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The ongoing challenges to Huck Finn as
racist in its representation of slavery and African Americans
have prompted a heightened scholarly interest in trying to
determine exactly what Samuel Clemens' ideas on those
subjects were. All accounts agree that his ideas changed
drastically over time. Although the Missouri he grew up in
never joined the Confederacy, it was a world in which slavery
was taken for granted by most whites, defended by all public
institutions, including the churches, and attacked out loud
by no one; Sam's own parents owned slaves. The Langdon family
his wife belonged to, on the other hand, was actively
abolitionist, and by the time Sam married into it at the
start of his career the U.S. had abolished slavery. As an
owner/editor of the Buffalo Express in 1869 he wrote
and printed an unsigned editorial protesting the recent
lynching of a black man in Memphis; in 1881 he wrote
President-elect Garfield a letter on behalf of Frederick
Douglass; in 1885, in acknowledgment of the rights of former
slaves to reparation for the wrongs that white America had
done them, he arranged to help support an African American
named Warner T. McGuinn through Yale law school. (You can see MT's
letter to Garfield in the SAM CLEMENS AS MARK TWAIN section of the archive. The best
account of slavery in Sam Clemens' Hannibal is Searching
for Jim, by Terrell Dempsey [2003]; a representative
account of how the adult Samuel Clemens personally thought
and talked about slavery and race is Lighting Out for the
Territory, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin [1997].) |
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But when Twainians cite these kinds of biographical
facts to answer the critique of Huck Finn, they
overlook the crucial distinction between what Sam Clemens
thought or did in private (what we know about his personal
life), and what "Mark Twain" wrote or what "the writings of
Mark Twain" say (what his audience saw in his published
books). The end of slavery did not mean America was finished
with such questions as what was slavery like? or
what does its existence mean about our past? Most of
MT's major writings are set in slave-owning societies -- how
do they re-present slavery for an American reading public
that was struggling to come to terms with slavery, indeed
that continues to be be haunted by those questions
today? For his contemporaries, MT's books were made of pictures as well as words, and for many of those readers the pictures would have spoken at least as loudly as the words. This page brings together some of MT's published words about slavery with many of the pictures that appeared in the first editions of his books. My goal is to give you a way to see the images of slavery that readers in his times saw through the windows onto that world that his books gave them. |
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MT's first contribution to The Atlantic
Monthly was also his first substantial representation of
the experience of slavery. In "A True Story, Repeated Word
for Word as I Heard It" (November 1874), "Misto C----"
listens as Aunt Rachel tells him "all 'bout slavery." Her
story begins with an account of the horrifying auction in
Richmond at which she and her seven children were sold apart,
and ends when, near the end of the Civil War, she was
reunited with her youngest son, now a soldier in a "colored
regiment" in the Union Army. Although some of its original
readers, knowing it was "By Mark Twain," apparently kept
looking for a joke in it, it is a moving story, and THE
MANUSCRIPT shows how seriously MT worked to get
Rachel's voice right. He reprinted the story in Sketches,
New and Old (1875), where True Williams' illustration of
Rachel at left appeared. |
| MT's next contribution to the Atlantic was
the series of sketches about his experiences as an apprentice
steamboat pilot on "the Southern trade" in the late 1850s.
These were published in seven installments between January
and July, 1875, under the title "Old Times on the
Mississippi." Rooted in nostalgia for the riverboats' "days
of glory," MT's narrative almost completely ignores the role
slavery played in steamboating -- that the boats' crews were
mainly slaves, and that slaves as well as cotton were their
staple cargoes. Mr. Bixby, who plays master pilot to the
narrator's cub, lands a steamboat at a plantation in the
pitch dark as an example of his prowess, but the darkness
also makes both the plantation and the slave who waits on the
shore invisible -- we can only hear "a darky's voice" saying
"'Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones.'" The Atlantic
texts were unillustrated, but MT incorporated the sketches
into Life on the Mississippi (1883), where the
illustrations below, by John Harley, show how this
version of the "Old Times" represented slavery: |
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| The word "slave" appears twice in MT's first fiction about the world of his childhood, in the Preface and in a footnote. In the text of the novel itself we meet Jim, identified only as Aunt Polly's "small colored boy," and hear about the unnamed "negro" who has just taught Tom a new way to whistle, about the "[w]hite, mulatto and negro boys and girls" who congregate at the town pump, and about "Uncle Jake," "Ben Roger's . . . pap's nigger." But slavery is barely mentioned. When the narrator talks about "captivity and fetters," he's referring to Tom having to go to school, and he uses the slogan of the Anti-Slavery movement -- "Am I not a man and a brother, without distinction of color" -- to make a joke about the way Tom's face looks after his sister Mary has washed it. More than Polly's fence gets white-washed in the story, but evading the presence of slavery is one of the most powerful means by which MT's story creates such an inviting past for his readers' nostalgia to inhabit. (For more on Tom Sawyer as a mythic representation of the nation's history, see ST. PETERSBURG AND AMERICAN NOSTALGIA in the archive's TOM SAWYER section.) True Williams drew the pictures for Tom Sawyer, and represents "slaves" in the series below: |
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![[THE STRANGLING HERO]](tsslav3t.jpg)
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| When MT next goes back to St. Petersburg, slavery
plays a much larger role in the story he tells, but how
Huck Finn represents slaves and slavery remains a very
controversial question. Throughout the novel Huck (as someone
who's been raised in a slave-holding society) believes
slavery is right; though he likes Jim and is willing to "go
to hell" to "steal Jim out of slavery," he expresses more
sympathy for Miss Watson as the "poor old woman" who owns Jim
than for Jim himself. By 1885, slavery had been abolished for
two decades, so nearly every contemporary reader would see
Huck's belief in its eternal rightness ironically, as an
example of another kind of "slavery" -- the way a child's
mind is captive to the values of the society she or he is
born into. But even after slavery has been abolished, there remains the problem of understanding what it was like, what its legacy is, what it says about the nation's culture. And what remains ambiguous about the novel is the way it presents slavery: the idea of slavery that its words and pictures leave in the minds of its readers. From the first edition's 174 drawings by E. W. Kemble, who was picked by MT himself to illustrate the novel, I selected the 16 below as representative of the way contemporary readers were shown the slave-owning society through which Huck and Jim travel. |
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"then he drops down on his knees..."
Kemble also did the illustrations for the new editions of Huck Finn that appeared in the late 1890s, and you can see them by CLICKING HERE. Of course every one of Kemble's 28 pictures of "Jim" is an image of slavery. In the HUCK FINN section of the archive you can look forward from Kemble at how the novel's 12 American illustrators between 1885 and 1985 RE-PRESENTED JIM. The images below are intended to give you one way to look backward: to locate Kemble's pictures in the context of other culturally well-known representations of slaves: |
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| About 10 years after finishing Huck Finn MT
decided to go back again imaginatively to the world of his
childhood. The story he wound up writing, about a slave
mother who tries to free her infant son by switching him with
her master's baby, makes Pudd'nhead Wilson MT's most
sustained engagement with the institution of slavery. What
it's saying about slavery, however, is by no means clear. As
published, his story was illustrated in an unusual way, with
hundreds of pen-and-ink "marginal illustrations" by F. M.
Senior and C. H. Warren. Their images of slaves are as
ambiguous as MT's text, ranging from sentimental to realistic
to minstrel grotesque. The 18 examples of their work
below are chosen to represent this range. The overall
effect of using "marginal illustrations," though, is to keep
the reader at a great distance from the narrative, to turn
the characters into cartoons, and, since shading is
impossible, to eliminate any kind of grey area between
"black" and "white." (You can see all the illustrations in
the DIGITAL FACSIMILE of the First edition in the
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON section of the archive. When the novel
appeared serially in The Century, it was illustrated
by one of the magazine's staff artists, Louis Loeb, whose
drawings, including 3 of slaves, can be seen on the ILLUSTRATING
PUDD'NHEAD page; there you can also see the 7 new
illustrations that E. W. Kemble drew for a late 1890s edition
-- slaves appear in 5 of those.) |
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Those Extraordinary Twins
In the U.S. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson was published with The Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins, the uncompleted farce about "Siamese" (or conjoined) twins that MT originally intended to set on the scene of Dawson's Landing. This representation of a slaveholding village recalls Tom Sawyer: boys and aunts are at the center, and slavery is only a peripheral element. But the text does include several mentions of the slaves on whose labor the "white village" depended, and among its 200 or so "marginal illustrations" are several graphic representations of slavery. |
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| My goal in this exhibit is to give you examples of
all that "Mark Twain" wrote and published, and that the
illustrations of his works showed, about American slavery.
The 4 examples below are from (1) "A Private History of a
Campaign That Failed" (1885), (2) Following the
Equator (1897), (3) "My First Lie and How I Got Out of
It" (1899), and (4) the newspaper publication of his
Chapters from My Autobiography (1908). (2) and (4)
contain MT's longest, most expressive discussions of his own
experience of slavery, at home and in Hannibal -- though it
is, as always, up to each of us to decide what we think is
being expressed. (If you can think of any other
representations of slavery that MT himself published during
his lifetime, please let me know.) |
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| "A SLAVE! Do ye understand
that word!" This protest rings out from one of the
unfortunate characters in MT's Prince and the Pauper
(1882). Hearing how harshly this man has been treated, the
exiled Prince vows to abolish the law that made his
enslavement possible, but as the man himself notes, he stands
before MT's reader as specifically "An English SLAVE!--that is he that stands before ye." No
American slave ever voices a similar protest in MT's
published books. "The most of King Arthur's British nation
were slaves," writes Hank Morgan, the narrator of the novel
that MT published between Huck Finn and Pudd'nhead
Wilson. In Connecticut Yankee (1889) the past he
depicts is the 6th century England he had read about in
Malory and Scott, not the ante bellum South he grew up in.
Slavery and anti-slavery play large roles in Hank's story. In
Roxy's narrative in Pudd'nhead Wilson New England
"Yanks" are said to make the most heartless slave owners, but
MT's Connecticut Yankee is a devout abolitionist whose
critique of slavery in this text is much more outspoken than
any of the narrators of MT's works depicting slavery in
America. The novel's illustrations are much more graphic in
depicting the horrors of slavery too. They are by Dan Beard,
who was himself a politically engaged social critic. Beard's
temperament, as well as Hank's direct attacks on slavery, may
account for the anti-slavery force of the illustrations, but
their representation of slavery may also reflect the fact
that in Connecticut Yankee the slaves are all "white,"
and the people who enslave them are not
American. |
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Kemble's Images of African Slavery
How much easier it is to see something when there is no way for guilt, personal or collective, to get in the way may be what the drawings below also illustrate. They are by E. W. Kemble, the artist who illustrated every edition of Huck Finn published in MT's lifetime, and who became a specialist (as he puts it) in "negroes." Kemble's work appeared in several volumes in Joel Chander Harris' Uncle Remus series and in many magazines. He also collected them for books like Kemble's Coons (1897) and Comical Coons (1898). From 1885 through the first couple decades of the 20th century, white America loved his usually clownish and always stereotypical representations of blacks. The pictures he drew for an article titled "The Slave-Trade in the Congo Basin" (Century Magazine, February 1890), however, do not stereotype blacks or slaves. I think these pictures almost speak for themselves, not just about slavery but also about why it's so hard for American culture to get beyond caricatures and myths about slavery: now that Kemble is depicting slavery somewhere else, so that American whites need feel no responsibility for it, he draws slaves with human faces instead of blackface minstrel masks, and depicts their human suffering realistically. Compare these drawings to his work on Huck Finn, or the other Kemble illustrations further down this page, and see if you don't see the same thing yourself. |
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| In his times, the words and pictures in MT's books
were read and seen in a very different cultural context than
ours. To appreciate the way his work re-presents slavery it
helps to see the kinds of images Americans were familiar with
from other popular sources. The examples below afford
only a few glimpses into that scene, but I've chosen them for
their representativeness. Almost all come from the decade in
which both Huck Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson --
MT's two fullest treatments of ante bellum slavery -- were
published, i.e. the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s. |
| This first sequence, though, starts in the 1840s,
which is when Blackface Minstrelsy erupted onto the
American cultural scene. The minstrel show, which claimed to
represent African Americans and the lives of slaves on the
plantation through the singing, dancing and comedy routines
of white men "blacked up" with burnt cork, was the single
most popular form of live entertainment in the U.S. until the
late 19th century, when it began giving way to vaudeville.
Most of the materials below are sheet music covers, but there
is one example of the minstrel joke book too. Several of the
artists featured were themselves African American, including
the composer James Bland and the Johnson Brothers (one of
whom was James Weldon Johnson, the writer), but the
conventions governing the representation of "blacks" were
defined by white publishers for white audiences. MT loved the minstrel show, and often borrowed from its conventions in his humorous pieces. More significantly, the caricatures and images of minstrelsy were the chief means by which many white Americans in MT's time "saw" slaves and freed blacks. |
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| Uncle Tom's Cabin came out of copyright in 1892, which led to dozens of new editions from various publishers, most of them illustrated (even E. W. Kemble did a 2-volume edition for Houghton Mifflin that year, with over 140 illustrations). These thousands of images are another good set of windows through which we can still look to see how MT's times "saw" slavery -- and you can see many of them in the ILLUSTRATING UTC section of my other electronic archive, Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture. But while Stowe's book was still popular in the 1880s and 1890s, millions of Americans every year experienced her story through The Tom Shows: traveling dramatizations that featured street parades, animals, and lots of musical numbers. Legree remained a villain who beat Tom to death at the play's climax, but in general the slaves on stage (often played by "genuine colored people," who were advertised as having been "slaves before the war") sing and dance happily. Even slave auction scenes typically served as an occasion for "buck-and-wing dancing" or "cake-walking." |
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| In this next set of images you can see how "slavery" appeared in a year's worth of issues of The Century Magazine, the popular national periodical that also published excerpts from Huck, Connecticut Yankee and Pudd'nhead. The year is 1890, and the drawings (many by E. W. Kemble) illustrate the three "plantation tales" printed in the magazine during that year. |
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| Plantation tales emerged in the 1880s.
Their authors were white Southerners, although the tales were
extremely popular throughout the North, and although they
typically featured as story-tellers former slaves, who spoke
in "black" dialect about life on "de old plantation." As a
genre, the tales are drenched in nostalgia for that world.
Even the slaves (as Joel Chandler Harris wrote in 1880 in his
introduction to Uncle Remus) have "nothing but
pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery." Sam, the
"blackvoice" narrator inside Thomas Nelson Page's "Marse
Chan" (1884), usually cited as the first full-blown
plantation tale, goes even further, telling the white frame
narrator that his life as a slave before Emancipation "wuz
good ole times, marster--de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in
fac'! Niggers didn' hed nothin' 't all to do--jes' hed to
'ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de
marster tell 'em to do." White American readers bought this
fiction again and again, and the images of masters and slaves
that illustrated the plantation tales played a major role in
shaping the way MT's times "saw" slavery. The incredible success of Harris' first book about Uncle Remus led to a series of sequels. The set of illustrations below are from two books he published in 1892: On the Plantation and Uncle Remus and His Friends. The first group are by E. W. Kemble; the second, by A. B. Frost, another book and magazine illustrator who specialized in "southern" material. |
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| The first of Page's many books about the ante bellum South was In Ole Virginia. This collection of tales that originally appeared in magazines was published in New York by Scribner's in 1887. After it went through a number of reprintings, Scribner's decided in 1896 to bring out a new edition, with 24 full-page illustrations. 12 of these are available below. They are the work of 5 different artists, but as you can see, all share the same romantic vision not just of the aristocratic life led by the ladies and gentlemen on the big plantations, but also of relations between these generous masters and their loving slaves. |
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| MT's times bought more tickets to Tom Shows than
copies of his books, but his books were among the era's most
popular and widely known representations of slavery. When
they looked through the words and pictures in those books as
windows onto the world of American slavery, what did his
contemporaries see? Reviewers seldom discuss this theme
directly, though you can search for a word like slave
in the archive's SEARCH THE
REVIEWS to approach the question from that
direction. In her The Southern Magazine review of the
first two installments of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for
instance, another Southern writer, the novelist Martha
McCulloch Williams, says that MT's work was a caricature of
the slave-owners: "To [MT's] mind, the only man worth
either saving or damning in all the South country is the
black man." On the other hand, in January 1889 MT actually
substituted for Thomas Nelson Page at a benefit lecture in
Baltimore, which suggests that to some in the audience both
men shared, these two Southern-born and -raised writers whose
best-known fictions depicted slavery, weren't ideologically
incompatible. No one reads Page anymore, but MT's works continue to be read inside and outside America's classrooms. What is the story they tell about slavery? That question, while it may never yield an answer everyone agrees on, should not be evaded or repressed. |
