Tom

[In the manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wilson, in what is now Chapter 10, MT included five paragraphs in which Tom, having just learned from Roxy that he is "black" and a slave, tries to understand his self on the basis of his racial ancestry. MT deleted the passage when he was making his last revisions of the manuscript. It reflects Tom's own thoughts, confused and inconclusive, not the narrator's, but if MT had included it in the novel he would have strengthed any case the novel might be making against the idea that "blackness" was an inferior racial heredity. (The manuscript is in The Morgan Library.)]

In his broodings in the solitudes, he searched himself for the reasons of certain things, & in toil & pain he worked out the answers:

Why was he a coward? It was the "nigger" in him. The nigger blood? Yes, the nigger blood degraded from original courage to cowardice by decades & generations of insult & outrage inflicted in circumstances which forbade reprisals, & made mute & meek endurance the only refuge & defence.

Whence came that in him which was high, & whence that which was base? That which was high came from either blood, & was the monopoly of neither color; but that which was base was the white blood in him debased by the brutalizing effects of a long-drawn heredity of slave-owning, with the habit of abuse which the possession of irresponsible power always creates & perpetuates, by a law of human nature. So he argued.

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