by Mark Twain
Twain has compressed his story in order to get Tom quickly to adulthood and into trouble. Once Tom is of age and his poor mother is gone, the novel’s mood relaxes and Twain takes a stroll around Dawson’s Landing to see who’s there. Judge Driscoll and Pudd‘nhead Wilson are the only two members of the town’s Freethinkers’ Society, but not even the Judge’s friendship has changed public opinion about Pudd’nhead. Irony is not for the people of Dawson’s Landing: When the Judge shows some citizens the dabs of philosophy from the whimsical almanac Wilson has been working on, they decide that if they’d ever had any doubts that he was a “pudd’nhead” then these revelations removed them.
Meanwhile, the widow Aunt Patsy Cooper needs a lodger. She receives a letter from Luigi and Angelo Capello, twenty-four-year-old Italian twins who say they have lived in Europe and have been in the United States for several years, and will pay double for her room. Aunt Patsy’s daughter correctly surmises that her family has suddenly become important, because the whole town will want to see the exotic pair who will be living with them, the town’s first Italians, its first travelers of any kind. The Judge stops by to congratulate them and to read and discuss the letter. The Coopers are steeped in happiness; and when the twins finally arrive late one night they are “the handsomest, the best dressed, the most distinguished-looking pair of young fellows the West had ever seen” (p. 33).
At breakfast the next morning, Angelo tells the spellbound family that their father, of Florentine nobility, was on the losing side of a war and had fled to Germany. His estates were confiscated. Angelo and Luigi, musical prodigies fluent in German, French, Spanish, and English, were ten years old when their parents died. “We were seized for the debts occasioned by their illness and their funerals, and placed among the attractions of a cheap museum in Berlin to earn the liquidation money. It took us two years to get out of that slavery” (p. 35). The Coopers’ neighbors must see the twins that afternoon. The introductions begin at the parlor door: “ ‘Good morning, Mr. Higgins—present you to Count Angelo Capello’ ” (p. 36).
The townspeople are not at ease, but, being honest, they did not pretend to be. None had seen a titled person before, none had expected to meet one at that moment, “consequently the title came upon them as a kind of pile-driving surprise, and caught them unprepared.” A few try to rise to “the emergency” with an awkward “ ‘My lord,’ or ‘Your lordship’ ” (p. 36), but most are overwhelmed and pass on, speechless. The parlor is not big enough; there is an overflow upstairs; the Cooper family understands for the first time the real meaning “of that great word Glory” (p. 37); and when the twins knock out a classic four-handed piece on the piano the townspeople realize “that for once in their lives they were hearing masters” (p. 37).
The Judge is the first to show the twins the graveyard, the jail, the town hall, the slaughterhouse, and churches. The fire company puts out an imaginary fire, and the twins inspect the muskets of the militia. The Judge also brings them to a meeting of the Freethinkers’ Society. They take an immediate liking to Pudd’nhead Wilson, just as the Judge had hoped, and agree to visit him, he who has so few friends. While waiting for them that evening, Wilson ponders a mysterious occurrence: From his window that morning he’d seen a young woman in Judge Driscoll’s house, “where properly no young woman belonged” (p. 39). The Judge, his sister, and three black servants were the only people supposed to be there, but Wilson could see the young woman’s trim summer dress and her bonnet finished with a pink veil. She was practicing dance steps in what Wilson knew was Tom Driscoll’s bedroom. He hoped to get a look at her face, but she disappeared.
The novel’s tone darkens as Twain brings Roxy back to Dawson’s Landing. In the eight years since she was freed, Roxy has, indeed, been a chambermaid, traveling between Cincinnati and New Orleans, proud of the adventurousness of steamboat life. But she quit when she developed rheumatism. She had planned for the future ; however, her bank in New Orleans has failed, and Roxy finds herself disabled, homeless, and a pauper, at age thirty-five. She has nowhere to go other than back to her birthplace. “Time had worn away her bitterness against her son, and she was able to think of him with serenity.... She would go and fawn upon him, slave-like-for this would have to be her attitude, of course—and maybe she would find that time had modified him, and that he would be glad to see his long-forgotten old nurse and treat her gently” (p. 42).
Roxy hears from Judge Driscoll’s “negroes” (p. 43) that Tom is away in St. Louis so much because the old master gives him a fifty-dollar monthly allowance to stay away. Her “son,” Chambers, tells her that Judge Driscoll found out about Tom’s gambling debts and paid them, but Tom’s allowance is not enough to cover the debts he has incurred since. “Ole Marse was jes a-hoppin‘! he was b’ilin’ mad, I tell you! He tuck ‘n’ dissenhurrit him.” “Dissenwhiched him?” “Means he bu’sted de will” (p. 43). The Judge eventually forgave Tom and made a new will, but Chambers wonders why his “mammy” is so concerned about it. Chambers asks Tom, back in Dawson’s Landing at last, to see Roxy. “Who gave you permission to come and disturb me with the social attentions of niggers?” (p. 44) Tom demands. Tom beats and kicks Chambers before allowing Roxy to come in. She is hurt to be so rudely received and ashamed to have dreamed of being treated differently by him. Roxy appeals to Tom’s conscience, reminding him that she nursed him as a baby. He tells her he’d rather strangle her than give her a dollar.
Roxy holds herself erect in Tom’s presence, warning him that having lost one chance, he’ll have to go down on his knees and beg for another. Her unexpected words send a chill through Tom’s heart. Roxy threatens to tell the Judge everything she knows about him. Tom isn’t sure how much Roxy knows, but he decides to humor her, holding out a “wild-cat bill” (p. 47), realizing that even a former slave can remember injuries and enjoy taking revenge. She spurns the dollar, saying she knows enough to bust the Judge’s will wide open. “You call me names, en as good as spit on me when I comes here.... Yassir, I gives you jes one chance mo’, and dat’s now, en it las’ ony a half second” (p. 48). Tom slumps to his knees, astonished that she could require such a horrible thing of her young master. “The heir of two centuries of unatoned insult and outrage looked down on him and seemed to drink in deep draughts of satisfaction” (p. 48).
Roxy has a shattering revelation in store for Tom. “You ain’t no more kin to ole Marse Driscoll den I is! ... You’s a nigger!—bawn a nigger en a slave! ... You’s my son” (p. 51). She tells him that the poor boy he’s been kicking all these years is the real Tom Driscoll, while he is Valet de Chambers, “en you ain’t got no fambly name, beca’se niggers don’t have ’em!” (p. 51). She tells the stunned Tom that she has taken the precaution of leaving proof of her assertions in the care of a gentleman who would know what to do should she die suddenly, mysteriously. It isn’t true, but she knows her wretched son. She makes him call her “ma” or “mammy,” not Roxy.
Roxy wants half of Tom’s monthly allowance. She also wants to know how he plans to pay his current gambling debts without the Judge finding out about them. Tom confesses that he has been prowling about in disguise, burglarizing houses in Dawson’s Landing. “His mother approved of his conduct, and offered to help, but this frightened him” (p. 53). He says that he would feel safer if she were not in town, and she agrees. Roxy, sobbing, explains that she has hated him for so long because after switching him into a good family all she got in return was cruelty. Tom reminds her that he didn’t know she was his mother—in other words, that he was simply behaving as a normal slave master. As they part, he asks who his father was: Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex, Roxy is proud to inform him. “Dey ain’t another nigger in dis town dat’s as high-bawn as you is” (p. 54). Thus, Pudd’nhead Wilson becomes a novel about a black man passing for white. “I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead” (p. 55).
Tom’s moral landscape, such as it was, is much altered. He can’t stop thinking—about the “awful difference” made between
white and black, about what crime “the uncreated first nigger” (p. 55) must have committed to earn the curse of his birth. He wanders lonely places, shrinking from friends, because the habits of a lifetime have deserted him, as if the “nigger” in him were asserting itself. “And the nigger’ in him was surprised when the white friend put out his hand for a shake with him” (p. 56). When Aunt Patsy Cooper’s daughter whom he secretly worships invites him in, the “nigger” in him is embarrassed, afraid to sit with whites on equal terms. Meals with his family are a trial, now that they aren’t his family anymore, and his hatred for his uncle increases. He begins to see suspicion in the faces around him, fear of detection being the central convention of “passing” novels. Everyone notices the change in Tom, now a hunted, skulking figure.
Yet, after a while, Tom falls back into his frivolous ways. His last “theft-raid” (p. 57) on Dawson’s Landing yields enough to pay his “gaming-debts,” saving him from exposure and another smashing of the Judge’s will. He and his mother meet periodically. They “learned to like each other fairly well. She couldn’t love him as yet, because there ‘warn’t nothing to him’ ” (p. 57). Tom returns to St. Louis for more gambling, with the predictable result that he needs to make good heavy losses, which means another raid on his town. It turns out that it is Tom in his burglar’s disguise, girl’s clothes, whom Pudd’nhead Wilson sees across the way in the Driscoll house the morning he meets the Capello twins. Tom sees Wilson, too, and guesses that he has a good view. Tom entertains him with a few “graces and attitudes,” (p. 58) slips out of sight, changes from girl’s clothes into his mother’s somber black clothing, and quietly leaves the house. His family doesn’t know he is in town. Tom wants to put off his planned burglaries, but his mother persuades him that the excitement created by the presence of the Italian nobles makes for the perfect opportunity. While the town is at Patsy Cooper’s reception, Tom burgles various homes, and then goes to the reception himself, happy to steal from the Coopers as well.
Tom drops in on Wilson later on and finds him entertaining the twins. Wilson’s guests run the fingers of their right hands through their hair to get a little coating of oil on them and make impressions on glass for Wilson’s fingerprint collection. Tom laughs that Wilson also goes in for palmistry, but the twins spare Wilson’s pride by claiming to take palm-reading seriously as a science. They’d had their palms read some years earlier and were struck then by the accuracy of the character descriptions. Moreover, most of the prophecies had since come true. Wilson reads Luigi’s palm and sees in his history that he has killed someone. “Why, a man’s own hand is his deadliest enemy!” Tom exclaims (p. 65). Luigi killed a man to save his Angelo’s life, and Angelo kept the weapon Luigi used, a knife of unusual shape, with a bejewelled sheath, given to Luigi by a great Indian prince. A thief who wanted the knife entered the prince’s palace and was about to kill Angelo in his sleep when Luigi woke and struck the fatal blow. Tom is amazed, because he had stolen the knife that afternoon. He assumed that the jewels were glass and would have sold the knife cheaply.
“There was a strong rum party and a strong anti-rum party” (p. 68) in Missouri. Luigi goes happily to the mass meeting of the local rum party, but Angelo, a teetotaler, wants to decline membership. Tom is made merry by the drinking and inadvertently insults Luigi, who cannot let it pass, because the insult was delivered in public. “He took a couple of strides and halted behind the unsuspecting joker. Then he drew back and delivered a kick of such titanic vigour that it lifted Tom clear over the footlights and landed him on the heads of the front row of the Sons of Liberty” (p. 70). They pass Tom over their heads toward the rear doors, whereupon fighting breaks out. Few in the hall are sober when they hear the cry of “FIRE!” The engine company has enough “anti-rummies” to nearly drown the stampeding “rummies.” Citizens of Dawson’s Landing “did not insure against fire; they insured against the fire company” (p. 71).
Judge Driscoll swoons with shame when he learns that not only did his nephew get a kicking from one of the twins, he also brought Luigi before the bench on assault and battery charges. Pudd’nhead Wilson defends Luigi, his first case, and loses. The presiding judge fines Luigi five dollars for assault. As descendants of the First Families of the great commonwealth of Virginia, the unwritten code of nobility the Driscolls adhere to demand that Tom answer for his honor himself. Instead, he has received a blow and crawled to the law courts about it. Tom balks at challenging Luigi to a duel and the Judge, apoplectic that there is a coward in his family, rips apart his will in Tom’s presence. He decides to fight the duel in his nephew’s place. In one of the novel’s rare passages of interior monologue, Tom resolves to give up gambling, at least while his uncle is alive, and to reform to such an extent that his uncle might repair the will in his favor.
Pudd’nhead Wilson has never failed in his courtesy toward Tom, who feels acutely the loss of his self-respect. Tom admires Wilson for his honesty and decency, even though he cannot understand why Wilson behaves with such decency, when to do so goes against what he thinks Wilson should consider as his self-interest. For instance, Wilson reproaches Tom for not having confided in his uncle, who would never have let him go to court over the trouble at the rum meeting. But had Luigi not needed a lawyer, Wilson would not have had his first case in twenty-three years, Tom points out. Wilson tells him that he values Tom’s uncle’s honor more. But Tom is so preoccupied with having been yet again disinherited, he is indifferent to Wilson’s disappointment that he refuses to fight Luigi.
The town constable and other leading citizens arrive at Wilson’s house and discuss the recent string of thefts. Everyone who lives near Patsy Cooper was robbed of trinkets and small valuables during the reception at her house for the twins. Some think the culprit is a man, but another has seen a stoop-shouldered old woman at the ferry, and the same woman was seen emerging from one of the houses that was robbed. The old woman won’t be able to sell much of her haul, Wilson notes, because the twins notified the police and the pawnbrokers “everywhere” (p. 81) as soon as they realized their Indian dagger was gone. Wilson’s neighbors ask him to run for mayor as a candidate of the Democratic Party, a sign that he has at long last entered the active life of the town.
Meanwhile, in order to satisfy the family’s honor, the Judge has challenged Luigi to a duel and the thought that he might be killed softens him toward his nephew. He redraws his will, which Tom inadvertently discovers. Once again Tom vows to reform. But if he can’t sell the Indian dagger and other valuable items from his last raid, then his creditors will expose him. Mournfully, he seeks out Roxy, who is disgusted that he has avoided the duel.
It’s de nigger in you, dat’s what it is. Thirty-one parts o’ you is white, en on‘y one part nigger, en dat po’ little one part is yo’ soul.... You has disgraced yo’ birth.... En it ain’t on’y jist Essex blood dat’s in you, not by a long sight—‘deed it ain’t! My great-great-greatgran’ father en yo great-great-great-great-gran‘father was ole Cap’n John Smith, de highest blood dat Ole Virginnny ever turned out, en his great-great-gran’mother, or somers along back dah, was Pocahontas de Injun queen, en her husbun’ was a nigger king outen Africa—en yit here you is, a slinkin’ outen a duel en disgracin’ our whole line like a ornery low-down hound! Yes, it’s de nigger in you! (p. 87).
But Tom is more concerned with his bad luck that his uncle was not killed in the duel. He confesses his dilemma to his mother, who comes up with a plan that will help him to hold off his St. Louis creditors. She also informs him that his days of stealing, drinking, gambling, and keeping bad company are over and that she intends to go to St. Louis with him to make sure of it. For her part, she swears off whisky, in order to keep him company in his reform.
Dawson’s Landing is more proud of the duel than any other event in its history and Pudd’nhead Wilson, as Luigi’s second, has become a man of consequence, certain to become mayor, and the twins are “prodigiously great now” (p. 91), and encouraged to be
come citizens. Their popularity brings out the worst in Tom Driscoll, who teases Wilson and the constable about their failure to apprehend the town’s mysterious thief. Tom plants suspicion of the twins even in Wilson’s mind. “Is it nothing to them to be able to dazzle this poor little town with thousand-dollar rewards—at no expense? Wilson, there isn’t any such knife” (p. 95). He explains to his uncle that he pretended to be afraid to fight the Italian adventurer in order to avoid the more dishonorable situation of meeting a confessed assassin in the field.
Tom goes to St. Louis, but he is robbed on the steamboat and again faces ruin. What follows when Roxy arrives makes for the most pathetic scene in Pudd’nhead Wilson. Tom winces at Roxy’s love and just because he now knows he is black does not mean that he is reconciled to “that despised race” (p. 99). Yet Roxy is willing to be sold into slavery so that he can pay his debts. “I’s wuth six hund’d dollahs. Take en sell me, en pay off dese gamblers” (p. 99). The Lord made white and black mothers the same, she says. “Ain’t you my chile? En does you know anything dat a mother won’t do for her chile?” The plan is for him to sell her to a farm up country where conditions for slaves are mild and then to buy her back in a year’s time. But Tom betrays his mother, selling her down river, to a cotton planter from Arkansas. “Voluntarily going into slavery—slavery of any kind, mild or severe, or of any duration, brief or long—was making a sacrifice for him compared with which death would have been a poor and commonplace one” (p. 101). Because she has worked on steamboats, Roxy realizes, too late, that they are traveling downstream with the current. “I’s sole down de river!” (p. 102).
