Corpse in the Mississippi (1847)
Chapter 14 of "Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs"
Chapter 14
Corpse in the Mississippi (1847)I have always been fascinated with water. Growing up, I was more often than otherwise wet as a muskrat. Whether it be Bear Creek, which ran through Hannibal, or the great river into which it emptied, the Mississippi, I was always in my element when I was wading, and swimming, and coming as close as I could to drowning. Water’s danger and drama worked an irresistible draw on me.
Although I had nearly drowned several times myself, and seen friends drown, those admonishings were not enough to get me to stay away from water. I had always felt that if I was to die, so be it, but the threat of such never made much of an impact on decisions I made. I would die of something, some time, and I didn’t see the sense in living my life afraid of what that something would be or when that some time would come.
Come to think of it, the thrill of the inherent danger that water presented may have provided part of its fascination for me. In fact, the nom de guerre that I eventually stuck with—after briefly trying many others on for size—was a phrase with double meaning centered on dangerous waters; but I will save that for the appropriate place.
Anyway, just a few days after Dutchy drowned, I was swimming with some friends in the Mississippi River, and a corpse suddenly sprang up out of the depths of the river, bobbing up right in front of me, its ghastly visage seeming to bore right through me with its wide-eyed glassy stare. The shivers it sent through me tolled a decade from my life span, so it seemed to me.
The corpse which had so quickened my pulse turned out to be the body of a runaway slave, who had been hiding amongst the foliage on the river bank. Bence Blankenship—the older brother of Tom Blankenship, who served as the model for Huckleberry Finn—had been secretly assisting this runaway by bringing him food from the village.
EDITOR’S NOTES: This man who had “stolen himself,” Neriam Todd, had been discovered by a group of men and chased into the water, after which they lost sight of him. Doubtless there would have been a reward for turning him in had they captured him.***Even decades later, those who had been residents of Hannibal in the 1840s easily recognized the inspiration for Huck when they read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In fact, when Twain’s mother read “Tom Sawyer” on its publication in 1876, she cried out to the family, as she came across the book’s description of Huckleberry Finn, “That’s Tom Blankenship!”The book’s amazon page is here.
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I listened to Mart Twain’s speechifyin’ agin & found the voice vaguely familiar 👏🏻👏🏻🤗