If you are like me then at almost every opportunity we both take a page from the past as a refuge from the onslaught of the recent toxic news of haters, and a willfully tone-deaf leader. While the news over the past week is a most compelling political story we need to stop and pay heed that this also is a most troubling entry into the on-going history pages of our nation. This is happening to OUR nation, NOW.
We have all heard the vile racial words over the past days, and watched the wretched actions of those grounded in hate. And we wonder who can bring some sanity to the mess? With that as a backdrop, Time offers up an article with Mark Twain as its way to convey some needed words for us to read. “Getting Past Black and White.” In part it reads….
In part it reads….
Twain was born in Missouri, a slave state, and fought in the Civil War, however briefly, on the Confederate side. His father occasionally owned a slave, and some members of his family owned many more. But Twain emerged as a man whose racial attitudes were not what one might expect from someone of his background. Again and again, in the postwar years, he seemed compelled to tackle the challenge of race.
Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books, according to the American Library Association, have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as coarse. Twain himself wrote that the book’s banners considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums.” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave whose adventures twine with Huck’s, and its frequent use of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often excoriated, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly–and miss the point. The novel is profoundly antislavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction–a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson–aside from being one of the earliest stories to hinge on the evidence of fingerprints–stood as a challenge to the racial convictions of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intellect, Twain’s tale revolved in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, concerned lest the child be sold South, switched him in the crib for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slaveholding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The thrust was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice–manner of speech, for example–were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery imposed on its victims. At the same time, he was well aware of the possibility that the oppressed might eke out moments of joy amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s. The narrator asks his 60-ish black servant, Aunt Rachel–who spent most of her life as a slave–why she is so happy all the time. The story is her answer, and I will not spoil it other than to suggest that Twain manages, in just a few pages, to lead us through the complexities of seeking happiness when your life is literally not your own.
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 