SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 11 (of 78)
Never Quite Sane in the Night (1846)
Chapter 11
Never Quite Sane in the Night (1846)
I killed my first man at the tender age of ten. Not directly, but I blamed myself for the death that occurred in the Hannibal jail. The victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit.
An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course—I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man’s death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me.
I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward. The drunken tramp who was burned up in the village jail lay upon my conscience a hundred nights afterward and filled them with hideous dreams—dreams in which I saw his appealing face as I had seen it in the pathetic reality, pressed against the window bars, with the red hell glowing behind him—a face which seemed to say to me, “If you had not given me the matches this would not have happened; you are responsible for my death.”
I was not responsible for it, for I had meant him no harm but only good, when I let him have the matches. The tramp—who was to blame—suffered ten minutes; I, who was not to blame, suffered three months.
My conscience never did seem to know when to keep still. My ability to feel guilt, even for things for which I was not really responsible, was prodigious. But I could not help it. It had to do with my physical organization. It is doubtless the case that the organ used to feel guilt is so large in me that it crowded out the organ whose function it is to excuse myself and absolve me of culpability.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain’s overactive conscience and imagination would ultimately cause him to blame himself for the deaths of at least five people: besides the vagrant in the Hannibal jail, mentioned above, these would be loved ones: his brother Henry, his son Langdon, his daughter Susy, and his wife Livy.
In her book My Father, Mark Twain, Clara Clemens wrote of her father’s propensity to blame himself:
One of Father’s most salient qualities was his tender sympathy for some one in trouble. If on any occasion he could manage to trace the cause of some one’s mishap to something he himself had done or said, no one could persuade him he was mistaken. Self-condemnation was the natural turn for his mind to take, yet often he accused himself of having inflicted pain or trouble when the true cause was far removed from himself. As, for example, in the case of his younger brother’s death on the steamboat destroyed by an explosion.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack each Sunday; it is also available in its entirety from here.