by Mark Twain
The summer election campaign finds the bid of the twins to be elected to the board of aldermen harmed by their having been too popular. In addition, people have come to doubt the existence of the Indian dagger, because such a valuable piece would have turned up by now, and Judge Driscoll and Tom have been working against them. In a campaign speech Driscoll says “he believed that the reward offered for the lost knife was humbug and buncombe, and that its owner would know where to find it whenever he should have occasion to assassinate somebody” (p. 104). Pudd’nhead Wilson is elected mayor, but the twins are defeated and withdraw from society, though there is a rumor that Luigi plans to challenge the Judge to a duel.
Back in St. Louis, Roxy, now a runaway, confronts Tom, but she is too brokenhearted to storm and rage. She tells him a long story about what the plantation had been like and how she escaped. Because of her beauty, the mistress wouldn’t have her as a house servant and made sure that the overseer lashed her because she was not strong enough to keep up with the work of the other slaves in the fields. One day, when the overseer was beating a slave child, Roxy seized his stick and beat him with it, much to everyone’s surprise. She mounted his horse and rode for the river, intending to drown herself rather than let herself be captured. She found a canoe and hid, eventually recognizing the steamboat on which she used to work as a chambermaid. Her friends on the boat got her to St. Louis, and in one of those places “whah dey sticks up runaway-nigger bills” (p. 109), she saw her master, the man who had purchased her from Tom. “Has he ben to see you?” (p. 110).
Not only has the man been to see Tom, he has told Tom that he thinks there was something suspicious about the sale, that everyone on the steamboat knew about Roxy’s case, and that her coming to find Tom rather than fleeing to a free state would look bad for him. Tom hadn’t believed the man, and hadn’t thought that Roxy’s “motherly instincts” (p. 109) would let her come to him, knowing how much trouble she’d get him into if she did. He has to deliver her back to the cotton planter or repay the money. Roxy can’t read, but she suspects that Tom has not read to her all of the runaway slave bill concerning her that he had in his pocket. She, a fugitive, armed, in men’s clothes, with her face blackened, also figures out that Tom must have agreed already to help the man capture her. She orders Tom to confess to his uncle and get the money to buy her back or she’ll go to him herself, knowing how he’d react to the news that Tom committed the crime of selling a black person his father had freed back into slavery.
In Dawson’s Landing, Pudd’nhead Wilson conveys to the Judge Luigi’s challenge, but the Judge rejects his terms, on the grounds that Luigi is an assassin, not a gentleman, and therefore can’t be faced on a field of honor. “The unwritten law of this region requires you to kill Judge Driscoll on sight,” Wilson tells Luigi, “and he and the community will expect that attention at your hands—though of course your own death by his bullet will answer every purpose” (p. 115). Tom has slipped back into his uncle’s house, intending to rob him rather than confess. His uncle wakes while Tom is in the process of lifting a pile of bank notes from a table. They struggle, and Tom stabs the Judge with the Indian dagger. Tom puts on his disguise, his girl’s clothes, blackens his face with cork, and escapes as the twins arrive to discover the body.
Luigi is indicted for murder, Angelo charged with being his accessory, and Pudd’nhead Wilson defends the foreigners. “The twins might have no case with him, but they certainly would have none without him” (p. 120). Twain makes heavy use of dramatic irony, ranging the whole town against the twins. Tom, relieved and safe, buys Roxy her freedom. He is jubilant on the opening day of the trial because Wilson’s defense is weak, while the circumstantial evidence against the twins is very damaging. Moreover, Wilson has been on a false trail in his investigation, trying to find the girl he saw in Tom Driscoll’s room the day the twins first came to town. But after Tom visits to tease him about the mystery woman, Wilson quickly solves the puzzle and works furiously through the night to prepare his fingerprint records, his evidence.
The court is astonished the next day to hear Wilson’s theory, starting with the blood-stained fingerprints on the Indian knife. The motive was robbery, not revenge, Wilson goes on to say, pointing out that the twins had not tried to flee the scene and their hands and clothing were clean of blood. Moreover, the veiled woman seen leaving by the back gate was a man dressed as a woman. To prove his theory he reverts to his strips of glass. “When the audience recognized these familiar mementoes of Pudd‘nhead’s old-time childish ‘puttering’ and folly, the tense and funereal interest vanished out of their faces, and the house burst into volleys of relieving and refreshing laughter” (p. 132). But Pudd‘nhead Wilson carries his argument, demonstrating that the fingerprints on the Indian dagger do not match the twins’ fingerprints. The audience applauds, and the fingerprints reveal the truth. Though proclaimed once again as heroes, the twins retire to Europe immediately, leaving the field of glory to Pudd’nhead Wilson, now “a made man for good” (p. 139).
Tom Driscoll is as unsympathetic as possible, yet his unmasking and that of his mother are pitiable. As far as the white people of Dawson’s Landing are concerned, when Roxy switched the infants she committed a crime against blood and nature, robbing a white man of his inheritance, condemning a white man to slavery. The child put into the kitchen to become a “negro and a slave” will stand before them “white and free” (p. 137), Pudd’nhead Wilson declares in the courtroom. Tom, the false heir, is sentenced to life in prison, but then creditors of the Percy Driscoll estate claim him as property.
Everybody granted that if “Tom” were white and free it would be unquestionably right to punish him—it would be no loss to anybody; but to shut up a valuable slave for life—that was quite another matter. As soon as the Governor understood the case, he pardoned Tom at once, and the creditors sold him down the river (p. 140).
Surely, the state of Missouri would have hanged such a murderer. Maybe to hang Tom would in some way be to dignify his character. Twain has said that death does not compare to Roxy’s sacrifice of selling herself into slavery to save her son. Slavery already is a kind of death. But at the novel’s end Tom is in no risk of becoming its hero; the comedy in the haste with which he is dispatched obscures his real punishment—race oppression.
Twain writes about an evil, but declines to call anyone in Dawson’s Landing such. They are weak, lost, or conventional. Throughout Pudd’nhead Wilson the story has followed the morality of the social order. Having been protected by his status, unsuspected by anyone because of his position, Tom simply falls and is relegated to the powerlessness of someone who has no status. To become publicly black, a slave, is to disappear. It isn’t only that to be sold down river is a fitting punishment for Tom, there is also the suggestion that the town is anxious to erase him, to be rid of someone who has so successfully masqueraded among them as a white man. Not until The House Behind the Cedars (1900), by Charles W. Chesnutt, a black writer influenced by Twain, would there be a black man in fiction who isn’t exposed and successfully passes for white. Most of the blacks who attempt to pass for white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction are women anyway.
Nineteenth-century writers had a hard time deciding what to do with light-skinned blacks and mulattoes in fiction, whether or not their characters were attempting to pass for white. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), George and Eliza Harris are intelligent, well-groomed, and light enough to pass for white. Harriet Beecher Stowe sends them to Canada after they escape slavery. They will go on to become missionaries in Africa. In the race thinking of the time, George’s intelligence and rebellious temper would have been taken as the influence of his white blood. (Pure Africans, by contrast, were usually depicted in fiction by whites as sweet and docile.) Stowe has the couple go to Africa because, like Abraham Lincoln, she didn’t really want to consider the problem of what to do with the freed slaves; she couldn’t imagine the Harrises living next door, these blacks who were so much
like white people.
Novels by black writers also tended to have light-skinned blacks as heroes and heroines, because it was thought that white readers would not be as put off by light-skinned blacks as they would be by having to enter into a story about dark blacks. In William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter (1853), a mulatto woman leaps into the Potomac rather then be sold back into slavery. Her daughter, however, graced with golden locks and a snow-white forehead, escapes to France, where she is reunited with the blue-eyed black man she had been in love with while in bondage. The choices were either suicide or exile for these blacks who would never fit into American society, and who were always portrayed as existing unhappily between the white and black worlds. The heroine of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon, a sensation in 1859, cries out, “I am an unclean thing!”
Even after the Civil War, the conventions did not change much for white-looking blacks in fiction. The mulatto heroine of William Dean Howells’s novel about passing for white, An Imperative Duty (1891), is ashamed to discover that she is actually black. At the novel’s end, she and the white doctor who falls in love with her settle in Italy. However, black women writers were beginning to offer their mulatto heroines exquisite renunciations as an alternative to exile or death. In Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), the light-skinned heroine, formerly a slave, declines to marry a respectable white doctor and dedicates herself instead to the future of the black race by becoming a teacher. The sentiments in her novel reflected the rise of the black women’s club movement and the drive for social reform, as well as the beginnings of a national civil rights movement that fostered black pride. And yet the desirable mulatto women in Alice Dunbar Nelson’s New Orleans in her novel The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899) are still trembling behind trellises and convent walls, dreading the dangers of seduction and the consequences in the courtesan’s life.
Since the beginnings of the slave trade, blacks had been spoken of as similar to animals in their sexuality, because to consider them as such justified or excused their sexual exploitation. Some white women in the South denounced slavery because of the humiliation of having to live with their husbands’ illegitimate slave children. The very existence of mixed-race blacks spoke of social intimacy between the races, race-mixing, miscegenation, interracial sex. In the late nineteenth century, when the segregation of the races was being fixed in law, American politicians and social scientists agitated over the purity of the white race. Consequently, the light-skinned black male was seen not as a competitor, but as a polluter, an interloper and usurper. The mulatto beauty was often presented in nineteenth-century protest fiction as the prey of white men. However, a parallel image grew alongside that of the exotic flower at the mercy of white men: that of the dangerous temptress. Because the larger American culture viewed the mulatto with hostility and suspicion, as an unstable individual, and a threat to the social order, the issue of the mulatto’s respectability, and that of the black race in general, became all the more urgent for black writers. It was crucial for blacks to prove that they were worthy citizens.
The character of Roxy seems a deliberate attempt to puncture the solemnity of late nineteenth-century octoroon heroines. Roxy is sensuous and easygoing, but she doesn’t mock the sense of rectitude that was so essential to many blacks in the post-Reconstruction era, because Twain’s novel is set in the brasher time of Missouri between 1830 and 1853, when slavery had been abolished in the North but was changing in the South because of the cotton gin; during these years the debate about slavery had intensified because the Fugitive Slave Law in theory made people in the North complicit in slavery. Apologists for the Confederacy were fond of portraying blacks as devoted to their masters; American literature after the Civil War has its share of blacks who remember the planter aristocracy with tenderness. The self-sacrificing blacks of Grace Elizabeth King’s Balcony Stories (1893) and Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk (1894) were held up by some white southerners as rebuttals to the accusations of George Washington Cable and Albion Tourgee. Yet the action of Pudd’nhead Wilson depends on Roxy’s being unencumbered by the virtues of loyalty and fidelity to her master. She feels the sin in her dishonesty, but then consoles herself by remembering that she was acting for a supreme good, to save her offspring from slavery.
Similarly, Twain does not give Roxy refined sensibilities. She is neither educated nor cultured. Writers who wanted to point out the injustice of slavery or of race prejudice were often at pains to give their heroes and heroines every supposedly upper-class cultural attainment, as if to say how terrible it was that an educated person could be treated in such a fashion. Significantly, Roxy can’t read, literacy being the supposed distinction of the light-skinned house slaves. But she is intelligent, full of schemes, insights, improvisations. Almost everything that makes Roxy stand out as a character has to do with what Twain left out of his portrait that was usually associated with the mulatto’s psychology. For instance, Roxy has no ambition to sit in the parlor with her son. It is enough for her to know he’s there. She is proud of his bloodline, that he comes from the best of old Virginia stock on his father’s side, and descends from John Smith, Pocahontas, and an African king on her side. But she doesn’t brag about it to anyone other than her son.
She does not want to be a slave, which is not the same thing as herself. When freed, she does not go to live as a white woman where no one knows her. She chooses independence, one experiment with marriage having been enough for her, she says. Her manner of speech, her class, defines and marks her. She identifies herself as black, or at least she admits to being a “nigger,” because Tom never lets her forget her status—“forgit I’s a nigger” (p. 53)—one of the things she so pitiably reproaches her son for when she reveals the truth to him. “Nigger” is synonymous with “slave,” here, but “slave” does not mean “black,” except in the legal sense at the time. In Roxy and Tom, Twain parades the reasons some whites advocated rigid enforcement of the color line.
Roxy is popular in steamboat society, which is presumably a mixed world of black slave laborers, white and slave passengers, and white officers; she knows she can turn to other house servants in Dawson’s Landing when she is in need. And there is the black Methodist church, her solace in the end. But apart from Jasper, Twain never really shows Roxy with other blacks. “Bofe of us is imitation white... we don’t ‘mount to noth’n’ as imitation niggers” (p. 44), Twain has Chambers say. Indeed, Roxy is hardly shown with anyone other than Tom, which also keeps her chaste throughout the story. White men, black men, sex—her past, whatever it might be, is scarcely hinted at, and yet Twain calms his headlong, caustic prose just long enough to describe Roxy, her luxuriant hair, and queenly bearing. Twain avoids any social scene that would make Roxy the center of a black novel.
Yet Roxy has such a vivid physical presence in the novel because Twain allows her more than he does any other character to speak in her own voice, especially when she relates her experiences down river. She ruminates, bitterly regrets, and is different from other mulattoes in the literature of her period in her sheer, bold expressiveness. Curiously, the heavy dialect Twain gives to her has the effect of aging Roxy. Moreover, she refers to herself as Tom’s “Mammy,” which, for extra-literary reasons, conjures up an image of an older black woman. It is easy to forget that when Tom is sold away from her, she is still young and beautiful, in the way that it is easy to forget that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a broadchested man when he dies and not an old darky.
Roxy is tragic—not because she is a mulatto in a white-controlled world and not only because she is a slave. It is because she is both a slave and a mother that her fate is so hard. She is willing to kill both herself and her child; what she so desperately wanted to avoid happens: Her son is sold down river. The one person in Dawson’s Landing outside of her church to show Roxy sympathy is the man she wronged. “Roxy’s heart was broken. The young fellow upon whom
she had inflicted twenty-three years of slavery continued the false heir’s pension of thirty-five dollars a month to her, but her hurts were too deep for money to heal; the spirit in her eye was quenched, her martial bearing departed with it, and the voice of her laughter ceased in the land. In her church and its affairs she found her only solace” (p. 139). This is all the more touching in that Twain has had to stay away almost entirely from portraying her relationship to the man who believed he was her son, he who never got any affection as a child, Twain says.
What Pudd’nhead Wilson has to say about slavery is unequivocal, but, historically, some critics have questioned what Twain meant about heredity and racial characteristics, and what were considered the innate characteristics of blacks in his time. Roxy bemoans the drop of “nigger” in Tom that paints his soul, the “nigger” in him being, to her way of thinking, the reason he is a coward. Did Twain agree or was he giving to her the opinion she would have in a moment of despair? In the end, Twain seems to be saying that caste and power made Tom the worthless man he is, and that environment conditions behavior, a position that gives his book its modern feeling. Thus, the man born white can’t stop feeling himself to be black.
The real heir suddenly found himself 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 were the manners of a slave. Money and fine clothes could not mend those 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 parlour, and felt at home and at peace nowhere but in the kitchen. The family pew 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. But we cannot follow his curious fate further—that would be a long story (p. 140).
