Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  ACCOMPANYING MR. STANLEY on his dealings around the city, to make our way up and down the mercantile strip of Tchoupitoulas Street into all the stores, was a joy, for he would remark with some pride that I was now his partner and son and should henceforth be addressed as Master Stanley. Those who had known me, such as Mr. Richardson, were somewhat vexed at this new development, and yet, in a short time, it was accepted. Mr. Richardson congratulated me on my good fortune, but no greater joy did I feel than to enter the old warehouse in my sumptuous wardrobe, with Mr. Stanley by my side, and to hear Mr. Ellison addressing me in a tone of respect.

  IN THOSE DAYS I LEARNED that Mr. Stanley, so corporeally sound, seemed to have a hidden infirmity, a tic of the sinews around his eyes, so that he blinked involuntarily, mainly after reading or standing too long in a place. He would also tap his feet against the floor sometimes, flail his hands, and shake them in the air when he did not think anyone could see him. Once I saw him direct from his coat to his mouth a smallish flask, which he uncapped in his massive hand and sipped of quickly. He had done so in a natural and unapprehensive manner, but his eye had caught mine: I had looked away, but as I turned, he said, “Come here.”

  Almost inexpressively, taciturnly, he held forth on his activity.

  “You may well be wondering why I would have need of this: It is a strong brandy, to be sure, but in the wake of Mrs. Stanley’s death, it was the recommendation of my doctors that I partake of such to calm my nerves. For the death of a loved one does such things. Surely you must understand.”

  I did not. “But is not the imbibing of certain liquors wrong? Why have you this need?” I asked.

  Then Mr. Stanley, my father, offered me his flask.

  “Sip from it and see.”

  I was reluctant to do so, but as he was now my father, I obliged.

  The taste of the liquor was thick and metallic, full of wooden flavors and resins, so burning and syrupy that I jumped.

  Momentarily a slight elation of mind, such as to suggest that all the world was before me, ensued. Groggily I asked: “So if this is good, what profit do you gain?”

  And then he told me his whole notion of how liquors might be useful: When it came to gatherings in the home, he recommended French wine, sherry, or port. As for the dealings of business, it was his experience that spirits functioned as a congenial lubricant to ease the negotiations. While city men were prone to drink beer and Scotch, not rye, planters preferred bourbon and Havana rum, a case of which he always took with him on his journeys.

  BY THE TIME WE BEGAN our first excursions upriver by steamer—it was in December of 1859—I was pleased to consider myself an asset to Mr. Stanley, for by then I had been put in charge of his accounting, kept track of his orders, and generally eased the burdens of his dealings. As it was part of Mr. Stanley’s routine to make several trips per year up to St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville, our early journeys were spent on the lower Mississippi tributaries, where we would mainly deal, and profitably so, with the merchants in small settlements, our route taking us between Harrisburg and Arkadelphia and between Napoleon and Little Rock. I take some pride in stating that my memory served him well in those days: No face, no name, no detail about shipments, purchases, and sales escaped me.

  In our portmanteau, we had packed a great number of books—various ancient and modern histories, books of poetry and plays, essays and biographies—so that when we retired to our cabin we could pursue the furthering of my education.

  As he wanted to correct the heaviness of my Welsh accent, he often had me read aloud to him, correcting my pronunciation. In this way, I drifted into speaking a neutral English that, while occasionally afflicted with some evidence of my Welsh origins as well as the influence of a southern drawl, depended greatly upon the precise enunciation of the consonants and hard and soft vowels.

  “Forget your upbringing in England, your lack of pedigree: Here in America, we treat all men equally and according to the quality of their character.”

  WE’D RISE AT DAWN, and he would send me to bed at an early hour, at which time he would often head out of the cabin to take the air and pursue, in private, his conversations with other merchants.

  And he impressed upon me his own feelings about religion, which is to say that he sought to correct my rustic and ignorant view of God. Up to that time I imagined God as a personality with human features set in the midst of celestial glory in the Heaven of Heavens. “How did you come to such a fancy?” he asked me. I told him my idea had come from the biblical verses that said God had made man after His own image. To this he gently said:

  “By ‘image,’ it is meant, in the Bible way, that we are a reflection of Him. But He, by His nature, hath no body. God is a spirit, and a spirit is a thing that cannot be seen with human eyes, because it has no figure or form. A man consists of body and spirit, or, as we call it, soul. We cannot see the earth move, and yet it is perpetually whirling through space: We cannot see that which draws the compass needle to the pole, yet we trust our ships to its guidance. No one saw the cause of the fever that killed so many people in New Orleans last summer, but we know it was in the air around the city. If you take a pinch of gunpowder and examine it, you cannot see the force that is in it. So it is with the soul of man.

  “Well, then, try and imagine the universe subject to the same invisible but potent intelligence, in the same way that man is subject to God’s. It is impossible for your eyes to see the thing itself; but if you cannot see its effects, you must be blind. Day after day, year after year, since the beginning of time, that active and wonderful intelligence has been keeping light and darkness, sun, moon, stars, and earth, each to its course in perfect order. Every living being on earth today is witness to its existence. The intelligence that conceived this order and decreed that it should endure—that still sustains it and will outlast every atom of creation—we describe under the term of God. It is a short word, but it signifies the being that fills the endless universe, a portion of whom is in you and me.”

  This I took to heart and have never forgotten.

  How I Met Samuel Clemens

  ONE EVENING, WHEN MR. STANLEY and I were bound from New Orleans to St. Louis on the steamship Arago, I was on the boiler deck, having just taken leave of my benefactor, who had, at the moment of our parting, seemed fatigued. Although I had looked forward to dining with Mr. Stanley that evening, he claimed, and rightly so, that he would be better off resting.

  It would have been natural for me to have insisted on accompanying Mr. Stanley back to the cabin, but I had noticed in recent days that he seemed particularly on edge. That night I thought it best to keep to myself, which turned out to be a good thing.

  So as my adoptive American father withdrew, I passed my time on the boiler deck among the standing passengers—those who did not have cabins—to continue my studies of the ancient texts of my little Geneva Bible.

  At dusk a lovely night began unraveling before me. The orange skies were streaked with plumes of smoke from a distant cane-field fire and went melting into the waterline; mists were forming along the shore, and the first fires, as darkness descended, were appearing. There was something infinitely comforting about looking out toward the riverbank and seeing the lamps lighting the houses of the settlements, the occasional church window or dry-goods-store doorway warming with a glow as some preacher or clerk would spark the kerosene lamps, small flashes of brilliance suddenly coming through the darkness. Indeed, the signs of life that flickered out from the plantation-house windows a mile or two inland were also gratifying. I believed that they signaled the happy doings of domestic living. I could not help but reflect how even God’s forgotten creatures knew well the simple pleasures of companionship and the rewards of family, which so many take for granted. But not I.

  There was a fellow stationed by a calliope, which he played all day from eight in the morning until eight at night, a pipe organ kind of music that became a signal to those along the shore of our arrival as we stopp
ed by small and large towns. I much enjoyed it when the captain let the steam whistles blow as the children on shore seemed greatly delighted by our approach, the captain of the boat, leaning over the rail, tossing out handfuls of hard candies to the little pickaninnies, who shouted out their happy thanks. Such vessels were always filled with agreeable sounds—the full, round tones of ships’ bells ringing the hours; the constant churning of the side wheel; the calling of the knockabout seamen dropping their lines into the water to measure the depths in that ever-changing river: “By the mark twain!” “Quarter less three!” “Nine and a half!” “Seven feet!”

  On that evening of drowsy, still waters, I found myself standing by the steamship railing studying some verses when I fell into a conversation with the riverboat pilot, who had come down from his wheelhouse to have a smoke on deck. He was something of a dandy, in his midtwenties, I supposed, of medium height, perhaps five feet eight, but he seemed taller in his polished boots and visored cap, a shock of flaming red hair and thick muttonchops around his leonine face. His was a large head tottering upon what seemed a somewhat thin body: sparely built, with narrow shoulders and small-boned, he had the most delicate of features. His gray-green eyes were like an eagle’s, I observed, and he seemed to look out at the world through narrow slits. In the light of a pine-knot torch I noticed that his hands were finely cared for, his nails neither black nor brittle like those of his usual cohorts. I had seen him before, but we had never spoken, because when he came down on the lower deck, he was often in the company of friends who’d gather around him as he would hold forth, telling jokes and sharing anecdotes in a lazy drawl, a cigar always lit in his hand. But that evening he clopped down the stairs alone and, gazing at the same shore as I, and perhaps amused by the fact that I was studiously reading my verses, inhaled upon his cigar, patted some ashes off the lapels off his smart frock, turned to me, and said: “Not a bad night, is it?” Then: “Care for a smoke?”

  “I’m not one for that, but thank you,” I said.

  “Well, to each his own.” Then: “You mind if I ask you a question?”

  “No.”

  “As you’re about the only young man I have ever seen on a riverboat reading a Bible in so intent a fashion when there’s so much else going on aboard, I have to presume that you have some connection with men of the cloth. Would I be correct in assuming that you are studying to become a preacher?”

  “No, sir; to the contrary, I am learning the river merchant’s trade with my father, Mr. Stanley. Perhaps you have seen me in his company—he’s a tall, bearded man, perhaps the tallest man aboard ship. He is a former minister, and as such he has kept me to my verses.”

  “A minister, was he? And now a river trader?”

  “Yes, sir. But he has never kept the Good Book from his heart.”

  “And what do you get from these verses?”

  “Inspiration… and wisdom, mainly.”

  “Inspiration and wisdom: two fine things, of which there’s not enough in this world. You must be the better for it, I will allow, though I’ve never had much of a taste for Sunday-school tales myself. Do you read other books?”

  “By my estimation, sir, even with my mercantile duties, I read several a week: If I were not to become a merchant I have often thought I would like to become a writer of some kind, so influenced am I to dream from what I have read. But it is my father’s opinion that I am quite well suited to the trader’s life, though it is still very new to me, as are so many other things in this country.”

  This comment seemed to puzzle him.

  “Oh, so you are not from around here?”

  “No, sir. I am originally from Wales.”

  “So that accounts for some of the occasional strange soundings of brogue in your voice.” Then: “And so you and your father have come here from Wales?”

  “No, sir. He’s originally from Savannah, Georgia, but you see, it was not so long ago, in fact last February, that I first arrived in New Orleans aboard a packet ship from Liverpool as a cabin boy. I was penniless at the time and alone. Low as I had sunk in those days, it was my good fortune to have made the acquaintance of the gentleman trader, Mr. Stanley: I have since come under his wing, as his adopted son.”

  “So you’re an orphan?”

  “As good as one; but now I am not. You see, in his kindness, Mr. Stanley has undertaken my education in the ways of the world and of books: He is a very learned man and so generous and pious that he has made me his own. I have only just recently taken his name.”

  “And this name?”

  “Henry Stanley.”

  “Ah, Henry, a good name: It was my brother’s,” he said, seemingly laid low by some recollection. But then, extending his hand in friendship, he told me: “I’m Samuel Clemens, first pilot of this ship.”

  GIVEN THE NATURE of my reserved character, I rarely engaged with strangers, the “small talk” and banter of such ships being of little interest to me. But the pilot, a congenial soul, also had a bookish bent of mind, for as we stood by the railing he told me, “I read quite a bit myself. Lately I have been dipping into all the works of Shakespeare and the writings of Goldsmith; but then I’ll generally read anything I can get my hands on—you name it, any books whatsoever… history, travel, literature, and the sciences. Such things are blessings as far as I’m concerned: Along with my cigars, they help me get through the slow moments of the night.”

  Then, as he looked out over the waters, he said that it was in his interest to speak with strangers, as in those days, aside from being a pilot, he was also something of a writer. He told me it was his sideline to compose short and humorous profiles of the river folk he met, and such articles had been published in certain newspapers along the Mississippi since 1853. He had worked for newspapers in St. Louis and other places, but by the time I made his acquaintance that writing vocation had become a diversion rather than a necessity.

  As I had been “reborn” in 1859, so had this Mr. Clemens received his pilot’s license in the April of that year, after a long apprenticeship. With his high wages and the finery and good life that came with his position, he had many an hour by which to enrich himself with books and to indulge in the keeping of a journal, whose pages he filled with descriptions of life on the Mississippi and with character studies.

  “It is not classy stuff that I write,” he confided. “It’s strictly entertaining; nothing like the higher works of literature—how wonderful it would be to write something out of history, like an epic poem about the Egyptians on their barges or plays with all manner of flowery language, as Shakespeare did. No, what I am, my bookish friend, is a river hack, a profiler of personalities, a gatherer of river tales; nothing more.”

  Having ascertained that I was a different sort from the usual types who frequented such boats, he commenced to asking me a great many questions about my origins, and though I was loath to look back at my past, I spoke to him that night of my years at St. Asaph’s; then of my subsequent experiences in New Orleans as a clerk and my travels upriver, the story of my month aboard a barge seeming of great interest to him.

  “I much enjoyed that journey,” I told him. “Being a barge hand wasn’t hard work, except when we were pulling at the oars or we got stuck on a sandbar in the shallows. From it I learned something about how the Mississippi moves and all the tricks of the water. I could see how a man such as yourself, sir, could take to a life on the river.”

  “You fancy the river, then?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Would you like to see the pilothouse?”

  “I would.”

  “I’ve got to go on watch: Come up with me now.”

  WE CLIMBED UP to the highest part of the ship and entered the pilothouse, as elegant as any first-class parlor, with polished wood floors, gleaming spittoons, shiny brass railings, and a ship’s wheel six feet high: It was entirely surrounded by windows, and its sweeping view of the river, lit by lanterns beaming out over the waters, left one with the feeling of
being up in a lighthouse tower.

  As he relieved the assistant pilot and took the wheel, he spoke of his profession. Three times a month he made the round-trip between New Orleans and St. Louis, navigating steamships like the Arago up along some thirteen hundred miles of the sinuous Mississippi River. He showed me some charts that folded open in about eight different sections and described the course of the river, which hooked and turned off into wild half loops, curving everywhere, so that it resembled a long and writhing serpent or a medical illustration of human intestines.

  “So many are the twists and turns of this river that what might be six hundred miles in a straight line turns into a thousand miles by boat: Now, piloting a steamboat is a very high art indeed. To learn, you’ve got to memorize the river’s eddies and shallows until they become as familiar as the back of your hand. Mainly you have to stay alert to its snags, bars, bottoms, and banks. The worst and most unsettling time is at night, particularly when your shift has come on a night of fog. You can go half crazy searching the darkness for some identifiable landmark—the docks of some town, the church steeple of another, the high woods of a cove—for on such nights, sometimes the sky and water meet in a thin, barely distinguishable line; and then you’ve got your cane-field fires to worry about, too, for their smoke can blow in, blinding the way.

  “But I’m happy in my profession: I’m well paid, have no boss above me save for the captain, who leaves me alone,” he told me. “Before I became a pilot, my whole life had been about wandering from one place to another: I was about your age when I had gone out East, to Philadelphia and New York City, working for different newspapers as a printer. Spent a few years in those places—I’d never seen so many freed Negroes and foreigners in my life before, nor had I ever felt so entirely alone. Then came a time when I got homesick for the West again: On the way back, having read some government report about the Amazon region, I had hatched a scheme, in those days, of traveling to Brazil, in South America, to corner the market on the cocoa bean, a vegetable product of miraculous powers, the export of which I had thought would make me rich—how I would corner that market with only thirty dollars in my pocket was not of concern to my youthful mind. But as I was traveling downriver aboard a steamer, the Paul Jones, from Cincinnati, with New Orleans as my final destination—from there I was to set off for Brazil—I struck up a conversation with the steamboat pilot, a fellow named Horace Bixby, who filled my mind with all manner of possibilities about entering into that profession. I became eagerly interested—for you see, Henry, growing up as I did in a little town along the Mississippi, a place called Hannibal, Missouri, I had a dream: Like many boys at the time, I wanted to work aboard riverboats. Having made a good impression on this man—as you had with Mr. Stanley—this chance encounter changed all my plans, and in exchange for the first five hundred dollars of my wages I entered into a pilot’s apprenticeship that required of me the development of a prodigious memory for the river and its many tricks and deceptions. But by and by, I became an assistant pilot on various boats.…”