"Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs" — Chapter 3
Tuesday Serialization of the fact-based biography masquerading as an autobiography
Chapter 3
Village and Household Slaves (1840s)
In those days and in that region, it was very common for families to own slaves. This was true even in Hannibal, which was situated just a mile west of the free State of Illinois, across the Mississippi River, and only sixty miles south of the Iowa border, another free State.
And it was not just plantation owners or wealthy families who owned slaves; even we, the Clemens family—by no means especially prosperous—were slaveholders.
In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing.
Yet things I saw as I grew older began to cause me to view this thing differently. For example, I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another, once, and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen.
The slaver back of such a scene was loathed by everybody. He was regarded as a sort of human devil. Yet I remember that once when a white man killed a negro man for a trifling little offense everyone seemed indifferent about it—as regarded the slave—though considerable sympathy was felt for the slave’s owner, who had been bereft of valuable property by a worthless person who was not able to pay for the loss.
I would have been embarrassed to be in any way associated with that slaver. It was then that I first realized that man is the only animal who blushes. Or needs to.
In particular, I remember a boy named Sandy, who was considered part of my family’s property. I remember complaining about him once to my mother, because he was always singing, constantly singing. I asked her to make him stop. My mother explained to me, though, that Sandy’s singing was a way for him to keep his mind off his family. She explained to me, “He will never see his mother again; if he can sing I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.”
I also remember the slave woman who belonged to a neighboring family, and what she did in 1845, when I was nine years old.
One day that year, when I was playing on a loose log which I supposed was attached to a raft—but wasn’t—it tilted me into Bear Creek. And when I had been under water twice and was coming up to make the third and fatal descent, my fingers appeared above the water and that slave woman seized them and pulled me out.
This near-drowning of me was not a unique attempt on the part of that Creek.
Even more chilling for me to remember, and shame-inducing when I consider the role my father played in this little drama, is the time a long-time slave of the family—who had been with us since before my time, when the family had resided in Tennessee—was sold sometime in the early 1840s, even though she had helped keep me alive through my first months, and had even once saved me from drowning in Bear Creek herself. Even after these actions on her part, my father thought it fitting and proper to sell her away, and to a slaver with an especially bad reputation, at that. My brother Orion, a lifelong abolitionist, gave his only child the name Jennie, after this former member of our household.
Besides Bear Creek, the Mississippi River, which practically flowed past our doorstep, got in on the act of trying to get rid of me, too. I was pulled out in a two-thirds drowned condition nine times from these two watery playgrounds of mine before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise. But my mother never worried much about it. She said that someone who was born to be hanged had nothing to fear in the water.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a young slave boy is in one scene singing a song, Buffalo Gals, that was very popular at the time (that is, in the 1840s). As much of the details of Twain’s novels were drawn from his life, this tune was probably part of Sandy’s vocal repertoire.
***
In September of 1841, Twain’s father John Marshall Clemens was part of a jury that helped sentence James Burr, George Thompson, and Alanson Work to twelve years in prison. Their crime? Being abolitionists.
The book’s amazon page is here.