all chil­

dren, with time for fishing, roaming the woods, or black-

berrying. And when Sam was too young for these diversions,

the Negro was present to entertain him with superstitions,

folk tales, and songs. Dixon Wecter, in Sam Clemens of

Hannibal, has analyzed the significant, integral relation­

ship of the Negro and all children, in this case Sam Clemens:v

These stories, as befitted the credulous and simple-souled who dwelt under the shadow of insecurity and intimidation, pivoted upon fear—stirring young lis­teners with a delicious and inforgettable terror. To analyze the part terror, sheer animal terror, plays in Huckleberry Finn, where death lurks at every bend of the river, is to glimpse the effect of this early education upon the mind of a child. [Moreover], the art of telling a story came not from Artemus Ward but from the lips of black people like his father's slave-of-all-work in these Florida days. Uncle Ned, whose story 6f the Golden Arm ("W-h-a-r-r-s my golden arm?"), with its accusing climax ("You've got it!"); these children never forgot it.

This early friendship with the Negro in a nebulous atmos­

phere of democracy made it impossible, at least in part,

for Mark Twain to be completely a Southerner. It is, in

17

fact, the primary reason for his overall sympathetic atti­

tude toward the plight of the Negro slave, as he "would, rT)

in fact, have been lost without such protection and com- . 30

pany." But after the invention of the cotton gin and

machine farming, slavery was less harsh, and thus the fear

of being "sold dov/n the river"--one of the leading motifs

of Pudd'nhead Wilson and one often exploited by Twain—and

the description of the cruel methods of.the overseer on the

Arkansas plantation became for him an excellent contrast to

Missouri slavery and thereby better material for fiction.

• It is evident, then, that when Mark Twain left

Florida, consciously or unconsciously, many of his child­

hood associations went with him. These associations were

not merely isolated in Florida: on the one hand, they in­

volved his uncle John Quarles, and on the second, the

Negroes on the Quarles's farm. Southern-born Quarles moved

to Missouri soon after the Missouri Compromise of l820 made

it slave territory. A merchant, he owned about four miles

north of Florida a plantation which he operated with some

thirty slaves. Quarles thus possessed the economic means

which John Clemens never found, and it was he who wrote the

letter bringing the Clemens family to Florida. A. B. Paine

states further the influence of John Quarles upon Sam's

childhood:

There was a halo around everything that belonged to Uncle John Quarles, & that halo v/as the jovial, hilarious kindness of the gentlehearted, humane

18

man. To visit his house was for a child to be in heaven of mirth & pranks continually.32

A second aspect of Quarles's influence upon Sam Clemens can

be seen in an analysis of his religion. T. V. Bodine,

Quarles's biographer, covers it well in this excerpt:

The question of human destiny, the why, the whence, the whither, was always with him. Unable to recon­cile it with the accepted dogmas of his people, and driven by a vigorous mind and a kindly heart, he be­came a "Universalist." What that meant during the days following the revival of Paulinian teaching in

; the valley country. . . . we of today cannot appre-j ciate. It was even worse than being an "Infidel,"

& often converted a man into a social pariah, though John Quarles did not suffer this fate, his natural kindness and his general usefulness as a man and a citizen saving him from the common penalty.33

This religion is not unlike that of John Clemens, in that

it was an "out-of-the-way church religion." Tv/ain offers

this comment upon his father's religious beliefs: "...

albeit he attended no church and never spoke of religious

matters and had no part or let in the pious joys of his

Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this

34 deprivation." It is important to note that in this sense

Twain is closer to his uncle and his father than he is to

his mother, or to her counterpart Aunt Polly, who wanted to

convey all her children into the Kingdom of Heaven. More­

over, if one adds to this conflict the simple faith and

various superstitions of the Negro, he can begin to realize

the complexity of Twain's spiritual background and thus

understand why he, too, worried about human destiny, so

19

apparent in "Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "Eve's

Diary."

Missourians of the l840's liked to think of their

slave system as mild and benevolent, John Quarles being no

exception. The local papers reported instances of runaway

slaves who, having safely escaped to the snows and bleak

economic struggles of Canada, were "all anxious to return."

Their columns v/ere full of rewards for fugitives, accompanied

with the familiar woodcut of a Negro carrying a bundle. But

the tragic irony of the relationship existing between slave (CCCCCCC

and master might never have become apparent to Sam Clemens

without the intimacy of those summers spent on the farm be­

tween l840 and 1846. Here he saw slavery approaching the

idyllic state, if such is possible, and under the easygoing

hand of John Quarles, who treated his slaves more like his

children than slaves, young Clemens came to know and love

his black comrades. Paine has perceptively analyzed the

association of Sam Clemens with the Negroes on the farm:

"His tendency to mischief grew with this wide liberty, im­

proved health, and the encouragement of John Quarles's ^

35 ' good-natured fun-loving slaves."-^

During his visits to his uncle's farm, therefore,

young Sam met his most remarkable Negro friends. He met

the buxom black matron "Aunt Hanner," who probably inspired

him to create, in a still unpublished story, the figure of

"Aunt Phyllis." He described her in the following man­

ner:

20

. . . as straight as a grenadier, and has the grit and the stride and the warlike bearing of one. But, being black, she is good-natured, to the bone. It is the born privilege and pre relative of her adorable race. She is cheerful, indestructibly cheerful and lively; and what a refreshment she is! Her laugh--her breezy laugh, her inspiring and uplifting laugh—is always ready, always on tap, and comes pealing out, peal upon peal, right from her heart, let the occasion for it be big or lit­tle; and it is so cordial and so catching that derelict after derelict has to forget his troubles and join in. . . .

It was "Aunt Hanner" whom Twain later confused in the Auto­

biography with the ancient Negress on the Quarles's farm.^'

The real aunt Hannah, who was over 100 years old and a per­

sonal friend of Moses, often thrilled the young boy with

witches's tales and lore. In the Autobiography Twain re­

calls her being " . . . superstitious, like the other

Negroes; also, like them, she was deeply religious" relying

on her beliefs when a "dead certainty of result was urgent."

Possibly another Quarles's servant was the "gay and impudent

and satirical and delightful young black man--a slave--who

daily preached sermons from the top of his master's wood­

pile, with me [Twain] for sole audience," his favorite text

being, "You tell me whar a man gits his cornpone, en I'll Q Q

tell you what his 'pinions is. ~^ This was yoimg Sam's

first unforgettable lesson in economic determinism--what he

would later consider as a folly in the democratic ideal.

Very important in forming Twain's later opinions of the

Negro was a slave girl, Mary, who, on the Quarles's farm,

usually attended Sam and his small cousins. Only six years

21

old, however, Mary was more a playmate than a guardian whose

forceful discipline could be done only by the threat of tell-

ing "Miss Patsy" or "Miss Jane." To Twain, then, the farm

was just "one long idyllic dream of summer-time and free-

In all probability, though, the most memorable serv­

ant, the one having the most profound influence upon young

Sam Clemens, was Uncle Dan'l. The evidence available sub­

stantiates the reliability of Twain's memory of the Negro.

Speaking of the days on the farm and Uncle Dan'l, he said.

We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally, and advisor in 'Uncle Dan'l,' a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies were warm and'wide, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. He has served me well these many years. I have not seen ^ him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his ovm name and as "Jim," and carted him all around—to Hannibal, dovm the Mississippi in a raft,.and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright.^1

Any direct parallel of Uncle Dan'l, point by point in this

description, with Nigger Jim would be superfluous at this

time; however, it will be inherent in the later analysis

of Huck's companion. Old Dan'l feared the night with all

its creatures. He often sang songs like "Go Chain the Lion

Down" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Too, he could neither

read nor write but taught his protegee that one could draw

logical and intelligent conclusions from an honest and

22

pure heart. He, in turn, was innocent enough to believe

the wild tales told by the excited young boy. In any case.

Twain, as Huck, soon learned that there was no fun in laugh­

ing at a good friend. His deep affection for Dan'l caused

the author to give him an overdue reward—his freedom--but

he never really knew the old man's fate: in I852 he was sold 42

by John Quarles. The overall influence of Quarles and his

farm can be seen in Twain's own opinion: "It was on this

farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appre­

ciation of certain of its fine qualities."^^

Several other childhood incidents also influenced

Twain's attitude toward the Negro. He was never able to

forget the time he saw a group of slaves chained together

on the wharf waiting shipment to New Orleans, a place of -4^

dread and evil for all Negroes, and remarked about them,

"They had the saddest faces I ever saw." That his child­

hood memories of slavery were always vivid to him can be

illustrated by the following incident. On a trip to India

in 1896 he saw a hotel owner strike a slave and instantly

remarked, "All that goes to make the me in me was in a

45 Missourian village on the other side of the globe."

Gladys Bellamy correctly analyzed his remark in saying,

"The flame of indignation at injustice which that vision 46

had lighted in him burned to the last. And beyond this.

Van Wyck Brooks insisted that "during his last years only 47

the spectacle of oppression could move him to v/rite." It

23

is true enough, in any case, that in later life Twain would

go across the street to speak to an old Negro and shake his

hand. George, his butler, was "precisely the sort of char-

acter Mark Twain loved," and he served in the household

for a long time: as Twain said, he came to wash the windows

and stayed for eighteen years. He insisted, moreover, that

every white man was indebted to every black man, fulfilling

his belief by financing the college education of two Negro ^^

youths. Twain also acted in behalf of another Negro, ex-/ I

slave Fredrick Douglass. When Garfield was inaugurated and

the rumor spread that Douglass might lose his government

job. Twain wrote the president-elect. His petition closed

with the follov ing words:

I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race.

He is a personal friend of mine . . . his history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them, too.^9

V^

Twain was very proud to claim Douglass as a "personal

friend," and he welcomed Negroes to his home as equals.

After entertaining six Jubilee Singers, he wrote: "Three

of the six were born in slavery, the others were children

of slaves. How charming they were--in spirit, manner,

language . . . carriage, clothes--in every detail that goes 50

to make up the real lady and gentleman, and welcome guest..

24

It is apparent, therefore, that his growth among

the Negroes was important to Twain as a literary artist.

Much that is distinct and real in his writing sprang from

slaves--from "the melancholy, the music, the laughter, the

terror, and the magic of the slaves. " - Or in different

but equally relevant words, "To hear the marvelous ghost

tales of the Negroes and to thrill to them afterward, was

probably the intensest form of emotional stimulation that

yovmg Sam Clemens ever received."" Let it suffice to con-

elude this aspect of the slaves's influence in words of

Gladys Bellamy. "The Negro influence on Mark Twain," she

said, "was not only deep; it was sustained throughout his

life. This hurt was often as deep as that of the injured

one."^^

But Mark Twain assimilated more than a feeling of \.

injustice from his childhood associations with the Negro.

He has been able to preserve the folk history of the Negro,

sociologically and historically, by interpreting the per­

sonality, the psychology of the Mississippi Valley slaves.

This is an inherent strain in the thoughts of Huck, Jim,

and Roxana, not to mention those closely associated with

them. The plantation tradition, as well as the more ur­

banized life of Hannibal, precluded a v/ide-spread familiar­

ity with music halls or theaters, thus eliminating the aura

of formal entertainment. In due time the overt reactions

of the Negro to his bondage became the major form of

25

"entertainment" for the.whites. And in the process the

slave cultivated through the media of folk tales, music,

and dancing what could be termed an emotional catharsis

for his frustrations. More important to survival, he had

to develop a release for the futility of human bondage.

The skill of each "release"--whether in serious religious

experience or in sly wit--also insured survival by making

the white master think that nothing more than religious

fervor (which he disdained) or buffoonery (which he regarded

with an amused condescension) was involved.. In the final

estimate, nevertheless, both extremes were tolerated as

folk expressions and utilized as diversionary entertain­

ment. e

The religion of the Mississippi slaves, said to be

a mixture of Methodism and African voodoo,^^ cannot be dis­

tinguished effectively from the superstition pervading the

Negro society. This religion involved more than faith or

exaggeration; it involved fear. Bringing from the Dark

Continent a religion of terror and death in which every

god was to be feared, the slaves adopted from Wesley a fer-

vence for exhortation still prevalent among their race. To

them King Jesus was coming on a blazing stallion to carry

them over Jordan where a kind, old sympathetic black man

was waiting to take all of his children home. Heaven v/as

only about six miles away and could be easily seen. It

indeed became a living fact: one composed of fervent hope

to compensate for their inhibited souls, as well as dark • • •

26

superstitions to explain and protect them from what they

could not understand.-^ It was such a view that Marc

Connelly was later to present in his powerful play Green

Pastures.

There was little in the natural world incapable of

being converted into this superstitious religion. In all

of Twain's books the Negro characters are imbued with the

language of the plants, animal lore, and too many other

vai-ieties of superstition to mention. But beyond these

somewhat harmless beliefs, there is the frightening world

of the unknown, the mysterious which was always associated

with death. The slaves were continually erecting defenses

against the spirit world, and from their knowledge of omens,

they passed these fears to the children of their masters.

This, then, was the method by which Tv/ain obtained his

varied catalogue of superstitions and witchlore--from his

close childhood associations with the Negro slaves. Thus

it was that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, not to mention Jim

and Roxana, became human encyclopedias of charms, portents

spells, and incantations. Superstition, the true and most

vivid aspect of the slave religion, became a weapon with

which the imprisoned Negro, as well as his young white com­

panion, must approach the world of adults where good and

evil were too often indistinguishable.

More importantly. Twain never condemned the slave ^ J

for his superstitions, although at times he did poke fun V

at his strange beliefs. He, instead, reserved judgment of

27

a race which had its only escape from oppression-in an

elaborate code wherein evil presupposed good. What the

author did present as moral integrity was a desire for the

highest good and highest knowledge of which a person was

capable, regardless of his economic and sociological

limitations—being the institution of slavery, in the case

of the Negro slave.

Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature: what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opin­ions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained

• into us. . . . And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the extremities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and blameless life, and save that ^e microscopic atom in me that is truly me. . . .5'

It may be somewhat presumptious to suggest a basis for

those social comments relating Twain's true feelings to

the entire system of superstitious beliefs held by the

slave; but, nevertheless, it is essential for one to under­

stand the scope of the Negro's influence in shaping Twain's "y

opinions. It seems logical, therefore, to agree with

Wagenknecht in asserting that the superstitions of the

slave society permeated his childhood, and ever further,

that he was never quite able to throw off its spell.

Either as a psychological rationalization for the slave's

behavoir (to explain his suppressed feelings) or as local

color adding strength to realism, these superstitions would

28

recur in many of his books, especially the major works

treating.the Negro., Pudd'nhead Wilson and Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain also developed along with this religion

an intense love for Negro music. The extent of influence

this music had on him is apparent in Mark Twain: The Man

and His Work:

Fortunately, however, there was one type of music-music of quality, and dignity, and beauty, music

. utterly free from all pretentions of "artiness"--that Mark Twain drank in with his mother's milk and which became a part of his very being. I speak, of course, of the Negro spirituals. [Wagenknecht then quotes Twain to support his contention.] "Av ay back in the beginning, [this music] made all vocal

• music cheap; and that early notion is emphasized now [on hearing the Jubilee Singers at Lucerne in I897]. It is utterly beautiful to me; and it moves me in­finitely more than any other music can. I think that in the Jubilees and their songs America had produced the perfectest flavor of their ages; and I wish it were a foreign product so that she would worship it and lavish money on it and go properly crazy over it."5o

The slaves listened to western ballads sung by travellers

and hymns sung at revivals and, using their innate rhythm

and ability to harmonize--which confirmed to the v/hites

that all Negroes were less than civilized, were pagan in

their primitive natures, and were in dire need of the be­

nevolent protection slavery afforded--, transmitted them

into the only art form to come from slavery. Mr. DeVoto

clarifies this last point by stating, "A Biblical mythology,

a Biblical immediacy, everlay the ghouls and spirits of

Africa, and with this alphabet the Negro spelled out the

29

longing, the labor, and terror of his estate." " In the

security of daylight these songs were gay, but in the ter­

ror of darkness they became at once terrible and sublime.

During these hours when superstition and fear were pre­

dominant, the peaceful church fables learned in Methodism

took on an awful reality. From the episodes and the imagery

of the Bible, the slaves reconstructed their own versions

and transformed them into a new social and religious faith,

causing Fredrick Douglass to define slavery as the "grave-„6o

yard of the mind." The force and vengeance of God, the

hope of all imprisoned, slaves, Negroes as well as Jews, be-

came the message, with emphasis upon dramatic scenes from

the Bible like Daniel in the lion's den, Moses and the death

of Pharoah's army, and, of course, the second coming of their

Savior. Through these songs, through fear as well as faith,

the Negro race proclaimed its torment and its salvation.

Bernard DeVoto has captured the essence of the Negroes'

spiritual beliefs, both in symbol and in spirit:

Go dov/n, Moses, tell ol' Pharoah to let my people go! The chariot swing lov/er, oh, yes. Lord! — green trees abendin', poor sinner stands atremblin', the trumphet sounds within my soul, I ain't got long to stay here. And nobody knows the trouble I see, nobody but Jedus. I know moonlight, I know starlight--I lie in the grave and stretch out my anns—I lay dis body dov/n. A motherless child, that's what I feel like; oh, yes. Lord, a long way from home. But I'm going to tell him the road was rocky, I'm going to tell God all my troubles when I git home. The trumphet sounds within my soul! Swing low, sweet chariot. I want to cross v/here all in peace, . . . i

30

We can see, thus, the joy, the humility, the hope of the

slave expressing himself to his God and, unknowingly, to

young Sam Clemens, a child v7ho "listened and the trumphet 62

sounded within his soul." He never lost his love for

Stephen Poster, and the Negro spirituals did indeed become

for him works of art. In his last days at Stormfield Twain

reflected his troubles and heartaches by emulating his black

comrades: "Nobody knows de trouble I'se seen. Swing low,

sweet chariot."^ Perhaps the best analysis of his intense /

love for Negro music, and one directly related to his feel­

ings for the Negro, came from his daughter, v/hen she said

that his singing was "an emotional outcry, rather than a 64 song." It was at least intense enough for him to sing

.spirituals to his wife on the night she died.

In 1880, twenty years after dictating the bulk of

his Autobiography, Twain wrote an English admirer concern­

ing the relationship between his works and his life: / / /

\ /

Yes, the truth is, my books are simply autobio­graphical. I do not know that there is an incident in them which sets itself forth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not occur. If the incidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, and the result would be an autobiography.65

Toward the last, it is true that he had a habit of forget­

ting, or changing, what seemed unpleasant, in a possible

attempt to become a myth-maker. He said, in fact, "I

should like to re-live my youth, and then get drov/ned. I

/ /

31

should like to call back Will Bowen and John Garth and the

others, and live the life, and be as we were, and make

holiday until 15, then all drown together." But he

still wrote fiction strongly, possibly immeasurably, shaped

by his own experiences, especially those involving the Negro

slave. As one critic has perceptively noted, "His imagina­

tion was developed from association with the old-time

darkies; he used characters he knew, and stories which he

first heard at this time [as a child] in his life, as

literary material." One must realize, in any circum­

stance, the wide spectrum of opinions regarding Tisrain as 68

a social critic; nevertheless, it is possible, within

the limits of this study, to offer some conclusions about

his relationship with the Negro: what he took from them

and what part of that he put into his books.

32

FOOTNOTES

1 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America (Cambridge:

Little, Brown and Co., 1932), p. 78.

In a footnote (3) to his chapter on Mark Twain, Alexander Cowie in The Rise of the American Novel explains the controversy over Twain's Hannibal. His note goes as follows: "Five-sevenths of Mark Twain's books, says DeVoto (p. 30), deal with his first environment. In the early 1930's a rancourous debate was rife as to the relative wholesomeness of Mark Twain's boyhood environment. In a word. Van Wyck Brooks [see The Ordeal of Mark Twain, New York, 1933, p. 45] condemned it as 'drab' and 'tragic'; DeVoto assented in part, but asserted its comparative 'joyfulness'; and Mumford contended that both were wrong, favoring, however, Mr. Brooks. The evidence finally favors DeVoto, whose Mark Twain's America is indispensable to any­one who wishes to get a quick survey of the mottled scene of Mark Twain's boyhood. Van Wyck Brooks seems to be re­cording the revulsion he himself would feel if suddenly de­prived of all the 'civilization' he now enjoys, forgetting that Mark Twain as a boy gre r into his environment." This whole controversy I have avoided in limiting this paper; however, it seems logical that DeVoto, a primary source in this area, is closer to the truth.

^ That Twain as a boy witnessed several brutal kill­ings is corroborated by the major biographical critics: DeVoto, Bellamy, Wagenknecht, and Paine.

For the factual information in this paragraph, I am indebted to Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (The American Book Company, 19^^)^ p. ^00,

• Mark T fain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922), pp. xvii-xviii.

For a more detailed analysis see M. M, Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 193^;. PP. 59> 195-

7 James Hall in Romance of the West (Cincinnati,

1857)p. 321, states that "The Feverish desire for wealth of the early French explorers led to the introduction of negro slavery into Missouri. The Sieur de Renault purchased hun­dreds of slaves in Santo Domingo to v/ork his mines in the Ste. Genieve district. In 1772 there were in the district nearly three hundred slaves to four hundred free men." Cited in M. M. Brashear, "Formative Influences in the. Mind

33

and Writings of Mark Twain" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of English, University of North Carolina), p. 46.

o Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. A. B. Paine (New

York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), p. 101. Q ^ Edgar Branch, Literary Apprenticeship of Mark

Twain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), p. 13.

Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952), p. 264.

^•^ Wecter, pp. 64-65. 12

M. M. Brashear, Mark Tv/ain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), p.; 87.

13 DeVoto, p. 65. In the Autobiography, I, 10, Tv/ain

also states the following: "At first my father owned slaves, but by and by he sold them and hired others from the farmers."

Wecter, p.72. (Five years later Governor Edwards pardoned the men.) Wecter, p. 285, footnote 17.

•^ Cited in Wecter, p. 75.

^^ Ibid.

^^ Wecter, p. 75-

•^^ In the Autobiography, I, pp. 101-102, Twain tells the story in different v/ords, and Paine in the Biography,p. 42, tells it in still other v/ords,

^^ Cited in A. B. Paine, Mark Ti /ain: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912)^ p. 1040,

' ^ "The Private History of a Campaign Ihat Failed," Merry Tales, p. 40. This appeared first in a slick magazine.

• ^^ According to DeVoto, p. 65, the pulpit of Hannibal held that "slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the pecu­liar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave him­self ought to daily and nightly be thankful for,

Brashear, p. 59•

^^ A. V. Goodpasture, "Mark Ti ain, Southerner," Tennessee Historical Magazine, I (July, 1931). PP- 253-260,

34

24 . Goodpasture, p. 254.

On February 11, 190I, Twain delivered a speech at the Lincoln birthday celebration. He said, "I was born and reared in a slave state, my father was a slave owner; and in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Con­federate service. For a while . . . We of the South were not ashamed, for like the men of the North, we were fight­ing for flags we loved; and when men fight for these things, and under these convictions, with nothing sordid to tarnish their cause, that cause is holy, the blood spilt for it is sacred, the life that is laid down for it is consecrated." Cited in Goodpasture, p. 257.

26 G. A. Bidewell , "Mark Tv/ain's F lor ida Years , "

Missouri Historical Review (January, 1946), pp. 159-I73. 27

Wecter, p. 45. 28

Paine, Biography, p. 17. In "Villagers of l84o-1843" Twain states that his father whipped her v/ith a bridle.

29 Cited in Wecter, p. 100. There is a passage can­

celled in the Autobiography which speaks more harshly of the incident: "everybody seemed indifferent about it—as regarded the slave--though considerable sympathy was felt for the slave's owner, who had been bereft of valuable prop­erty by a worthless person who v/as not able to pay for it. Cited in Wecter, p, 290, footnote, l4. ,

•^ Paine, Biography,, p. 15. 31

Autobiography, p. 96.

Autobiography, p. I8.

Cited in Brashear, p. 53-33

^ Mark Tv/ain's Notebook, ed. A, B, Paine, (New York: Harper and Bro the r s , 1935), p . 271.

35 Paine, Biography, p, 32.

6 ^ Wecter, p, 99-' In the Autobiography, I, 99^ he calls the bedrid­

den crone Aunt Hannah, but compare the following: "Describe Aunt Patsy's house, and Uncle Dan, aunt Hanner, and the 90-yr. old blind negress." Cited in Wecter, p. 290, foot­note 15. In "Adam Monument" the old woman is the servant in the household of an eccentric admiral.

38 Autobiography, p. 5.

39 "Corn-Pone Opinions," Europe and Elsewhere, Cited

in Wecter, p. 100. ? . • 4o

Paine, Biography, p. 31. 4l

Autobiography, p. 100. 42

Jerry Allen, The Adventures of Mark Twain (Lon­don: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1954), p. 62.

43 Autobiography, p. 100. ,

44 Gladys C. Belleany, Mark Twain as Literary Artist

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), p. 53. 45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Ibid, •

Bellamy, p. 55.

Brooks, p. 256.

Paine, Biography, p. 573.

Cited in Biography, p. 70I.

For a more detailed analysis see DeVoto, pp. 68-76,

Edward Wagenlaiecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), p. Ib2.

52 V/agenknecht, p . 100.

53 Bellamy, p. 59-

54 Margaret J. Butcher, The Negro in American Culture

(New York: Alfred Knopf, I920), p. 41, 55

I am greatly indebted to Bernard DeVoto for the specific information on the religion of the Mississippi Negro slave.

- DeVoto defines four aspects of the slaves' super­stitions. First, the unseen was horrible and identified with death, A corpse generated evil, and everything belong­ing to it shared its powers. In short, they feared the dead in every aspect. Second, spirits of the dead floated around but could not think and thus v/ere easily fooled. They tried to get revenge on the living during the night. Third, witches and Ha'nts v/ere allies. Usually old v:omen, they lurked in all dark, lonely places and were obligated

36

to harm man. Fourth, defense against witches and ha'nts v/as precariously possible, as animals and spirits could detect and warn.man of them. They had limitations, too; witches could not cross running water, were impotent in the presence of religious tokens, and were afraid of sharp instruments. There was little, in fact, in the natural world that could not be used to control the unseen and little that did not serve at times to reveal it, if one could read all the por­tents. The lore of the Negro, a world corrupted with evil and fear and death, permeated the childhood of Sam Clemens, indeed the maturity, of Mark Twain.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, ed. Hamlin Hill (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1963)5 p. 217.

^ Wagenknecht, pp. 27-28.

^^ DeVoto,* p. 24.

Cited in Butcher, p. 39-• 61 n

DeVoto, p. 38.

^^ DeVoto, p. 38.

Cited in Wecter, p. I90. 64

65

66

67

Ibid.

Cited in Wecter, p. 65.

Cited in Wecter, p. 27.

Brashear, "Formative Influences in the Mind and the Writings of Mark Twain," p. 72.

The range of opinion regarding Twain as a social critic goes all the way from George B, Shaw, who thought him a sociologist before all else, and wrote to him: I am per­suaded that the future historian of America will find your works indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire"; to the opposite extreme of Van Wyck Brooks, who felt that he suppressed much of his real opinions. My only concern with Twain as a social critic is how he thought the Negro race v/as mistreated by the white race, and more importantly, how he manifested this belief in his works through an elucidation of the Negro's humanity.

CHAPTER III

THE MAJOR DOCUMENT: PUDD'HEAD WILSON

Mark Twain is, by most standards, the only major ^ ^

American writer who utilized the institution of slavery in

the fiction of his century. Northern novelists, as DeVoto

emphasizes, may have understood the necessity of slave re­

forms, but none exceeded the efforts of Harriet Beecher

Stowe or J, T. Trowbridge. The South likewise had no sig­

nificant realists prior to Twain who examined this facet

of American life, except humorists who ignored the real

meaning of the theme. A few "happy niggers" did occur be­

fore the Civil War in Beverly Tucker's "Partisan Leader,"

and several more important authors, e,g,, Thomas N, Page,

Gearge W. Cable, and Joel C. Harris, even managed to present

realistic elements of slave life. But none of them were

able to attain the depth, intensity, or realism inherent in

Twain's analysis of the Negro personality and its antithesis,

the Southern gentleman. Reaching the Mississippi River in

The Gilded Age, Uncle Dan'l and Aunt Jenny inaugurate a new

theme in American fiction. The Negro's struggle for freedom

against overv/helming odds would appear more effectively in

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, con­

sequences of miscegenation. Apart from the tales of Joel

Chandler Harris, the only Negro characters who really live

in nineteenth-century American literature are Jim, Roxana,

37

38

and Uncle Dan»l--all creations of Mark Twain.

In Pudd'nhead Wilson Twain handled a theme which was

totally ignored in the fiction of his century, the subject

of miscegenation and its consequences. George W. Cable's

John March, Southerner caricatured its Negroes, a feeble

attempt, indeed, when compared to the fabulous Negro prince.

Bras-Coupe, of The Grandissimes; however, in neither of-

these does Cable inveigh against the evils of miscegenation.

More directly, William Dean Howells' An Imperative Duty,

published in I893, concerned the integration of races by

dealing with the tragic problem of an octoroon girl sought

by a white man in marriage. Significantly, however, neither

Cobb nor Hov/ells revealed the oppression of the black race.

Against this background, as well as against the flood of

anti-Negro fiction pouring from the presses in the l880's

and 1890's, Tivain's Puddn'head Wilson stood in illuminating^ .

contrast. Yet, the public accepted this shocking theme

quite calmly, offering, in fact, no criticism of this ta-2

booed element of their slave society. The reason for the

book's acceptance lay, of course, in the author's treat­

ment of his theme, a subdued, yet straightforward presenta­

tion void of any sexual passion and subordinate to the

broader theme of m.an's inhumanity to man. His analysis of

this unsavory, yet commonplace, by-product of slavery, and

more importantly its consequences, v/as the result of knowl­

edge acquired in an impressionable youth, together with a

\

39

certain amount of disillusionment. ' Slavery in Missouri from

1830 to i860 provided more than a transient setting; it was

indeed the very soil out of which moral conflicts grew.

That it was used as a background in other of Twain's books

is obviously true, but in Puddn'head Wilson (and in Huckle­

berry Finn) it is the dynamic force of the foreground,

illuminated by his critique of a specific consequence of

the institution, which activated the characters to their

respective performances. Even the patriarchal slavery which

Twain recalled from the Quarles farm received his condemna­

tion, out of which grew his treatment of miscegenation.

As implied. Twain did not remain detached from his

theme. Instead, he took a specific viewpoint. He is dis­

approving—of slavery in Dawson's Landing, in short, of

the innate prejudice and delusions of "the damned human

race"- in perpetuating such an hypocrisy. Setting and char­

acter become for him microcosms of the American experience

to 1894. It was a society pictured in one village, and

the portrait was not pleasant to behold. As a mere place

the village seems innocent enough, a place of flov/er-decked

homes, contented people and easy prosperity. But, in fact,

it is "a slave-holding town, v/ith a rich slave-v/orked grain

and pork country back of it . . . sleepy and comfortable 3

and contented." From this basis all forces evolve, and

from this setting comes the problem of a stigmatized, in­

ferior race, entirely dependent and yet depended upon, by

40

a community denying them human status. More specifically,

however, for the purposes of this study, these forces are

the consequences of the conflict between Roxy and her son

on the one hand, and, on the other, the village, represented

by the Driscolls, especially Tom--in short, the consequences

of pingling the blood of two races.

Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson reveals a sympathetic but,'

on the whole, realistic picture of the Negro slave who was

conveniently used, and too often misused, by the white

aristocracy. The original intent of the book, a farce on

the problem of personal identity inspired by the Siamese

twins well known in America, Chang and Eng, changed in the

process of writing, A twist on this nebulous problem, the

action focuses around the plot first used in the Prince and

the Pauper. As in the prince and the pauper, a child is

born to white parents, members of the aristocracy, and one

to a mulatto slave, a member of the lowest stratum of

society and a product of miscegenation. In this accepted,

though never publicized, morality of the slave-owning class,

by which a slave (Roxy) could become her master's concubine

and bear him mulatto children, Tv ain revealed the abuses

arising from slavocracy. In several ways, then, the book

more sharply reveals Twain's contempt for slavery than

Huckleberry Finn,

The specific subject of the book is unquestionably

slavery and the consequent abuses arising from its moral

41

acceptance. Furthermore, the tragedy of slavery with its

hereditary assumptions and warped social mores was but a

morass of discrimination. For what else but prejudiced

convention could make Tom Driscoll originally "black" and

enslaved, later "white" and free, then finally a slave when

Wilson revealed the "truth" about Roxana's switch? The

aristocratic society of Dawson's Landing forced upon black

and white the evils of slavery, whereby the training in each

role corrupted slave as well as master. The human dignity

of the slave would be destroyed, as he would be educated

as inferior and imbued with a dislike for himself and his

master. Conversely, the master would be destroyed. En­

couraged to be cruel to those he considered inferior, he

became insensitive and unjustifiably class conscious. In

short, then, Pudd'nhead Wilson was an attempt to prove a

deteiininistic thesis: a free white child raised as a slave

would have the character and tastes of a slave, while a 5

slave child raised free would behave like a white man.

Proving this, Tivain could dispel the legal definition of

a slave, and at the same time expose the results of mis­

cegenation.

The book opens with an ironical picture of the rul­

ing class of Dawson's Landing. Immediately, we realize

how a slaveholding culture spav/ns an aristocratic, feudal

tradition in a democratic country. Tv/ain vividly sum­

marizes the philosophy of the leading citizen in the

42

following manner: "To be a gentleman--a gentleman without

stain or blemish--was his only religion, and to it he was

always faithful." He further delivered a tremendous sa­

tire on the P. F. V,'s and their code of honor:

In Missouri a recognized superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to supremacy when a per­son of such nativity could also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth. The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy.

. In their eyes, it was a nobility. It had its / unwritten lav\/s, and they were as clearly defined and as strict as any that could be found among the printed statutes of the land. The F. F. V, was born a gentleman; his highest duty in life was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it un-smirched. He must keep his honor spotless. Those laws v/ere his chart; his course was marked out on it if he swerved from it by so much as half a point on the compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor; that is to say, degradation from his rank as a gen­tleman. These laws required certain things of him which his religion might forbid: Then his religion must yield—the lav/s could not be re­laxed to accomodate religions or anything else. Honor stood first; and the laws defined what it was and wherein it differed in certain details from honor as defined by church creeds and by the social lav/s and customs of some of the minor di­visions of the globe that got crowded out when j the sacred boundaries of Virginia were staked out.

With such a code of honor to guide them, it was not un­

usual, as Tv/ain pointed out, that these "gentlemen" thought

nothing of separating slave families by selling them dov/n

the river, V/hen Percy Driscoll rescinded his threat to

sell his slaves dov/n the river, he was so amazed at his own

magnanimity that "like a god he had stretched forth his

mighty hand and closed the gates of hell against them . . .

43

and that night he set the incident down in his diary, so

that his son might read it in after years and be thereby o

moved to deeds of gentleness and humanity himself." We

can imagine the horror of the F. F. V, if he could have

heard Roxy, a Negress slave, even mentioning the name of a

peer (Cecil"Essex, father of her mulatto son) in connection

with her own. The Negress Roxy, "a character of magnificent vigor

ii9 and realism, has an unquestionable grandeur shining

i

through her crude manners and vulgar speech. She domin­

ates the book and quite clearly embodies the qualities

which Mark Twain valued most—qualities he believed dis­

cernible in human experience, having known them in previous

acquaintances vfith slaves. Twain describes her in the fol­

lowing manner:

She was of majestic form and stature, her atti­tudes v/ere imposing and statuesque, and her ges­tures and movements distinguished by a noble and stately grace. Her complexion v/as very fair, with the rosy flow of vigorous health in her cheeks, her face v\[as full of character and ex­pression, her eyes were brov/n and liquid, and she had a heavy suit of fine soft hair v/hich was also brown, but the fact was not apparent because her head was bound about v/ith a checkered hankerchief and the hair was concealed under it. Her face v/as shapely, intelligent, and comely--even beautiful. She had an easy, independent carriage--when she was among her caste--and a high and "sassy" way, v/ithal; but of course she was meek and humble enough v/here white people were.l^

The lowly slave has attained the stature of high nobility.

44

in Twain»s eyes becoming a triumphant vindication of

slavery. Indeed, she becomes what Henry Seidel Canby has

observed as "the only completely real woman in his

[Twain's] books. "-" This dual character of humility and

independence. Twain makes clear as the story develops, was

far more than a facade. For personal safety she must be

meek and humble, but Roxana will defy even the whole sys­

tem of slavery to extricate her son from the degradation

of oppression which she has too often experienced. Through

Jim (as will be later shovm). Twain revealed the fundamental

humanity and courage of the Negro male; and through Roxy,

he portrayed, as he had already done in "A True Story," the

immeasurable energy of the Negro woman.

. Aunti Cord, the cook at Quarry Farm who became Aunt

Rachel of "A True Story," was like Roxana in at least one 12

respect. She, too, was a bright mulatto. The story,

"repeated word for word as I [Twain] heard it," ^ begins

with a description of the Negro servant, "a cheerful,

hearty soul" who v/ould "let off peal after peal of laugh­

ter" at the end of a day's work, A person "of mighty frame

and stature, [who] was sixty years, but [whose] eye was

undimmed and [whose] strength unabated," Aunt Rachel was

a product of miscegenation like Roxy and her son Tom. Con­

sequently, she, too, could say after being reunited with

her family: "Oh no, Misto C—, I hain't no trouble. An'

no joy!"-" ^ In the few pages of "A True Story" TV/ain

45

suggested more about the Negro people, the true nature of

slavery, the Civil War, and the role of the Negro people

than could have been achieved by an author less familiar

with his subject. In short, then, his first literary treat­

ment of the Negro,^lave proclaims the same oppressive con­

sequence of slavery as Pudd'nhead Wilson or Huckleberry 16

Finn.

Ostensibly a product of Twain's association with

Aunti Cord, Roxana is indeed the dominating presence of

Pudd'nhead Wilson and gives it, for all the astringency,

its genial quality. That she is a person of warmth, pas­

sion, and intense loyalty indicates that Roxy reacts less

to institutions than to people. Probably the reason for

this is that she is a member of the more privileged class

of Negroes, As a domestic servant who nursed the master's

children, she lived in comparative ease, symbiotically ab­

sorbed in the aristocratic tradition. She shared the life,

the luxuries, and the attitudes of her white masters, and

even upheld, at a distance of course, the foibles, the tra­

ditions, and the interests of "her" family. Conscious of

17 her own birthright, she cultivated proper, restrained

manners and conservative standards, disdaining the bois­

terous, irresponsible ways of the laboring class of slaves,

at least until she was removed from all white people. Typi­

cal, then, of her stratum of life, v/ith its paradox of "be­

longing" and "not belonging," and its moods of alternating

46

pride and shame, Roxy has mixed emotions toward the white

race. On the one hand, the father of her child is a white

aristocrat; Judge Driscoll is always kind to her; and Wilson

enchants her, although she fears him and realizes that he

is "no fool." On^he other hand, she learned to fear and

hate other white men: Percy Driscoll who falsely accused

her of theft, the dread Arkansas overseer who beat her and

severely injured a little slave girl, and the jury in the

courtroom. These hopelessly confused reactions inherent in

Roxy's station can be seen further in her attitude toward

her son. She v/as at once proud of Tom's progenitor:

. . . You ain't got no 'casionto be 'shamed 'o yo' father, I kin tell you. He v/uz the highest qual­ity in dis whole town--ole Virginny stock. First famblies, he v/uz.

Dey ain't another nigger in dis town dat's as high bavm as you is. . . . En jus you hold yo' head up as high as^you want to--you has de right, en dat I kin swahll^

But later in a rage at Tom's refusal to accept the duel,

she exclaims:

. , . Thirty-one parts o' you is white, and on'y one part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' soul. 'Taint wuth savin', tain't wuth totin' out on a shovel en throwin' in de gutter. You has dis­graced yo' birth. What would yo' pa think o' you? It's enough to make him turn in his grave. J->

Proud not only of her son's father, but of her own

ancestry as well, Roxy further reveals the consequences of

miscegenation. Her ov/n ancestors, if she is correct, were

.'Mh

47

dignitaries, including among them the renowned Captain John

Smith, And to make Tom's heritage more important, Essex

was actually descended from Pocahontas, Thus, Roxy can

boast proudly of her "whole line" of "Smith-Pochontases."

Nevertheless, from her ovm life of conditioning and oppres-

sion, she realizes that the "good" in Tom is the v/hite,

whereas the "bad" is the black, the one-thirty-second nig­

ger. It would seem, then, that in her ov/n thinking Roxy

is as much a product of tradition and prejudice as is Judge

Driscoll. Caught in a web of circumstances (the subsequent

results of miscegenation) and her own instincts, she es-

capes being a naturalistic character—the inevitable end

of slave concubinage--by her fight for Tom, her ov/n strug­

gle for freedom, and most of all her human compassion.

Since her basic motivation is motherly love, there seems

to be little conflict in her between reason and passion.

A product of the master race, her reasoning has to be mere

rationalizing and expediency--as used in the exchange of

the two babies:

She flimg herself on her bed and began to think and toss, toss and think. By- and-by she sat sud­denly upright, for a comforting thought had flov/n through her v/orrled mind:

"Tain't no sin--white folks has done it! It ain't no sin, glory to goodness it ain't no sin! Dey's done it--yes, en dey was de biggest quality in de whole bilin', too--kings!"^"

\ V

\ > •

. * £ , • • . ' .

48

So awful, final, and irreversible is the convention­

ality of the distinction between "nigger" and white that

Roxy would do anything to prevent her child the fate hang­

ing over the-slave--of being sold dov/n the river. The ac­

tual distinction is revealed in Roxy's speech, the only " — 21

revelation of her one-sixteenth "nigger" blood, but even

here it has no validity, as illustrated later when Chambers,

newly discovered white master, cannot drop the slave dia­

lect learned in childhood. Twain himself scoffs at the ab­

surdity of such a convention that justified enslavement of

anyone with the slightest infusion of Negro blood in his

veins. "Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that

sixteenth did not show , . . ," he said, "To all intents

and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-

sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen

parts and made her a negro. She was a slave and salable

as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, 22

was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom, a negro,"

0. ' So^r^ike were the two babies, in fact, that one could tell

them apart only by their clothing, "for the white babe wore

ruffled soft muslin and a coral necklace, while the other

wore merely a coarse tow-linen shirt which barely reached

to his knees, and no jewelry." In saving her son from the

consequences of his birth, Roxy clearly demonstrates the

common humanity of the nigger and the white: the father

himself cannot detect the fraud. Moreover, it is his cruel.

49

but surely "righteous," action that imposes the full

wretchedness of slavery upon his own child who becomes the

servant of the slave's child. On the other hand, Roxy's

feat in saving Valet de Chambres (named as a tribute to

white lordline ss) from slavery erects an ignominbus bar­

rier between child and mother. "Young Marse Tom" does, in­

deed, become another person, one of the master race, with

Roxy necessarily observing an appropriate awe before him.

And when finally outraged by his humiliating repulsions,

she decides to reveal the "truth" about the switch, only

to discover that as a slave no one would believe her. A

further irony of the conventionality of slavery is apparent

in Tom's change which, if it has been bad (as egocentric

indifference), v/as the result of his training as heir and

master.

Mark Twain delved further into the consequences of

miscegenation than is immediately apparent. In usurping

the prerogative of the Deity by switching His predetermined

outline, Roxy has shown a completely human passion.

I's sorry for you, honey [Tom Driscoll]; I's sorry, God knows I is--but v/hat kin I do, what could I do? Yo' pappy would sell him to somebody, some time, an den he'd go down de river shoi , and I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't stan' it. ->

Twain, in fact, has deliberately drawn her as compassionate,

as he had Nigger Jim. To him this truly human quality was

an integral part of the Negro he had known in youth. He

50

further reveals Roxy's magnanimity in the episode of the

stolen money, declaring that "all were guilty but Roxana."

But he did endeavor to portray the worse side of the Negro

character, while at the same time avoiding stereotypes.^^

Was Roxy guilty, then, of anything worse than the general

character of her race? It would appear from the evidence

that she was not, that, in fact, she was merely trying to

eschew her son the indignity of slavery—a human action

precipitated by her own oppressed life and her innate com­

passion. It is this exposure of the human nature of slaves,

not in essence unlike that of the whites, that marks the

focal point of Tv/ain's examination of miscegenation. And

it is this same exposure that reveals the facade of "Marse

Tom," i.e., the deception of the white race in proliferat­

ing its superiority.

The melodrama and sentimentality in this portrait

of Roxana are inevitable given Twain's background. Never­

theless, in fact and in detail she is real. As DeVoto says,

"She lives: her experiences and emotions are her ovm and,

being her own, are faithful to thousands. [Literature] is

unlikely to go beyond the superstition, affection, malice,

25 and loyalty of this woman." In her Ti /ain has presented

a microcosm of one large aspect of the ugliness of slavery

(the consequences of miscegenation) as well as one of its

potential beauties (the innate humanity of the Negro slave).

True to life, she therefore embodies the slave's attitude

mM:,

51

toward death. Realizing that death was a moment of per­

sonal glory, she had to meet her Savior, thus "she resolved

to make her death toilet perfect," for only after careful

preparation "was she ready for the tomb." Another dominant

trait of the^slave, superstition, is apparent in her con­

stant wariness of Wilson. Thinking he is a witch because

she is unable to understand him, Roxy will not approach

Pudd'nhead without a charm, a horseshoe in hand, to ward

off his powers. Finally, the worst fate befalling a slave

happens to her: "she is sold down the river. This incident,

says Alexander Cowie, "derives from the very roots of Mark

Twain's fibre," for he, too, knew all too well the fate

of Negroes on the large plantations, which was not exclu­

sive of any slave as proven in the fate of Nigger Jim. At

the end of the book Roxy, a victim of the grim social

reality which Wilson typifies, is in effect alive only in

her religion, the last hope of any slave: "the spirit in

her eyes was quenched, her martial bearing departed with

it, and the voice of her laughter ceased in the land. In 27

her church and its affairs she found her only solace."

Ti-zain's portrait of the Negress Roxana is, in the

final estimate, sympathetic and generally realistic in de-,,28 ^

fining "the relative culpability of master and man. The

author is more than fond of Roxy, and knowing personally

the Negro temperament, he has drav/n from the depths of his

memory to expose the worst evil of slavery. Against this

52

system, this paradox of human dignity, which denies her

the right to give her son the basic privileges of security

and decency, Roxy is depicted. And her decision is in con­

flict with "institutionalized slavery and its attendant.

circumstance of miscegenation, of v/hich she is both product

" — 1.2Q and continuing agent." ^ Her unfortunate situation stems .

entirely from this predatory union of white master and

black servant.

The system against v/hich Roxana is opposed is clearly • • • •

objectified in the tv/o characters v/ho, by a reversal of fate,

are dissected point by point to reveal their inner qualities.

Tom Driscoll, v/hite and aristocratic by birth, and Valet de

Chambre, black and enslaved by birth, offer two distinct ex­

planations of human nature: one as determined by environ­

ment, the other by heredity. The real Tom Driscoll reared

as the slave son of Roxy indicates, on the one hand, en­

vironmental determinism and illustrates X ilson's maxim that

"training is everything , , . cauliflower is nothing but

cabbage with a college education."-^ Valet de Chambre, on

the other hand, seems to indicate that innate nature, at

least in part, cannot be changed. If one accepts this

oversimplification of Chambre, however, v/ithout clarifica­

tion, the two themes negate each other. It is important,

in this case, to distinguish how the innate nature of Cham­

bre, reared as "Marse Tom," v/as not changed, as opposed to

the larger fact that he did indeed become a product of the

53

white environment. Twain portrays Tom, after learning of

his real birth, as succumbing to the "nigger" in him. Like

the gigantic eruption of Krakotoa "with the accompanying

earthquakes, tidal waves, and clouds of volcanic dust,

changing the face of- the landscape beyond recognition,

bringing down the high lands, elevating the low, making

fair lakes where deserts had been, and deserts where green

prairies had smiled before, " " the awful calamity had trans­

formed Tom's "moral landscape" in quite similar fashion.

Lifetime habits acquired as a white man mysteriously changed

Instead of inv9luntarily extending his arm to shake hands,

it hung limp, and he was even surprised v/hen a white friend

offered him this customary greeting. He began, moreover,

to shrink and sulk wherever he went, giving the road to

superior white men and likewise refusing to sit on equal

terms with his newly realized masters. So strange and com­

plete was Tom's change that people began to notice it,

while in them he fancied suspicion and possible detection.

In short, he "pj*esently came to have a hunted sense and a

?2 hunted look" so characteristic of the slave. But the

climax of this change was made aware to Tom v;hen, after

acting strangely at the table. Judge Driscoll said to him,

"What's the matter with you? You look as meek as a nig­

ger," At this point Tom realized that he indeed was little

more than "his [Judge Driscoll's] chattel, his property,

his goods, and he can sell me just as he could his dog."

kiti

54

But, as the author further points out, this sudden reversal

did not last forever; in fact, the main structure of his

character--that of the white man learned in the aristocratic

34

environment--could not be changed. Thus, he again set­

tled into his old habits of being "Marse Tom," white and

free. .

It should be pointed out here that Twain is, in no

sense, equating the Negro character with evil but, instead,

is oversimplifying the case to emphasize the universality

of human nature, to prove that environment shapes the man,

and so far as the two boys (Tom and Chambers) are concerned,

slavery is the determining environment.

From his childhood to the revelation of the final

courtroom scene, Chambre, or the real Tom Driscoll, is the

exemplar of environmental determinism. In great detail

Twain contrasts the paradox of human nature, abused in one

aspect and degraded in the other. Even from the beginning

Tom received all the attention, and Chambre got none. Thus

it was that Tom was overbearing, whereas Chambre was meek

and docile. Furthermore, he v/as the bodyguard and object

of physical abuse by the master Tom. He soon learned, in

such a case, to bear meekly whatever "Marse Tom" gave, or

receive a caning from Percy Driscoll who told the slave

boy that under no provocation v/as he to lift his hand

against his little master. This physical abuse culminated

when Tom, after being saved from drowning by Chambre and

55

as a result being publically obligated to the slave, stabbed

the Negro boy several times with his pocketknife. Moreover,

time did not lessen the cruelty of Tom tov/ard Chambre, ap­

parent when he beat and kicked the slave for merely tran­

scribing a message. This, then, was the training which made

a white boy into a slave. And it is not until the final

courtroom scene that the terrible irony of this training is

revealed:

The real heir suddenly found humself rich and free, but in a most embarrassing situation. He could neither read nor write, and his speech was the basest dialect of the Negro quarter. His gait, his attitudes,.his gestures, his bearing, his laugh--all were vulgar and uncouth; his manners v/ere the manners of a slave. Money or fine clothes could not mend these defects or cover them up; they only made them the more glaring and the more pathetic. The poor fellow could not endure the terrors of the white man's parlor, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen. The family pev/ was a misery to him, yet he could nevermore enter into the solacing refuge of the "nigger gallery"— that was closed to him for good and all.35

Thus, the awful consequences of slavery are revealed, for

even the inherent qualities of the supposedly superior

white man were not indestructible to its training. The

character of Chambre seems, in fact, by contrast the better

half of the whole personality of slavery represented by the

two switched identities.

The other part, then, of this whole identity of

slavery, i.e. Tom Driscoll, remains to be analyzed, with

especial emphasis on his training as heir and young master

56

and the results of this training. For it is from this back­

ground that Twain contrasts" the "good" of Chambre to the

"evil" of Tom, an oversimplification as such (already

pointed out) but an effective technique for expressing his

opinions.

The false Tom Driscoll is a paradox of concealed

identity and perversion resulting from the training imposed

upon him by the white society of Dawson's Landing. He

therefore exhibits the worst traits of the master race.

This situation is the direct result, in short, of miscegena­

tion, first in relation to its personal effects upon Roxy

(herself a product of such a union) and secondly to her

.knowledge of its potential upon her son. Reared as "Marse

Tom," in a station indulging his whimsical cruelties toward

his slave servant who v/as with him throughout childhood as

a scapegoat, Tom Driscoll was "petted and indulged and

spoiled to his entire content . . . [which] went on till

he was nineteen, then he was sent to Yale."-^ But even

there he could not last, as his "handsomely equipped condi­

tions" v/ere not sufficient to make him an object of dis­

tinction.- ' True, he did acquire several new manners, now

being able to offend people "with a good-natured semicon­

scious air that carried it off safely, and kept him from

getting into trouble.^° And besides his natural indolence,

a fundamental characteristic of his training, he had ob­

tained two other habits, drinking and gambling, quite

57

seemingly because of his acquired weaknesses. Tom's usual

cruelty as a white master also remains apparent in his

everyday actions. In regard to this Twain clearly states,

in a passage for unknown reasons deleted from the final

version of Pudd'nhead Wilson, that cruelty was indeed a

product of slavery: (

At this distance of time it seems nearly incredible that such a performance as the above [Tom's beating Chambre] would have furnished to a stranger no sure

/ indication of Tom's character--for the reason that / such conduct was not confined to young men of harsh

nature. Humane young men were quite capable of it, good-hearted young fellows v/ho v/ould protest with their lives a dog that was being treated so. Slavery was to blame, not innate nature. [italics mine] It~ placed the slave below the brute, without the white man's realizing it.39

Tom's worst example of cruelty, however, was selling

Roxana down the river after she agreed to be sold back into

slavery to help pay his debts and after he knew that she

was his real mother. But he had "long ago taught Roxy 4o

'her place,'" and as a result was completely indifferent

to her as a human being. This fact is made especially

clear in a detailed analysis of Roxana: "by the fiction

created by herself, he [Tom] was become her master."

The author further elaborates on her intense desire to be­

have like his slave, which having been applied so diligently

soon became an automatic and unconscious habit. Then, Twain

says, her public deceptions gradually became self-

deceptions:

58

the mock reverence became real reverence, the mock obsequiousness real obsequiousness, the mock homage real homage; the little counterfeit rift of separa- . tion between imitation-slave and imitation-master widened and widened, and became an abyss, and a very real one—on one side of it stood Roxy, the dupe of her own deceptions, and on the other stood her child, no longer a usurper to her, but her accepted and recognized master.

She saw her darling gradually cease from being her son, she saw that detail- perish utterly; all that was left was master--master, pure and simple, and it was not a gentle master either. She saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the somber depths of unmodified slavery. The abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete. She was merely his chattel now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing and helpless slave, the humble and un­resisting victim of his capricious temper and vicious temper.^^ .

How parallel seem the divisions between Roxy and son and

between slave and master in general. The tone and detail

of this passage would seem to indicate that Mark Twain had

more in mind than two individuals. If so, then, his com­

ments are biting vituperations upon the very system spawn­

ing such an arrangement whereby slave and master, both

mere "imitations," were separated by an abyss of conven­

tionality.

After learning his true name, Tom ponders what is

"base or high" in him, his Negro or his white blood. To

this fundamental tenet of slavery Tv/ain states that only

the institution can debase either, again focusing his opin­

ion upon the humanity of black as well as white. "Marse

Tom" has become, in effect, a brutal white master, while the

real Tom Driscoll has been educated in the subordinate role

• 59

of a black slave, Tom, shocked to learn that he is Valet

de Chambre, poses the follov/ing significant questions:

"Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the un­

created first nigger commit that the curse of birth was

decreed for him? And why this awful difference made be­

tween white and black? . . /^ow hard the nigger's fate

43 seems this morning!" Reflections such as these are one

method by which Twain uses the Negro to evaluate the other

characters. In showing that Tom is "a bastard, a thief, a

murderer, and worst of all a Negro, he [Twain] demonstrates

that the official culture, with its vaunted ideals of honor

and chivalry and ancient lineage, is merely a facade for

„44 deceit, avarice, and illegitimacy. The climax of the

book—the culmination of all the consequences, direct and

indirect--also corroborates the idea that Twain blamed

slavery for the degraded state of the Negro. When Tom's

real identity is revealed, his creditors rightfully claim

their property and sell him dov/n the river--what amounted

to a worldly hell for the slave. Florence Leaver offers

still other concluding words on the total effect of slavery:

"This novel shows without a doubt what slavery does to

master and what it does to slave--it destroys the good in

„ 5 human nature wherever it is found.

Besides Pudd'nhead Wilson other books of Tivain re-

46 veal his understanding of the Negro. In these works, too,

he discloses his pessimism toward man, toward the outcome

1..-

"k •f, •

6o

of democracy in a materialistic society, in short, to the

false idea that America was a land of free people. One

need only examine the extent of his disgust to ascertain

this point:

'. , , man's heart is tlie only bad heart.in the ani­mal kingdom; that man was only an animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengeful-ness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loved drunkness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habita­tion, . . , the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses, and kills members of its own immediate tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe,47

From the whimsical character of Uncle Dan'l to the vicious ,,48 .

diatribes against mankind found in "What is Man." Mark

Twain reveals his understanding of and sympathy for the

oppressed Negro race. But nov/here is he more scathingly

realistic than in Pudd'nhead Wilson.

mi'..

A*^m'>^'

61

FOOTNOTES

' 1 This general statement is fortunately qualified

by DeVoto, and I paraphrase him in the text. Thomas W, Ford in "The Miscegenation Theme in

Pudd'nhead Wilson," Mark Twain Journal, 10 (Summer, 1955)5 13-14, gives two basic reasops^for the public's acceptance of the book. First, he states that the reader first learned of miscegenation through the conversation of Roxy and Jas­per. The statement defining her as a Negro "seems so much a part of the description that one passes over it, barely realizing its significance." Second, Ford points out that Twain deemphasized the identity of Roxy's child. In short, then, the theme is so integral a part of the story, and is presented in such a straightforward manner, that the reader hardly realizes the importance of this "ticklish" subject.

^ Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, (New York: New American Library, 1954), p. 23.

^ This change might have occurredr because Twain went to Europe at this time, giving him a physical as well as mental perspective. Nevertheless, when Roxana appears, the story changes, as Twain points out in his Note to the book.

^ John Wain in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," Spectator, 194 (May 20, 1955)j 652-653, proposes the following ideas to show the weaknesses of Pudd'nhead Wilson. He feels that Tv/ain has presented this~Tmportant tTTeme in a fairy-story way," thereby shirking the more harsh and urgent aspect of the theme. "We want to know," he says, "not what happened to a Negro v/ho is nearly all white and gets born on the same day as his young master, but what happens to one who isn't in the least white, is born into unequivocal slavery and lives and dies in it." He further states that such a treatment "misses out the emotional factors." First of all, in my opinion any critic has to criticize what the author has done, not v rhat the critic would have preferred. Second, the critic overlooks the fact that whatever a "Negro who isn't in the least white" receives as a slave cannot be as emphatic and denunciatory as what a white boy receives as an '^imitation slave." In this way Tv/ain points out the sham and prejudice of the aristocratic, master race; in Wain's manner, he would not have the bitter irony present in the work. Furthermore, there is indeed real emotion pervading the story. One point, however, which _ Wain points out has some validity: "it is as if Mark Tv /ain were merely insisting that servitude is unequivocally good;

62

authority, unequivocally bad." Of course. Twain does not: to assume such would be to overlook the final courtroom scene, as well as the idea that Twain was using such a partial oversimplification as a technique of emphasis.

Pudd'nhead Wilson, p.'23.

7 Pudd'nhead Vfilson, p . 93. Pudd'nhead Wilson, p(, 33.

9 Dixon Wecter, "Mark Twain," Literary History of

the United States, ed. Robert Spiller, et al., 3rd ed., {19b3), p. 935,

- ^ Cited in Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain: Social Critic, (New York: International Publisheis, 1965), p. 211.

11 A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), p. 51b.

- ^ Cited in Foner, p.' 212.

•^•^ The Complete Short Stories of Mark Tv/ain, ed, Charles Neider, (New York: Bantam Books, 1957)^ p. 94.

l4 The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, p. 94.

•^ Foner, p. 204, lists the major points of "A True Story."

Clement Eaton in Tlrie Grov/th of Southern Civiliza­tion, (New York: Harper and Row, 19^1), pp. 49-71^ analyzes these oppressive results of slavery, from slave trading to the complete segregation of the l890's.

•'"' Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 73-1 o

Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 109.

Eaton, p. 79, points out that "the Southern states varied in their legal' definitions of the Negro: in Virginia, a person who had as much as one-quarter Negro blood was a Negro; in North Carolina, a person with one-sixteenth Negro blood. None of them took the position of Southern states today that the possession of a drop of Negro blood classi­fied a person as a Negro."

Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 36.

63

21 Mark Twain, in a footnote to Huckleberry Finn, ex­

plains that the term "nigger" vjas not necessarily abusive, but was the colloquial term for a slave,

22 Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 29.

23 Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 36,

24 This idea, covered partially in footnote 5 will

be discussed in chapter four. 25 '~~N

Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America, (Cambridge: Little, Brown, and Co.), p, 293.

26 Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel,

(The American Book Co., 194b), p. 625. ( 27 : ' Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. I67.

28 Cowie, p, 625,

2Q F. B. Leaver, "Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson,"

Mark Twain Journal 10 (Winter, I956), p. 16.

30 31

Pudd'nhead Wilson, p, 46.

Pudd

^^ Pudd

3^ Pudd 34

Pudd 35

36 Pudd

'^'^ Pudd 38

39

nhead Wilson, p. 75•

nhead Wilson, p. 75-

nhead Wilson, p. 76.

nhead Wilson, p. 76.

nhead Wilson, p. 167.

nhead Wilson, p. 47-

nhead VJilson, p . 47-

nhead Wilson, p. 47-

Henry N. Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 196^j, p. I80.

40 , 1 Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 44.

41 , Pudd'nhead VJilson, p . 4 1 . 4?

Pudd'nhead Wilson, pp. 4l-42.

64

43

44

5

46

Pudd'nhead Wilson, p. 74,

Smith, p. 182,

Leaver, p. 20.

Other books of Twain dealing with slavery are Life on the Mississippi, Innocents Abroad, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sav/yer, and The Prince and the Pauper. These books will also be utilized in the subsequent chapters,

47 Cited in Sherwood Cummings, "Mark Twain's Social

Darwinism," Huntington Library Quarterly, XX (February, 1957), 172. "

48 In the essay "What Is Man?" Twain presents seven

points to support his attitude of pessimism: (l) man is a machine in mind and body; (2) as a machine he has no free will, no original inspirations--his life and ideas are determined, by environment; (3) where choice seems pos­sible, it is ah illusion always based on self-satisfaction; (4) a degree of efficiency is the only difference between the mind of man and the mind of animals; (5) the mind is a function of the physical organism; (6) "thought" is an automatic response to external stimuli and "instinct" is solid thought; (7) at birth the mind is bland and is filled by environmental influences.

),'.*•,

CHAPTER IV .j^i'ti

THE AMBIVALENT MORALITY OP ABOLITION:

"NIGGER" JIM AS TOUCHSTONE

In 1869 Mark Twain urged "Petroleum V. Nasby"

(David Ross Locke) to accompany him"\>n a lecture tour of

the West, during which Nasby would deliver his vituperative

denunciation of slavery, "Cussed Be Canaan." Nasby refused

on the presumption that lectures on slavery had become mean­

ingless: "You know that lemon, our African brother, juicy

as he was in his day, had been squeezed dry. Why howl

about his wrongs after said wrongs have been redressed?

, , , You see, friend Tv/ain, the fifteenth Amendment busted

'Cussed Be Canaan.' I howled feelingly on the subject while

it was a living issue . . . but now that we have won our

fight, why dance frantically on the dead corpse of our

,,1 enemy.

Why, then, did Tv\[ain persist in writing about a

seemingly dead issue? Perhaps because he felt that an art­

ist should limit himself to familiar subject matter, and

certainly T A/ain knew the Negro slave. Perhaps, too, he did

not really feel that the wrongs of slavery had been re­

dressed. Although his av/areness of the slavery issue came

later than Nasby's, he did realize that the Negro's struggle

for freedom v/as not culminated in the ratification of the 2

Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. In fact,

65

66

during the same year of his offer to Nasby (I869), Twain

published The Innocents Abroad in which he opined that the

slave was not truly free. In the book he pays unusual

tribute to a Negro guide in Venice, realizing that in most

of the United States this cultured man would be considered

inferior to the most illiterate white man. His final ob­

servation to the guide substantiates the idea that in

Twain's opinion the Negro was not truly emancipated: "Ne­

groes are deemed as good as white people, in Venice, and

so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land.

His judgment is correct."

Mark Twain, as commentator on the human conscience,\\i

was in the final estimate a critic of individual conduct.

He knew that every man v/as a duality of good and evil, the

first attracting and the second repulsing him. The trend

in his ethical thinking, as Edgar Branch points out, was

toward the less admirable in human nature: toward man's

selfish motivations, his cowardice, his self-deception,

and, above all, his reliance upon petty moral prohibitions

and social conventions. Ultimate responsibility, then,

was based upon the individual, whether in politics or in

civilization as a whole. More specifically, however.

Twain states his ideas on \iniversal brotherhood. "I am .

quite sure," he wrote, "that (bar one) I have no race pre­

judices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste

prejudices nor creed prejudices. . . . All that I care to

fsl-."

i n

67

know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for

me; he can't be worse."' Ihis statement of his pessimism

summarizes Twain's attitude tov/ard people" in general, re­

gardless of color, caste, or creed. Its essence is re­

vealed in another statement made in 190I: "One of my

theories is, that the hearts of men-are about all alike,

all over the world, no matter what their skin-complexions

may be.

Yet, he was still cognizant of the fact that no in­

dividual is absolutely responsible for his actions. The

effect of training and environment, what Branch cites as

the "kelson of his mature ethics,"^ was clearly aclaiowledged

in San Francisco when a clerk embezzled $39,000 from the 10

United States Mint, Upon such selfish motives were built

the structures of conventional moral precepts. Moreover, J\v.j

he anticipated as early as 1863 the theme in Huckleberry

Finn by burlesquing the pious Sunday School concepts of

morality. Such fables as "Advice for Good Little Girls"

and "The XMas Fireside" are works of a realist who de­

spised moral pretensions. This concept of the perverse

nature of man, intensified by personal grief and tragedy,

would later be used as a major theme in his fiction. His

California moralizings, then, v/ere specifically related to

a deep concern with the ethical status of the individual

and his position in the hostile world.

68

Twain had, in short, a fierce sense of justice, a

distinct hatred of wrong, and a deep admiration of digni­

fied action. On the other hand, it was the ignorance, the

cowardice, and the stupidity of the h\Aman race in contrast

to the noble actions of individuals that he deplored,"'""

International travel as a correspondent had taught him

that knowing others was one means of attaining universal

peace and understanding: "Travel is fatal to prejudice,

bigotry, and narrowmindedness, and many of our people need

it sorely on these accounts. Broad, v/holesome, charitable

views of man and things cannot be acquired by vegetating

IP in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

What equality America claimed to possess was destroyed by _\

the abundant class consciousness, clearly vilified in

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Through the

character of Hank Morgan v/e can see the harsh reality of

slavery which always haunted Ti*/ain, V7hen the Boss sees a

bank of emaciated slaves in the market place, he describes

a scene Tv/ain recalled from Hannibal, Missouri: "There

they sat, grouped upon the ground, silent, uncomplaining,

13 with bov/ed heads, a pathetic sight" • --quite seemingly a

recollection of Beebe's chained Negro slaves on the wharf

waiting shipment to New Orleans. Hank's statement that

"A master might kill his slave for nothing: for mere spite,

malice, or to pass the time" is reminiscent of young Twain's

witnessing a slave stoned to death for almost nothing. To

7"

69

further elucidate the prejudice, the bigotry, and the

narrow-mindedness which Tivain regretted, it would seem ap-

propriate to quote Morgan's opinion of English slaveholders

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slave­holder's moral perceptions are known and con­cealed, the world over; and a pri; 4.-leged class, an aristocracy, is but a bank of slaveholders under another name. . . . One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes below him to recognize--and in but indifferently modified measure--the very air and tone of the slave-

' holder; and behind these are the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feeling. They, . are the result of the same cause in both cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom, of re­garding himself as a superior being.14

Without question the most important and most widely

knov/n book by Twain treating the Negro is The Adventure^ j^

of Huckleberry Finn. Alone on a raft in the Mississippi ^ / \ \

River, a young white boy, a product of the society respon- \/ "

sible for the evils of slavery, and a Negro slave, the

embodiment of those evils, enact the drama of American

democracy, and transcending that, man's essential need for

compassion and understanding. In this book, too, Tv/ain

relates his abhorrence of racial discrimination, prefer­

ring to judge each individual, regardless of all else, upo

15 his own merits. As usual, his treatment of the Negro ^

probes for the goodness and equality of man, thereby sharply

exposing the moral v/eakness of society through the institu- J

tion of slavery.

70

When Huck feels compassion for the two feathered

frauds, he, indeed, emphasizes the focal point of the

Negro question. Man's inhumanity to man is clearly ex­

pressed in his single statement: "Human beings can be aw­

ful cruel to one another." This central theme of

Huckleberry Finn is especially reveal^~^in the life of

"saintly but hunted Jim, whose history personifies all the 17 evils of slavery." But, in essence, it is only another

manifestation of the same moral corruption pervading

Pudd'nhead Wilson, For the world of the Negro, slave, which

Twain often revisited, lay irrevocably on the west bank of

the Mississippi River in the slave town of Hannibal, Mis- ( II

souri. And though he transcended that world, foreshadow­

ing the writings of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway,

and Robert Penn Warren, Twain also explored the inner geo­

graphy of the river, discovering in the process a black

maelstrom twisting and diverting the purest streams of hu­

man consciousness.

This inhumanity is further exposed by Twain in the

conflict between romance and realism. The deliberate,

cold-hearted attempt by the supposed Wilkes brothers to sell

Jim down the river to suffer a fate similar to Roxana's, in

itself close to the insensitivity of the "nigger-trader,"

is not as unjust as the less deliberate cruelty of Miss

Watson, Having known Jim personally for many years, she

still thoughtlessly agrees to sell him down the river.

71 :

superseding her promise not to separate him from his family.

But she,, too, feels normally superior to, and even com­

pletely void from, the humanity of her "property," an emo­

tion early displayed on the raft by Huck. The false pride

implicit in the accepted code of "position" is.here be­

trayed, along with the evils which false^pride incurs.

The solution for all three problems offered by Twain is as

readily apparent in the relationship between Huck and Jim

on the raft as it is in the struggle of Roxana. Ohis

pseudo-aristocratic tradition is even further analyzed in

the colloquy between Huck and Jim about King Solomon's

wisdom. For once, Huck is trapped by the romantic lore

which he has learned from Tom Sawyer, as Jim, drawing upon

a simple and honest heart, the way Uncle Dan'l had often

done, refutes Huck's "logic." The v/hole notion of white

superiority is thus exploded as romantic nonsense for Huck,

as it would be in a second example, this time of Pap Finn, 18

an excellent criterion of the Knov/-Nothings. Ihe bases

pf democracy, at least to Mark Twain, were not in the aged

romantic legends of race superiority, but in the essential

goodness of the human heart manifest in compassion for

other people.

In 1846 Tom Blankenship's older brother Benson helped

a fugitive slave hide on the island across the river from 20

Hannibal. It v/as illegal and immoral according to Han-21

nibal standards, a convention readily apparent in Huck's

72

initial belief th^t aiding Jim was'wrong. But from Ben­

son's example Huek^omises in Chapter Eight the same com­

passion and humanity to a runaway slave: "I said I

wouldn't [tell], and I'll stick to it, . , . People would

call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keep­

ing mum--but that don't make no difference,"^^

This decision is hardly believable given Huck's

background with Pap and Miss Watson in a society not unlike 24

that which he and Jim pass on the river. In Miss Watson,

Huck could see life as a moral certainty filled v/ith rou­

tine Bible reading, daily prayers, and providential mercy.

Juxtaposed to her life of piety, however, is another facet

of the overall personality of the typical Southerner, Ob­

livious to Jim as a himian being v/orthy of understanding 25

and compassion, she lets normal actions tov/ard him belie

her "religion": in Jim's words, "she pecks on me all de

time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she

wouldn' sell me down to Orleans, , , , en I hear ole missus

tell de widder she gwyne to sell me dov/n to Orleans, but

she didn' want to, but she could git eight hund'd dollars

for me, en it 'uz sich a big stack o' money she couldn'

26

resis'." The odyssey along the river, to be sure, pre­

sents a broader, more realistic view of society in its de­

based and darker aspects--a society perpetuating the insti­

tution of slavery. Perhaps no one describes these river

tov/ns more succinctly and more piquantly than Dixon Wecter:

73

We are shovm the sloth and sadism of poor whites, backwoods loafers with their plug tobacco and Barlow knives, who sic dogs on stray sows and "laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise," or drench a stray cur with turpentine and set him afire. We remark the cowardice of lynching parties; the chicanery of patent medi­cine fakers, revivalists, and exploiters of rustic ribaldry; the senseless feudings of the gentry. In the background broods fear: not_only a boy's apprehension of ghosts, African superstitions,^' and the terrors of the night, not the adults' dread of a black insurrection, but the endless implicated strands of robbery, floggings, drown­ing, and murder.2o

This description, in general, is not too different from

that of DeVoto, Wagenknecht, Bellamy, and even Paine (three

major biographical critics of Twain) in analyzing young

Sam Clemens' hometown of Hannibal,.Missouri, previously

pointed out in chapter one of this paper as one of the most

significant influences on the boy.

Even Huck, who has aided Jim's escape, experiences

2Q the misgivings of a deeply imbued Southern conscience,

Listening to Jim talk of his imminent freedom, Huck realizes

that he, of all people, was to blame for it, "I tried to

make out to myself that I warn't to blame," he says, "be­

cause I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it

warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, 'But you

knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a pad-

30

died ashore and told somebody.'" Poor Huck is then re­

minded of his Southern conscience of what Miss Watson has

personally done for him: "What had poor Miss Watson done

to you, that you could see her nigger go off right imder

74

your eyes and never say one single word? Why, she tried

to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your man-

ners, she tried to be* good to you every way she knowed how.

That's what she done,""^ But nothing could upset Huck's

heretofore accepted Southern conventions as much as the

next two incidents in Chapter Sixteen, vrfien Jim thinks

that he sees Cairo, in the free state, and shouts, "Dah's

Cairo!" Huck at once realizes the extent of his "miserable-

ness," The next incident folloi /s Jim's avowal that once

he was free he would buy his children, if necessary "get

an Ab'litionist to go and steal them." Instantly, Huck

knov/s the awful v/rong he has done to society. It almost

"froze" him to hear a slave deliberately say that he would

steal his children--"children that belonged to a man I 32

didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm."

From this background, Huck and Jim—strong only in

their fidelity and ingenuity—struggle to survive in the

midst of almost insurmountable obstacles. They constantly

face a hostile nature threatening their security as the

raft journeys through a physical v/orld of hovering doom.

Heavy fog separates them, dissipating their unity and caus­

ing them to float by Cairo. Snags, floods, and strong

currents likewise effect near disasters. Even Huck's

judgment is betrayed by dim stars and shadows that "ain't

good to see by." But it is the man-made situation keeping

them in bondage which reinforces this motif of impenitent

nature and more clearly reveals the everpresent doom ai

ing them. Having begun the escape by regarding Jim as

Miss Watson's "property," Huck gradually discovers that

despite the conventions of society Jim is a normal person

whose human characteristics are merely suppressed. This

drastic change occurs very slowly in Huck), and becomes, in

fact, the majpT_s;truggle of the book. More significant

than the escape of just one slave, Huck's inner conflict

in overthrov/ing the conventions of society by obeying his

humanitarian ideals elucidates Mark Twain's moral stand

against slavery. It is, in short, Jim's "goodness" that

causes Huck's "badness," with this accomplishment being

the true greatness of the book. Thus, we can see how in­

extricably these two renegades are boundto each other,

each relying by sheer necessity on the other's strengths

for survival—and more importantly, freedom.

Their relationship, then, is an attempt by the au­

thor to reconcile the antiquated idiom of slavery with in­

stinctive and human ethics. Fortunately, Huck is practical

enough to discern the sham of his adult world and moralis-33

tic enough to respond to his relationship with Jim. His

decision not to turn in Jim, made on the basis of personal

feelings which he assumes are wrong since they oppose con­

temporary mores, is undoubtedly the crucial moral act of

the book. His humanity, founded on an affection for Jim

and thus a dislike for the institution perpetuating his

76

bondage, triumphs over his duty to "society. Thus, he must

"decide forever betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I

studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says

to,myself, 'All right, then I'll go to hell.'"^^ Twain

summarized this event, years later, in his notebook: "A

sound heart and a deformed conscience came into collision

35" ^ and conscience suffers defeat. "-- This "conscience" scene

depicts more effectively than anything else in the book

the contradiction between the holy institutions condoning

slavery and the humanity of one lone boy.

In such passages as the "conscience" scene. Twain,

like his contemporary George W, Cable, tries to destroy

the derogatory stereotypes of the Negro prevalent in most

Reconstruction literature. Evaluating the progress of

American Literature, the London Times Literary Supplement

in 1954 stated that "Mark Twain's Jim , , , begins an at­

tempt to portray the Negro as an individual rather than

as a stock character."- But the author also seems to

explode the myth of the acquiescent slave, setting forth

by example the historical truth that the slave could chal­

lenge, and through struggle, defeat the institution of

slavery--but more importantly, he could overcome the dog­

matic Southern conscience, thereby proving that white and

black could, indeed, if given the opportunity, mutually

profit from the latent humanity of all Negroes.

/

77

Alone on the vast Mississippi River, the two prin­

cipal characters were only in a transient sense free.

They were secure for the moment from the retribution of

society, it is true, but only for the moment. That Jim

could have easily escaped by paddling to a free state is

obvious, but then the principal association of the book

would never have been fulfilled,^'^ For it is only within

the transient security of the raft, beyond the immediate

demands of society, that such a relationship as that of

Huck and Jim could occur. It is here, then, that the mas­

ter and the slave come to imderstand their mutual humanity

by practicing their code: "What you v/ant, above all things,

on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right

and kind towards the others" --a human credo offering de­

vastating criticism upon the existing social order.

It is this freedom, moreover, that would have de­

stroyed the v /hite boy were it not for the Negro slave.

For even as he knows more about the operations of malevo­

lent powers than Tom Sawyer, Huck is still a beginning

disciple. The magus, as Hoffman points out, is Nigger Q Q

Jim. In various roles as seer and shajnan, as an inter­

preter of the secrets of nature denied by the church and

the white society to all except the slave, Jim emerges as

the book's noblest character and Twain's masterpiece of

the Negro slave. The Negro superstitions apparent in the

character of Jim, already carefully docui-nented by Bernard

78

DeVoto, are more significant than as mere authentications

of local color. They are, in my opinion, of dramatic im­

portance in the development of Nigger Jim to the stature 4l

of a mature human being.

When we first encounter him, Jim is truly a slave.

His superstitious.beliefs are, indeed, bohds upon his

hum.anity, but later become the torch to sever those bonds.

His gullibility and helplessness are humorously analyzed

in Chapter Ti'/o. Finding him asleep on the widow's kitchen

steps, Tom hangs Jim's hat on a branch and leaves a nickel

on the table, . "Afterward Jim said the witches bewitched

him and put him in a trance, and rode him all over the state,

and then set him dov/n under the trees again, and hung his

42

hat on a limb to show v/ho done it," His frightened ex­

aggerations give him status, as other slaves come to hear

his tale. His ironic inability to interpret dreams is also

illuminated. Using the magic hairball, Jim warns Huck to

avoid the v/ater, "'kase it's dov/n in de bills dat you's

43 gwyne to git hung," But upon finding Pap in his room,

Huck immediately escapes by water. The fear of being sold

down the river, hov/ever, is one he can not control; and

Jim escapes to Jackson's Island. Even there, none the less,

he is in constant fear of capture; thus v/hen he thinks Huck

is a ghost, he begs for mercy: "Doan' hurt me--don't! I

hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'. I alv/uz liked dead

people, en done all I could for »em. You go git in de

79

44 river ag'in, wah you b'longs." But when he is finally

convinced of Huck's reality, Jim also realizes that he, too,

is free. This new realization precludes, moreover, a dras­

tic change in the nature of Jim's superstitions. Once

Isolated on the raft, he speaks not of ghosts and v/itches

but of practical items like weather, good luck, and death.

He becomes at once stoical, a contrast to the illusions of

Miss Watson and Tom Sav/yer, and in this sense prepares

Huck for survival on the river. Soon after the young birds

fly by, it rains; Thus, the river rises, and as further

predicted, the House of Death floats by. This change

frOm comic magician to practical magus enables Jim to in­

struct, in fact, to protect Huck from the malevolent powers

besieging them. It should be further emphasized that once

Jim realizes his freedom, his attitude and feelings toward

Huck also change. And on the river their relationship

takes an ironic tv/ist: while it seems that Huck is taking

care of the renegade Negro slave, Jim is also protecting

Huck.

Once set in motion by his ability to survive, i,e.,

by the successful employment of superstitions. Nigger Jim's

human qualities heretofore suppressed by slavery really be­

gin to emerge. And it is in this role of human being, a

status precluded by freedom, that Jim offers Huck protec­

tion from society's retribution. Functioning in this role

of foster father (a loving, protective adult male), Jim in

80

his attitude toward Huck has, indeed, changed. He offers

the boy the same fatherj.y refuge which Uncle Tom had given 45

Little Eva. Having saved the boy from the storm, Jim

builds a wigwam on -the raft, and, as Huck points out, often

takes extra watch: "I'd see him standing my watch on top '

of. his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping."^^

More importantly, however, was Jim's action>hen the House .

of Death floats by. He is the first to go aboard, and after

finding the corpse of Pap, spares Huck the misery of seeing

his dead father. It is at this point, when he realizes the

real vulnerability of the boy, that Jim truly exhibits basic

human traits--something no slave was permitted, Huck, more­

over, clearly perceives this fact upon hearing Jim's af­

fectionate relief that the boy was not lost:

What do dey stan' for? I's gwyne to tell you. When I got all v/ore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart v/uz mos' broke bekase you v/uz los', en I didn' k'yer no mo' v/hat becom.e er me en de raf' , En when I wake up en fine you back agin', all safe en soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss' yo' feet I's so thankful. En all you v/uz thinking' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim v/id a lie, Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."^7

Only sincere concern such as this could make Huck regret

his action, an ordinary manifestation of Southern conscience

similar to placing the snake in Jim's bed, and say.

It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed Iris feet to get him to take it back. It v/as fifteen'

81

minutes before I could work myself up to go- and humble myself to a nigger--but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't • done that one if^I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way."48

Quite clearly Huck is beginning to see Jim not as a slave

but as a human being basically like himself--a person need­

ing consideration and affection.^ Huck thus begins his

ovm journey of moral growth simply by being juxtaposed to

a Negro slave v/hose latent characteristics are magnified

only within the freedom of the river.

Captured and reduced to the level of a slave again

(a creature void of any huraan characteristics), Jim. becomes

at once the symbol of a slave's normal status. The fact

of slavery in this episode is, in short, another examina­

tion of. the institutional hypocrisy pervading Pudd'nhead

Wilson—a fusion of humor and pathos. The benevolence of

the Phelps family and of Miss Watson in freeing Jim does

not mitigate the previous examples of society's malevolence

in curtailing a slave's freedom. For here, too, v/e see

Jim chained to his bed to prevent his escape; and after he

does break free, his white captors "cussed" him and cuffed

him on the head. The doctor realizes, however, that Jim

had nursed Tom and says, "Don't be no rougher on him than

„50 you're obleeged to, because he ain't a bad nigger. Be­cause of this statement, then, the captors "promised,

M51 right out and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.

82

This final episode, a burlesque on romantic nonsense, does,

indeed, offer commentary upon the entire system of slavery.

Here, again, the ironies of white'supremacy are de­

nounced, as Huck agrees to Tom Sawyer's fantastic plans to

free Jim. That he has not completely superseded his South-

e m mores is apparent in Huck's shock at Tom'^ desire to

help steal Jim. "it was the most astonishing speech I ever

heard," he says, "and I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell,

considerable, in my estimation. Only I couldn't believe it.

Tom Sawyer a nigger stealer."^^ He elaborates still fur­

ther on his feelings when he is firmly convinced of Tom's

intentions:

Well, one thing was dead sure; and that v/as, that Tom Sawyer was in earnest and was actually going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the one thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable, and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he v/as bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean but kind; and yet here he v/as, v/ithout any more pride, or righteousness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before everybody. I couldn't understand it, no way at all. It was outrageous.

• • •

It would seem from this statement that while Huck has recon­

ciled his attitude tov/ard freeing Jim (simply because of

his close, personal association with this particular slave

during v/hich he realized, at least in part, that Jim, too,

was a human being), his continued respect for Tom Sav/yer's

"respectability" (based on Southern mores) indicates that

83

Huck has not related the humanity in Jim to the same poten­

tial in all slaves. In this instance, then, Huck's matura­

tion process is not complete--moreover, at this point he

does not represent the dynamic moral force of Nigger Jim,

But, as he is slave again, Jim submits willingly

to the boys' bizarre schemes. He could not "see no sense

in the most of it, but he allowed we was v\rhite folks and

knowed better than him, . . ."^^ This passive resignation

and compliant servility seem to some critics mere horseplay

in which Jim humorously participates,^^ but beneath the

burlesqued romance there seems to be an underlying tone of

the real status of slavery, which is not in its true es­

sence humorous. The inscriptions which Jim scribbles on

the wall are somewhat like Emmeline Grangerford's mottoes:

another example of romantic sentimentality in contrast v/ith 56

the real world of feuds and slavery. Jim's occasional

plaintive objections, "I never knowed b'fo', 't was so much

bother and trouble to be a prisoner," offer still another

critique of the slave mentality. This burlesque dramatizes,

in sum, the author's major objection to slavery, the sub­

stitution of the bogus and the indifferent for the individ­

ual human good. In his renev/ed status of slavery, Jim man­

ages, nevertheless, to retain his generosity and his un­

selfish affection, even though for all practical purposes

he ceases to be a man. These romantic antics strip him,

as well as Huck, of much of the dignity and individuality

S."'

84

which they had obtained on the raft.57

-. The conclusion of the book exposes still another

paradox of slavery. That it resolved Huck's question about

a slave's humanity is only superficially apparent. Having

progressed from his early feeling of superiority to his -—-^

total rejection of society, Huck is finally overwhelmed by

Jim's simple nobility. He listens as Jim explains v/hy he

unselfishly remained behind in great personal danger to

nurse Tom v /hen he could have escaped to freedom, proving

beyond question that he is human enough to forsake himself

for another:

Well, den, dis is de way it looks to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him [Tom] dat 'uz bein' set free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, v/ould he say. Go on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?" Is dat like Mars Tom Sa\r/yer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn't! Well, den, is Jim gwyne to say it?5o

And all Huck can say to Jim's reasoning is "I knov/ed

he was v/hite inside, . , , -- But does this mean only that

Huck had finally realized the true humanity of the Negro 60

slave? In tenns of the white society, yes, he has, but

not in terms of humanity itself. It would seem that in the

final estimate of-Nigger Jim, Huck is still unable to under­

stand that humanity is not measured by caste but by the in­

nate character of the individual. In this sense, then, one

might compare Huck's statement with the advice v/hich Livy

Clemens gave her husband: he should consider every man

IS

85

black until he proved himself white. These tv/o extreme

opinions offer the whole gamut of ideology concerning the

humanity of slaves. By evaluating each person for his

moral worth. Twain finally portrays Jim as kind, selfless,

and loyal—hence, noble--and likeiJncle Dan'l, Roxana, and

Valet de Chambre, Jim functions as a moral touchstone by

which the author measures all men, Jim the "nigger" is.

indeed, his masterpiece, and we have to agree with Huck

- — ^2 t h a t "he was always good, t h a t v/ay, Jim was . "

86

FOOTNOTES

^ .X. /.r ^ ® ^ Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain:. Social Critic, (New York: International Publishers, 1966), p. 2l6.

Jerry Allen points out In The Adventures of Mark ^^^^ "that between I882 and 1949, (3430 Negroes were lynched in America, ^

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), p. l^b,

4 Edgar M, Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of

Mark Twain, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), p. M9.

1 5 i In a letter to W. D. Hov/ells, Twain describes party

politics: "The man behind it is the important thing." Letters, I, 1876, p. 289.

6 If civilization v/ere a "shabby poor thing . , ,

full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meanness, and hypocrisies, "• it v/as the individual who m.ade it so. Letters, II, I900, p. 695,

7 Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His

Work, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), p. 220. In a footnote he ex'olains that Tv/ain's anti-French feeling was due to his abhorrence of Latin attitudes tov/ard sex. • He also states that it was ironical that the human being Tx ain adm.ired most should have been not only French but the national heroine of France.

o Letter to Ray J. Freidman, Nev/ York, March 19,

1901, Cited in Foner, p. I82.

^ Branch, p. l49.

10 resulting from Mark Twain said it v/as a crime nepotism and speculation. He even felt the corruption in the police department was the partial effect of underpaj TTient. But this v/as only part of the overall problem. The individ­ual v/as also at the root of the evil: that "thing in man which makes him cruel . . , is in him permanently and will not be rooted out for a million years." Cited in Branch, p, 149. It v/as this concept, in short, that made T\'/ain a satirist of individual morals.

11 E. Hudson 'Long, K?rk Ti'/iin

Hendricks House, 1957), p.~T91..

HandboO'V (TTew York:

87

12 The Innocents Abroad, pp. 427-428,

13 -" Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's

52Hi:|? (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Ciompany, I963),

^^r A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, p. 3I0, ~~~ '

15 Long, p. 375.

Sculley Bradley, Richmond C, Beatty, and E, ^ Hudson Long, (ed.). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., inc, 19bl), p, 1«0, an annotated text with a collection of critical essays,

17 Gilbert M. Rubenstein, "The Moral Structure of

Huckleberry Finn," College English (December, I956), p. 75-Rubenstein, p, 76,

19

20 For a detailed analysis, see Long, pp, 369-375.

Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), p. I09,

21 For a detailed analysis see Norman D. Harris,

History of Negro Slavery in Illinois and of Anti-Slavery Agitation in "That State, (Chicago, I9O6), pp. 112-115.

22 In l84l when Sam Clemens v/as six, his father

served on a jury (explained in R. J. Holcomb, History of Marion County, Missouri) trying three abolitionists v/ho J^ aided renegade slaves. " The slaves helped capture them., -and although the Negroes were not then allov/ed to testify against white men, the judge overlooked this. Thus, their testimonies convicted the men who were sentenced to tv/elve years hard labor. Cited in Blair, p. 110. See also Ruck's reactions to Jim, Huckleberry Finn, pp. 73 and 76.

Huckleberry Finn, p. 39-

24 Cognizant of present attitudes tov/ard slavery,

it must be pointed out that in the South during the time of Huckleberry Finn, slavery v/as supported by all social and religious institutions. Huck v/as a boy unfortunately trapped between conflicting loyalties--betv/een the accepted morality and v/hat he knew to be humanly right. This di­lemma continues, moreover, to be the primary motivation throuF ,hout the book.

m •a,' 'M

88

25 Kenneth S, Lynn, "Huck and Jim," Yale Review

XLVII (March, 1958), pp, 421-431 of the Norton Critical Edition of Huckleberry Finn. He goes on to say that in her religion Miss Watson expressed a "monumental lovelessness, a terrible hypocrisy," The two are not conjunctive, how­ever, as her actions are not the result of harsh cruelty emanating from a calloused heart, but the actions of ac­cepted, unquestioned conventions. Later, she did free Jim--an act not too prevalent in the South before 1865. . 2 6

Huckleberry Finn, p. 39. 27

Daniel G. Hoffman in Form and Fable in American Fiction, (New York: Oxford University Press, I96I), p. 361, says that all the lore in Huckleberry Finn is European, not African.

28 ^ . • Dixon Wecter, Literary History of the United

States, (New York: MacMillan Co., 1946), p. 933. 29

Pascal Covici, Mark Twain's Humor: The Image of a World, (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), p. 237. The critic quotes Tv/ain in emphasizing the nature of the conscience: "It is merely a thing; the creature of training; it is v/hatever one's mother and Bible and comrades and laws and system of government and habitat and heredities have m.ade it. It is not a separate person. it has no originality, no independence." Notebook, pp. 3^8-349, January 7, I897. 30

31

32

33

Huckleberry Finn, p. 73-

Huckleberry Finn, p. 73-

Huckleberry Finn, p. 73-

Charles Kaplan, "Holden and Huck: The Odysseys of Youth," College English, X, (November, 1936), p. 79. con­trasts Tom. Sav/yer and Huck Finn. Tom operates within the conventions of society, accepting its standards; thus, he is a "romanticizer of reality." Huck, on the other hand, says, "I can't stand it." He does not want to be "slvil-ized."

34

35

36

Huckleberry Finn, p. I68.

Cited in Foner, p. 208.

Cited in Foner, p. 209.

89

37 w. ^ • Illinois was free soil separated only bv the Mississippi and Ohio rivers from slave states. By slave law, a slave without freedom papers could be arrested; nv^?r^?^^^ Jim»s most logical access to freedom was the !?i 4.? ^ • Critics have debated why Twain did not carry ?o?^ 4?i S ^^ of escape. Manuscript reports show that he laid the book aside near the end of chapter XVI for about •

^nhJoo^--^-?^!? ^2 ^^^"^ " ^ " ^ y ^^^^^> he seemed to be enhanced with the freedom of the river, in isolation from society. X

38 ) Huckleberry Finn, pp. 101-102.

39 • Hoffman, p. 4oi,

40 Wecter, p. 257- This opinion is also corroborated

by BranderMatthews, "Huckleberry Finn: A Review," Saturday f?gv 't' (London: January 31, 1665), p, 153. He states that the essential simplicity and kindliness and generiosity of the Southern negro have never been better shown than here [Jim] by Mark Tv/ain,"

. 4 1 . Hoffman, p, 399, says that the elements of lore

are not merely authentic touches of local color; they are of signal importance in the thematic development of the book and in the growth toward maturity of its principal characters."

42

43

44

45

Huckleberry Finn, p. 10.

Huckleberry Finn, p, 21.

Huckleberry Finn, p, 37'

Kenneth Lynn, p. 432, explains the possible in­fluence Uncle Tom's Cabin had on Mark TAvain. His analysis proceeds as follows: "To what extent Tivain had Uncle Tom's Cabin in mind when he conceived of the relationship'betv/een Huck and Jim can never be known, for with neighborly good manners he did not make public comments about Mrs Stowe's famous book. We knov/ that George Washington Cable burst into tears when he read the novel as a child; v/e knov/ that the character of Uncle Tom had such a profound effect on Joel Chandler Harris that he seriously considered the novel to be a defense of slavery—on the grounds that any system which could produce such a holy man must necessarily be good; v/e know, indeed, the reaction of a vast number of individual Americans to Uncle Tom's Cabin; but not Mark Tv/ain's, Yet Uncle Tom and little Eva, talking rapturously about reunion in Heaven, clearly have something to do with Huck's decision to go to Hell rather than send Jim back to slavery: in both instances, the black man and the vjhite child are morally united against the organized v/orld.

90

Little Eva and Uncle Tom are brought together by their un­questioning acceptance of the Will of God; Huck and Jim are also united by their common beliefs--in the compara­tive harmlessness of stealing an occasional chicken"" or water­melon; in the delights of going naked in the starlight' and of smoking a pipe after breakfast; in the undoubted exist­ence of ghosts, and the significance of 'signs.' In both novels, the child-Negro relationship exists on a level Of • emotional ecstacy, the extraordinary intensity of which de-\ rived from an appeased longing of the author's." In part, ) this statement can be questioned, but, on the whole, it offers at least an indication of the influence of Stov/e.

46

47

48

49

Huckleberry Finn, p. 167.

Huckleberry Finn, p, 71,

Huckleberry Finn, jp. 71-72,

Huckleberry

Huckleberry

Huckleberry

Huckleberry

Finn,

Finn,

Finn,

Finn,

P-

p.

P-

P-

221,

176,

182.

193.

This incident is a good example of Tv/ain's reali­zation that the true Southerner was naively innocent of the evils of slavery. Huck proves this point v/hen he answers Aunt Sally's question as to whether anyone was hurt in the steamboat explosion. "No'm. Killed a nigger," he replies,

50 Huckleberry Finn, p, 220.

51

52

53

54

Sculley Bradley, Richraond C. Beatty, and E, Hud­son Long, in a footnote to their edition of Huckleberry Finn, share this opinion, explaining that "the persistent horse­play may seem a cruelty tov/ard Jim; yet here, as before, he participates in familiar antics vjith boys whom he trusts, although actually he could have escaped." p. 202, footnote 7.

^6 - Branch, p. 212, ' Leo Marx, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckle-

berry Finn," The American Scholar, XXII, No. 4 (Autumn, 1953) / P • 333'"of"the~Norton Critical Edition of Huckleberry Finn,

58 Huckleberry Finn, p. 213.

:Itt^ •,

91

59 Huckleberry Finn, p, 213.

^ Thomas A. Gullason, "The 'Fatal' Ending of '^ Huckleberry Finn," American Literature, XXIX, (March, 1957)^ p, 361 of the Norton Critical Edition of Huckleberry Finn. He states the follov>/ing in supporting his opinion: "This, entire episode, based on Tom's lie, cannot be considered fatal because Huck settles conflicts presented earlier in the novel. Important themes, which are repeated and varied, furnish the key. It is only in the last chapters that Huck completely rejects both Tom's romantic irresponsibility (which he first suspected in.Chapter II) and society's cruel J nature. It is only here that he understands Jim's true worth, after battling his conscience through many chapters. Finally, it is the honest and humble way in which he faces and then resolves each of the above-mentioned conflicts that shows Huck's developing strength of character--and makes him the hero of the novel."

6l Wagenknecht, p. 222.

62 . „. ,^^ Huckleberry Finn, p. 103.

CHAPTER V

• CONCLUSION

The primary intention of this paper has not been to

adjudge Mark Twain a social critic above all else, but

rather to offer some conclusions as to v/hy, as well as how,

he portrayed the Negro character in his fiction.^In pre­

senting the slave realistically from personal knowledge,

Tv/ain does not try to conceal his sympathy for the dovm-

trodden race. Thus, he could, in a sense, be considered a /f

social critic. For.it is from this trend of thought that

Twain could test the Negro character, could, in short, use

him as a moral touchstone to assay the purity (or impurity),

in its varying proportions, of the human race. The exist- f,

ing social structure being tilted against the Negro, T\:/ain

could especially offer the latent goodness of the lowest

slave in contrast to the active pretensions of the highest

master. That he took such a stand against the destructive

influence of racism, particularly in relation to the Meri-

can Negro, but also concerning the Jew, the Chinese, the

Indian, and the Congolese, indicates that Tv/ain did, indeed,

despise the moral facade of an institution depriving any

person of his basic humanity.

It can be argued, of course, that Twain had serious

weaknesses as a social critic. ,Often superficial and in­

accurate, he v/as objective enough to concede his inability

92

& ; • •

93

in pursuing a cause.: "I scatter from one interest to an­

other, lingering nowhere. I am not a bee, I am a lightning 2

bug." Prejudice and bad judgment diverted him to wrong

conclusions on many issues, and like the VThitman of "Song

of Myself," he was full of contradictions. As Long points

out. Twain knew the diversity of the human race and felt

their traits to be his own. Writing in I907, Twain states,

"I have studied the human race with diligence and strong

interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find

in big or little proportion every quality and every defect 4

that is findable in the mass of the race." Experience,

he felt, was the unpolished stone, with the final gem of

writing being hewn through the work of the imagination. In

a preface he voices well the problems of the writer:

He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two,, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work.-

Insisting "upon matter over manner, upon the organic over

mechanics, nature over art," Twain made his narrative flow

along like the stream of life, "which often diverts, eddies,

and swirls before reaching its climax." It is hard to

deny, then, that poor mechanics blemish Twain's satiric

powers. Yet, the main drift of his social critiques, "the

thing uppermost in a person's mind . . . to talk about or

94 :.

v rite about," remains for all time valid and meaningful.

Of the many themes pervading Mark Twain's fiction,

the dominant one is, in words of Foner, "a burning hatred ^ ^

of all forms of intolerance, tyranny, and injustice, an ab­

horrence of cant and pretension, a passion for human freedom,

a fierce pride in human dignity, a love for people and for

life, a frank and open contempt for the mean, the cruel,

the selfish, the small and petty. "^ Ihat he remained true

to the idea of opposing all forms of tyranny is revealed in

a cogent statement from his notebook. "Satirize all human r '

grandeurs & vanities,"^ he wrote and followed his own ad­

vice with caricature, burlesque, irony, sarcasm, and humor,

using above all else deliberate, factual detail as a basis

for these. Despite his constant exaggeration--to emphasize

the ridiculous nature of dogmatism and prejudice--Twain

never veered from his fundamental tenet that fiction be

founded upon experience and observation. It was in this

sense, then^ that he exposed the moral hypocrisy of slavery.

Besides the Negro slave, Tivain also utilized the

plights of other minority races to report the intolerance

permeating the American character. His early prejudices

toward the foreign-born (especially the Irish-American) v/ere

not in essence different from the contemporary norms. Thus,

he could v/rite in 1853 of the "mass of human vermin" wallow­

ing in the immigrant districts of New York. Although he

did admit his early bias to Frank E. Burrough in I876,

95

Twain's intolerance prevailed for several years. This

same man, nevertheless, could also transcend his early in­

fluences to say in l899^ "Patriotism is being carried to

insane excess, I know men v/ho do not love God because He

is a foreigner,"

His exposes of the many abuses of the Chinese in

California are biting satires, but ones which slowly emerged.

As early as 1868 he could write, "I am not fond of Chinamen,

12 but I am still less fond of seeing them wronged and abused."

Even earlier, however, he had described the Chinese quarters

in New York in compliance with the stereotyped anti-Chinese

propaganda of the day. In California he soon learned that

the character of the Chinese people was in complete contrast

to his preconceived ideas. Twain's first written statement

on the abuses of these people vias in San Francisco, 1873-

He commented in a sketch published in the New York Sunday

Mercury: "God pity any Chinaman who chances to come in the

way of boys hereabout, for the eye of the law regardeth him

not."''' He likewise vilified Brannan Street butchers "who

set their dogs on a Chinaman v/ho was quietly passing with

a basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs muti­

lated his flesh, a butcher increased his hilarity of the

occasion by knocking some of the Chinaman's teeth down his ,,1

throat with half a brick.

After he left the West coast, Tv/ain published still

15 other indictments of the treatment given the Chinese.

96

But, in any case, the most incisive and most effective satire

on this subject is "The Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy"

published in Galaxy magazine in I870, He begins the sketch

in the following manner: ' .

In San Francisco, the other day, a well-dressed boy, on his way to Sunday-school, was arrested and thro -m into the city prison for stoning Chinamen, What a commentary is this upon human justice! . . , What had the child's education been? How should he sup­pose it was wrong to stone a Chinaman?!^

The author then proceeds to defend the boy for his actions,

since he was merely the manifestation of a corrupt adult

world, being, in fact, quite similar to young Sam Clemens

17 of Hannibal. Twain summarizes his arguments for the de­fense in the following manner:

It v/as in this that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrov/s that any man was bound to pity; that neither his life nor his liberty was worth the purchase of a penny v/hen a v/hite m.an needed a scape-goat; that nobody loved Chinamen, nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffer­ing when it was convenient to inflict it; every­body, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating, abusing, and per­secuting these humble strangers.

"And, therefore, what could have been more na­tural than for this sunny-hearted boy, tripping along to Sunday-school, with his mind teeming v/ith freshlj'--learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself: 'Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him.' And for this he was arrested and put in the city jail."1"

But it is the final note of vituoerative irony v/hich indicate:

M.

97

Twain's real opinion of anti-Chinese sentiment. "Every­

body conspired to teach him," he concludes, "that it was a

high and holy thing to stone a Chinaman, and yet he no

sooner attempts to do his duty than he is punished for it."^^

Jewish people fared no better than the Chinese in

young Sam Clemens' early environment. He reports in his

notebook that the first Jews he saw created "an awful im­

pression among us," The young Levin boys were stoned by

Hannibal youths, in no manner different from the Chinese in

San Francisco. But, like the youth in "Disgraceful Persecu­

tion of a Boy," these young Missourians were mere products

of their environment and therefore not to blame. Both

Church and newspaper droned out anti-Semitic propaganda for

their consumption. Thus, Mark Twain, as product of contem­

porary society, was not entirely free from anti-Semitic

prejudice; but he was objective enough to record in his note­

book in 1879 the follov/ing conclusion: "Sampson was a Jew--

therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best average brain

of any people in the world. The Jews are the only race who

work v/holly with their brains and never with their hands.

There are no Jev/ish beggars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers,

hod-carriers, day-laborers or follov'/ers of toilsome, mechani­

cal trades. They are peculiarly and conspicuously the

20 world's intellectual aristocracy."

These opinions of Twain v;ere unfortunately never

published. Thus it was not until I899 that his real feelings

m.

98

emerged. Asked to clarify certain generalizations about the

Jews in "Stirring Times in Austria," he agreed to examine

the whole problem of anti-Semitism. His analysis, the es­

say "Concerning the Jews," is, in general, a tribute to the

character of the Jewish race, with the concluding paragraph

unveiling deep admiration for an oppressed race:

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent of the himaan race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of

; the Milky Way, Properly the Jew ought hardly to be • heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard

of. He is as prominent on the planet as any of her people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a mar­velous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and Roman follov/ed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Despite this respect. Twain would be criticised, even vili­

fied, for writing an article in some ways typical of current

anti-Semitic opinion.^^ An excerpt from the most vehement

Jewish critic. Rabbi M. S. Levy, will indicate the extent

of misunderstanding prevalent over the world. Rabbi Levy

k-^i.

99

sees anti-Semitic prejudice throughout the article which

"the author [Twain] denies at the outset. From the many

statements Mark Twain makes regarding the various traits of

the Jews, it is plain that they are not only tinged with

malice and prejudice, but are incorrect and false."^^

That Twain was unprepared for such an examination

of anti-Semitism is clearly apparent from his oversimplifi­

cation of the cause of the problem, yet the evidence seems

to, indicate that, for all practical purposes, he was merely

attempting to expose the facade of racist thought and there­

by aid the Jew in his emancipation. New York's Jewish immi­

grants seemed impervious to the ill-founded criticism heaped

upon Twain and often invited him as the honored guest to 24

performances of his books at the University Settlement.

Moreover, when his daughter, Clara confided to her father

regarding her engagement to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, a Russian-

Jewish pianist. Twain rejoined that "any girl could be proud 25

to marry him. He is a man--a real man." Clara's fiancee ;

/ I would always recall Twain's final comment on racism: too

often when we dislike a Negro's features or color, "we for­

get to notice that his heart is often a damned sight better

than ours."^ This emphasis of the "heart" over the "head"

is, in my opinion, the focal point of Tv/ain's opinions re-

garding any type of racial oppression. A passage from his

last travel book. Report From Paradise, further supports

this opinion. Trained by early environment to dislike Jcv.'s,

100

Captain Stormfield misconstrues Solomon Goldstein's anguish

at being sent to Hell. "They haven't any heart—that race—

nor any principles," Stormfield says,^"^ But after learning

that the Jew \ias crying over being separated from his

daughter, the Captain suddenly perceives his stereotyped

notions as galling prejudice--reminiscent of Huck's awaken­

ing in the dream episode on the raft.

By God, it went through me like a knife! I wouldn't feel so mean again, and so grieved, not for a fleet of ships. And I spoke out and , said what I felt; and went on damning myself for a hound till he was so distressed that I had to stop; but I wasn't half through. He begged me not to talk so, and said I oughtn't to make so much of what I had done; he said it was only a mistake, and a mistake v/asn't a crime. There now--wasn't it magnanimous? I ask you—wasn't it? I think so.^^

T\ /ain's dislike for racial oppression is likewise

apparent in his protests over treatment of the Indians. As

the policies of manifest destiny overwhelmed the Indians,

excusing their slaughter, he appealed to President Cleve­

land, "You not only have the power to destroy scoundrelism

of many kinds in this country," he wrote, "but you have

amply proved that you have also the unwavering disposition

and purpose to do it."^^ His analysis of the Indian was

generally intended to accent the lower aspects of Indian

life, but in the midst of their debased manners he also re­

veals their unmitigated squalor, a consequent state of their

enslavement. His brief analysis of the Indian can be

101

concluded with two references. Speaking to a New England

Society in I88I, he remarked, "My first American ancestor,

gentlemen, was an Indian, an early Indian. Your ancestors

skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. "^^ And a notebook'

entry in I882 supplies the final argument:

U, S. Government: We have killed 200 Indians, What did it cost? $2,000,000. You could have given them a college education for that.31

By far the most caustic and most deliberate of

Twain's appraisals of racial intolerance (with the excep­

tion of the American Negro) involves the Congo Reform or­

ganization. It should, without a doubt, dispel any feeling

that Twain did not really care about the plight of oppressed

people, that he used them only as characters to convey other 32

themes, or to make money," During the early 1900's many

protests arose over the treatment of the Congolese people

by the International Association for the Exploration and

Civilization of Central Africa v/hich established the Congo

33

as a free state under King Leopold of Belgium. These pro­

tests continued until finally E. D. Morel founded the Congo

Reform Association. It spread to the United States where

it received international acclaim with the publication of

Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy.

This scathing denunciation of the Association was

not an impetuous, inspirational act, but the consequence of

102

latent feelings in Twain. As early as I903 he had ex­

pressed regret over Leopold's actions, writing to the author

""^ e Crime of the Hnr^^n- "it seems curious that for about

thirty years Leopold & the Belgians have been daily &

nightly committing upon the helpless Congo natives all the

hundred kinds of atrocious crimes known to the heathen sav­

age & the pious inquisitor without rousing Christendom to

a fury of generous indignation; all Christendom: statesmen,

journalists, philanthropists, women, children, even reli­

gious people, even the Church, even the pulpit," Blaming

the United States for condoning Leopold's actions,^^ Twain

issued "A Thanksgiving Sentiment" on Thanksgiving Day, 1904,

a portion of which is cited below:

We have much to be thankful for. Our free Re­public being the official godfather of the Congo Graveyard; first of the Powers to recognize its pirate flag & become responsible through silence for the prodigious depredations & multitudinous murders committed under it upon the helpless na­tives by King Leopold of Belgium in the past twenty years: now therefore let us be humbly thankful that this last tv/elvemonth has seen the King's usual annual myriad of murders reduced by nearly one & one half per cent; let us be humbly grateful that the good king, our Pet & protege, due in hell these sixty-five years, is still spared to us to continue his work & ours among the friendless & the forsaken; & finally let us live in the blessed hope that when in the Last Great Day he is con­fronted with his unoffending millions upon mil­lions of robbed, mutilated & massacred men, women & children, & requited to explain, he will be as politely silent about us as we have been about him,30

Tv/ain's emerging opinions would receive v/orld recognition

103

when he agreed in I904 to Morel's request that he write for

the "cause of the Congo natives," Early in I905 he penned

the last words of his article. King Leopold's Soliloquy,

The pamphlet begins with a portrait of Leopold who

is distressed because the truth of his exploits of the

Congolese is being told. "In these twenty years," he

screams, "I have spent millions to keep the press of the

two hemispheres quiet, and still the leaks keep on coming,

I have spent millions on religion and art, and what do I

get for it? Nothing, Not a compliment. These generosities

are studiedly ignored, in print. In print I get nothing but

slanders--and slanders again--and still slanders, and slan­

ders on top of slanders,"^' The disturbed King then de­

scribes the real conditions in the Congo, using excerpts

from outside reports:

Yes, they go on to tell everything, these chat­terers! They tell how I levy incredibly burden­some taxes upon the natives--taxes which are a pure theft; taxes which they must satisfy by gathering rubber under hard and constantly harder conditions, and by raising and furnishing food supplies gratis--and it all comes out that when they fall short of their tasks through hunger, sickness, despair, and ceaseless and exhausting labor without rest, and forsake their homes and flee to the woods to escape punishment, my black soldiers, drav/n from un­friendly tribes, and instigated and directed by my Belgians, hunt them do vn and butcher them and burn their villages--reserving some of the girls. They tell it all: how I am v iping these people out of existence for my private pocket's sake.-

Such prejudice against him is even more apparent in the re­

port that he had provided nothing "but hunger, terror, grief.

m.

lo4

shame, captivity, mutilation, and massacre"^^ for the Con­

golese in retribution for robbing them of their wealth.

T ^^^^i® their style!• I furnish "nothing"! ± send the gospel to the survivors, these censure-mongers know it, but they would rather have their tongues cut out than mention it. I have several times required my [slave] raiders to give the dy­ing an opportunity to kiss the sacred emblem; and if they obeyed me I have.without doubt been the humble means of saving many souls. None of my tra-ducers have had the fairness to mention this; but let it pass; there is One.who has not overlooked it, and that is my solace, my consolation,4o

'Momentarily this consolation vanishes when the King reads

the report of the crucifixion of sixty women. "It was wrong

to crucify the women," he clearly admits, ", . . I believe

that it would have answered just as well to skin them. . . .

But none of us thought of that; one cannot think of every-4l

thing; and after all it is but human to err." But he is

secure, nevertheless, with the United States supporting his

actions, and he can even comment ironically that the "self-

appointed Champion of and Promoter of the Liberties of the

World, is the only democracy in history that has lent its

power and influence to the establishing of an absolute 42

monarchy."

Twain did agree to submit the "Soliloquy" to the

Reform association, but at the time he also stated that he

43 would in no v/ay become actively involved in the movement.

During the following months, however, he retracted this

statement by accepting the vice presidency of the Reform

105

organization, ^ position requiring him to influence govern­

ment officials to investigate the Congo Free State. But

in 1906 he rejected for the last time any offer of active "

participation in the movement, excepting financial support.

A final gesture on the subject ended his contributions—an

epitaph for King Leopold: "Here under this gilded tomb lies

the rotting body of one the smell of whose name will still

offend the nostrils of men ages and ages after the Caesars

and Washingtons & Napoleons shall have ceased to be praised

44 or blamed & been forgotten--Leopold of Belgium."

The slaves, then,--Chinese, Jew, Indian, or Negro-- ^>,^

represent in the fiction of Mark Twain something more than '

realistic characters drav/n from personal knowledge. They

become, in fact, mirrors to reflect the hypocrisy of the en-

tire human race condoning their bondage. That he continued/'C^

to expose the oppression of the Negro following the Civil

War merely substantiates Twain's idea that the slave still

wore the yoke of slavery. And more important, Tv/ain's di- /-->-. * -f —

gressions upon slavery existing before the War reflect his

attempt to destroy the very ideological foundation of the

institution—and, in that sense, raze the entire structure

of slavocracy, not merely improve the immediate problems of

the freed Negro. This endeavor generally encompassed two

primary facets of the Negro character. Casting the Negro

slave as a heroic person capable of attaining freedom, Tvjain

exploded, first of all, the myth of "helpless prssivity"

io6.

underlying slavery. Second, and more important, he portrayed

the debased slaves as human beings with similar character­

istics as white people. The first endeavor provided physi­

cal freedom for the Negro; the second, spiritual equality.

Perhaps the final insight to Mark Twain's treatment

of the Negro can be found in his last travel book in which

he says, "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source

of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor . ' 45 in heaven." It can be surmised from his works and his

actions that Tl ain accepted slavery in early youth, but he

was too young to do otherv/ise; that he grew to dislike it,

as he sav/ people he knew to be good being mistreated; and

finally that he regretted the memory of it, as he recalled

those wonderful childhood friends of his. His references(^ J

to slavery in general, as well as to those directly pertain­

ing to the Negro, are all the more scathing from the realism

and sympathy with which he presented his feelings. In this

sense, it seems approp.riate to agree with Edward Wagen­

knecht in asserting, "Among the great writers of the world,

I know none v/ho is closer to his material or whose success • -

more directly dependent upon his ability to assimilate it."

Perhaps in Pudd'nhead Wilson, however, the author has pre­

sented his total attitude toward slavery in the form of a

hope--a possible solution to the ideological problem of

slavery:

Diligently train your ideals upward and sti}l upward towards a summit v/here you will find your

107

chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer, benefits upon your neighbor and the community.^7

To him this had seemed to be the only practical answer; for,

indeed, there was no "humor in heaven," at least not for the

Negro.

108

FOOTNOTES

1 -J,

Philin Ponpr"" L^^lnn'^tL''''^^^^^^ ^^ '^^i^ ^ satirist, see q2^ o?o^^ i S* 309-310, and E. Hudson Long, p. 311 ff. See also footnote 61, Chapter I of the present study.

Cited in Foner, p. 309. 3 Long, p. 256,

4 Cited in Bellamy, pp. 338-339.

5 ^ vH+v. r>„^^, u ^2^1.?° Those Extraordinary Twins, now pr in ted wi th Pudd'nhead VfilsonT . ~^

6 , Long, p.. 313.

7 Autobiography, I, p. 327. 8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Foner, p. 309.

Cited in Foner, p. 309.

Foner, p. 183.

Cited in Foner, p. 183.

Cited in Foner, p, l84.

Cited in Foner, p. l84.

Note to "Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy." The Complete Essays of Mark Ti\rain, ed. Charles Neider, garden City: Doubleday & Co., Inc., I963), p. 9.

15 Onlj'- tiN/o are mentioned here. In "The Treaty With

China, Its Provisions Explained," IVain felt the Burlin-game Treaty gave the Chinese government the rights of a Consulship and even approved their becoming U. S. citizens. In "Goldsm.ith's Friend Abroad Again," he also examines satirically the brutal treatment given the Chinese in Airierica In both articles, then. Twain explodes the myth of American democracy.

"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy," Essays, p. 7-

17 In the sketch Twain fulminates against society by

satiTically defending the boy on several points. For a complete analysis see the article on Foner, pp. I87-I88.

109

18 „ 8-9. Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy," Essays, PP

19

20

21

22

alysis, 23

24

25

26

27 , Report From Paradise, (TJew York: Harper & Brothers,

Publishers7T§5'2), pp, 8-9,—~ 28

Report From Paradise, p, 9.

"Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy," Essays, p. 9.

Notebook, p. 151.

"Concerning the Jews," Essays, p. 249.

See Foner, pp. 225-330, for a more detailed an-

Cited in Foner, p. 231.

Foner, p. 235,

Cited in Foner, p. 235.

Cited in Foner, p, 235,

29

30

31

32

Cited in Foner, p, 237,

Cited in Foner, p. 237.

Cited in Foner, p, 236.

Foner cites the way in which Twain presented the satire to the RefoiTn organization: "He then gave it to the American Congo Refoimi Association, which had it published as a pamphlet under the imprint of the P, R. Warren Company of Boston. At Twain's advice, it included drawings and photographs of mutilated Negroes--men, v/omen, and children. Under the title on the cover was drav/ing of a cross and knife \ ?ith the slogan: 'By this Sign We Prosper.' The pamphlet \ia.s also issued in England, with a preface by E. D. Morel. An edition of the pamphlet, dated January 1, I906, carried this note: 'The publishers desire to state that Mr. Clemens declines to accept any pecuniary return from this booklet, as it is his wish that all proceeds of sales above the cost of publication shall be used in furthering effort for the relief of the people of the Congo State.' It sold for twenty-five cents per copy.", p. 300.

00

For a brief analysis of Leopold's actions in the Congo, see Foner, pp. 296-297.

^ Cited in Foner, p. 297-

110

35 The United States was the first power to ratify

the arrangement giving Leopold exclusive rights to the Congo Free State.

Cifed in Foner, pp. 297-298.

37 "King Leopold's Soliloquy; A Defense of His Rule," (Boston: P. R. Warren, I905), p. 1.

38 Soliloquy, p. 7.

39 Soliloquy, p. 20.

4o „ ,., Soliloquy, pp. 21-22.

4l Soliloquy, p. 31.

' 42 I Soliloquy, p. 12. *

43 -^ Foner, p. 30I. 44

Cited in Foner, p. 302. 45

Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, Chapter 10, 46 ,

Wagenknecht, pp. 4-5-47

"What Is Man?" Essays, p. 367.

Ill

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