difficulty. The situation is less a puzzle for the intellect than a challenge to the will and heart.

"First of all, it is up to the black man himself. His freedom, won at such cost, means only opportunity, and it is for him to improve the opportunity. As he shows himself laborious, honest, chaste, loyal to his family and to the community, so only can he win to his full manhood. The decisive settlement of the whole matter is being worked out in the cotton fields and cabins, for the most part with an unconsciousness of the ultimate issues that is at once pathetic and sublime,—by the upward pressure of human need and inspiration, by family affection, by hunger for higher things.10

"But for the right adjustment of the working relations of the two races, the heavier responsibility rests with the whites, because theirs is the greater power. They can prescribe what the blacks can hardly do other than accept.

"What we are now facing is not slavery,—an institution that may be abolished by statute-but its offspring, Caste-a spirit pervasive, subtle, sophistical, tyrannic. It can be overcome only by a spirit more pervasive, persistent and powerful-the spirit of brotherhood.11

"Each of us dreams his own dream, and thinks his own thoughts. Differ as we may, let us unite wherever we can in purpose and action. The perfect social ideal will be slow in realization, but it is to-day's straightforward step along some plain path that is bringing us nearer to it. The black workman who every day does his best work; the white workman who welcomes him to his side; the trade-union that opens its doors alike to both colors; the teacher spending heart and brain for her pupils; the statesman planning justice and opportunity for all; the sheriff setting his life between his prisoner and the mob; the dark-skinned guest cheerfully accepting a lower place than his due at life's feast; the white-skinned host saying, Friend, come up higher,it is these who are solving the race problem." 12

10 Merriam, The Negro and the Nation, p. 392.

"Ibid., p. 393.

Ibid., p. 410.

CHAPTER 37

MARK TWAIN'S DELINEATION

Pudd'nhead Wilson, Dealing with the Tragedy of the Mulatto-Tom Sawyer Abroad-General Attitude of Mark Twain toward the Negro

IN the writings of Mark Twain, the Negro plays a conspicuous part

in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Mark Twain came from slave-holding stock. His father received several slaves by inheritance. Jennie, the house servant, and Uncle Ned, the general utility man, were the companions of Mark Twain's youth. From them he became acquainted with the ghost stories and other superstitious lore characteristic of the slaves. In addition to his father's slaves, Mark Twain had an opportunity to know the thirty slaves belonging to his uncle, John Quarles. One of the latter furnished the model for his "Nigger Jim" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. On one occasion Mark Twain was saved from drowning by a slave man, Neal Champ. In his youth he had seen a gang of Negro men and women chained together awaiting shipment. When he grew to manhood and married, he employed Negro servants and one of them, Aunt Rachel, his cook, became the "Auntie Good" in A True Story.

When Mark Twain moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871, he came to know very well Harriet Beecher Stowe, authoress of Uncle Tom's Cabin. He had every opportunity to know the Negroes intimately, and liked them, especially those of the ante-bellum type. In writing to his uncle, who had moved to Iowa, he said, "How do you like free soil? I would like amazingly to see a good old-fashioned Negro."

In Mark Twain's novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Negro characters play the leading parts. The story deals with just one aspect of the Negro problem and that is the tragedy of the mulatto. The central figures in the story are two mulattoes, Roxanna, a slave girl, and Valet de Chambre, her son. The former was only one-sixteenth Negro, having been born of a light-mulatto woman and a white F. F. V. Her son was thirty-one parts white, having been born of Roxanna and a white man of some distinction in Missouri. Both of these mulattoes

were so Caucasion in color and features that they were indistinguishable from pure-blood whites. Even the yellowish tint under the finger nails, which is a sure sign of Negro blood, was absent. The scene is laid at Dawson's Landing, a little town on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, half a day's journey by steamboat below St. Louis.

Roxanna (Roxy for short) was living at this town as the slave of one Percy Driscoll, who was a married man without children. On a certain day in 1830, two boy babies were born in the house, one by Driscoll's wife and one by Roxy. The Driscoll child was named Thomas and Roxy's, Valet de Chambre, shortened to Chambers.

Within a week Mrs. Driscoll died, and thereafter Roxy had the care of both babies. To the casual observer the chief difference in the appearance of the babies was the dainty white gown with its blue bows and flummery of ruffles of the Driscoll child and the miserably short gray tow-lined shirt of Roxy's child.

One day Percy Driscoll missed some money and, calling his domestic slaves before him, said, "I give you one minute," he took out his watch. "If at the end of that time you have not confessed, I will not only sell all four of you, but I will sell you down the river."

This threat was, in the minds of the Negroes, equivalent to condemning them to hell.

Roxy reeled in her tracks and the color vanished out of her face; the others dropped on their knees as if they had been shot; tears gushed from their eyes, their supplicating hands went up, and three answers came in one instant:

"I done it." "I done it."

"I done it."

The three servants, confessing to the crime, were sold up the country, while Roxy, whose hand did not go up, was retained. The reason she could plead not guilty on this occasion was that she had lately "got religion," at a revival, and was able to resist the temptation when she saw the money on her master's desk. But she had remarked to herself, "Dad blame dat revival. I wisht it had 'a' be'n put off till tomorrow.""

In fact, Roxy had the prevailing slave habit of pilfering.

Mark Twain asks the question, "Was she bad? Was she worse than the general run of her race? No. They had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they held it no sin to take military advantage of the enemy-in a small way; in a small way, but not in a large one. They

would smouch provisions from the pantry whenever they got a chance; or a brass thimble, or a cake of wax, or an emery-bag, or a paper of needles, or a silver spoon, or a dollar bill, or small articles of clothing, or any other property of light value; and so far were they from considering such reprisals sinful, that they would go to church and shout and pray the loudest and sincerest with their plunder in their pockets. A farm smokehouse had to be kept heavily padlocked, for even the colored deacon himself could not resist a ham when Providence showed him in a dream, or otherwise, where such a thing hung lonesome and longed for some one to love. But with a hundred hanging before him the deacon would not take two-that is, on the same night. On frosty nights the humane negro prowler would warm the end of a plank and put it up under the cold claws of chickens roosting in a tree; a drowsy hen would step onto the comfortable board, softly clucking her gratitude, and the prowler would dump her into his bag, and later into his stomach, perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure-his liberty-he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him in the Last Great Day."

Roxy's narrow escape from being sold down the river filled her with profound terror. She spent a sleepless night. "Her child could grow up and be sold down the river. The thought crazed her with horror. If she dozed and lost herself for a moment, the next moment she was on her feet flying to her child's cradle to see if it was still there. Then she would gather it to her heart and pour out her love upon it in a frenzy of kisses, moaning, crying, and saying, 'Dey sha'n't, oh, dey sha'n't—you' po' mammy will kill you fust.'"

Once, when she was tucking it back in its cradle again, the other child nestled in its sleep and attracted her attention. She went and stood over it a long time communing with herself:

""What has my po' baby done, dat he couldn't have yo' luck? He hain't done noth'n'. God was good to you; why warn't he good to him? Dey can't sell you down de river. I hates yo' pappy; he hain't got no heart-for niggers he hain't, anyways. I hates him, en I could kill him.' She paused awhile, thinking; then she burst into wild sobbings again, and turned away, saying, 'Oh, I got to kill my chile, dey ain't no yuther way-killin' him wouldn't save de chile from goin' down de river. Oh, I got to do it, yo' po' mammy's got to kill you to save you, honey'-she gathered her baby to her bosom now, and began to smother it with caresses-'Mammy's got to kill you-how kin I do it.

But yo' mammy ain't gwine to desert you-no, no; dah, don't cry— she gwine wid you, she gwine to kill herself, too. Come along, honey, come along wid mammy; we gwine to jump in de river, den de troubles o' dis worl' is all over-dey don't sell po' niggers down the river over yonder.'

Suddenly a strange light dawned in her eyes and she became lost in thought. Instead of drowning herself and her infant she conceived the idea of dressing her baby in Tom's "flummery of ruffles" and passing him off as the Driscoll heir. The idea was put into operation and worked. The white child was raised in the habiliments of a Negro and in Negro society and in time was sold. Roxy's child assumed the name of Tom Driscoll and was petted and coddled as the heir to the throne.

The fake Tom manifested misanthropic traits from his youth. He was devoid of affection and took a delight in wounding the feelings of his associates. He had tried to induce Percy Driscoll to sell Chambers, the real son, down the river. In order to prevent the possibility of this, Judge Driscoll, the brother of Percy, had purchased Chambers.

Percy Driscoll died when the fake Tom was fifteen years old. By will Roxy was set free, and went chambermaiding on a Mississippi steamboat. Tom was taken into the indulgent care of Percy's brother, Judge York Driscoll, whose wife had borne no children. The judge's widowed sister, also childless, was living with him, and Tom's coming into the home met with more than a cordial welcome.

Tom, the counterfeit heir, was sent to Yale University, but returned in a short time with nothing to his credit. He was idle and dissipated, spending much of his time in the gambling dens of St. Louis.

Roxanna, his mother, was obliged to retire from her chambermaiding on the Mississippi on account of rheumatism and she suffered the additional misfortune of losing all of her savings through a bank failure in New Orleans. She returned, broken in health and fortune, to the Driscoll home at Dawson's Landing. Here she was kindly received, but she was much grieved to learn that Judge Driscoll had been compelled to liquidate Tom's gambling debts, and had threatened to disinherit him.

When, by appointment, Roxy met her son, Tom, she was saddened to find, instead of the affectionate greeting of a white man for his old Negro mammy, an icy coldness and a fiendish disdain. Resentful of this manifestation of ingratitude, Roxy turned indignantly against her