SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 6 (of 78)
Summers at Quarles’ Farm (From 1843)
Chapter 6
Summers at Quarles’ Farm (From 1843)
In my early boyhood, I spent the summers at my uncle John Quarles’ farm in the village of Florida, the hamlet of my birth.
I learned the art of story-telling partly from my mother, but also from an old slave named Dann who lived on my uncle John’s place. Everyone called this slave “Uncle Dan’l.”
I can still recall the look of Uncle Dan’l’s kitchen as it was on the privileged nights, when I was a child, and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Dan’l telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to gather into his books and charm the world with, by and by.
My learning how to tell a story from Dann was not just in manner and technique. There was a particular story that I smouched from him. This was the story of “The Golden Arm,” with which I entertained and edified household guests and lecture audiences for decades. Uncle Dan’l never failed to get a rise out of the hair on our head and to send a delicious tingle of fright up and down our spine as he suddenly sprung the climax of that tale on us listeners—even when we had heard it before. There I learned the supreme power of the properly-timed pause. No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for Uncle Dan’l’s race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of seventy years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Many of the things that Twain heard and experienced over several summers at Quarles Farm in Missouri in the 1840s heavily influenced what he wrote over the course of many summers at Quarry Farm in New York three and four decades later, in the 1870s and 1880s. One thing in particular was that “Uncle Dan’l” was the model for Huckleberry Finn’s traveling companion and friend, the “runaway slave” Jim.
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The “Uncle Remus Harris” to whom Twain refers above is Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus tales.
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In 1895, Twain wrote an essay entitled How to Tell a Story wherein he used as an example the telling of The Golden Arm, particularly the impeccable and audience-specific timing of the pause at the end.
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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.