by Ron Powers
An edge existed in the Clemens-Bowen friendship, however, in childhood and in later life. Two of Sammy’s most dangerous boyhood acts were performed in Will’s company. The first could be written off as a prank that nearly went fatally awry. The boys discovered a huge boulder, “about the size of an omnibus” as Mark Twain remembered it,4 lodged near the peak of Holliday’s Hill. One Saturday afternoon, the two boys put their shoulders against the rock, waited until a picnic party had passed on the road below, and gave it a shove. The plummeting rock tore up trees, crushed bushes, pulverized a woodmill—and then bore down on a drayman whose mule had entered the rock’s path. At the last instant the boulder struck a hard object and launched itself over the drayman’s head and into a frame cooper shop, probably that of Mrs. Horr’s husband. “The coopers swarmed out like bees,” Mark Twain recalled years later. “Then we said it was perfectly magnificent, and left. Because the coopers were starting up the hill to inquire.”*5
The second act was far more freighted. A near-suicidal gesture on its surface, it was more likely, by Mark Twain’s accounting, a rather brave gesture of his boyhood anxiety about fate—an anxiety almost certainly nourished by the Presbyterian message of predestination that he absorbed at Jane’s side every Sunday morning. An epidemic of measles hit Hannibal in the summer of 1845, claimed the lives of several children, and terrified everyone. Funerals occurred almost daily. No mother was more distraught than Jane Clemens, who became obsessively protective of her children. Will Bowen was among the afflicted. Sammy, all but certain that he was next, decided to force the issue. He slipped into the Bowen household and stole his way to the rear bedroom on the second floor, where Will lay. There he was spotted by Mrs. Bowen, who screamed at him and threw him out of the house. He returned, sneaking through the backyard this time, up the rear entrance and into the bed. He lay beside his stricken friend until Mrs. Bowen discovered him again and hauled him all the way home by the back of his collar. The contagion he received nearly killed him. The family gathered around his bed. “I have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time,” he remembered.6
TOWARD THE end of 1843, the Clemenses moved out of the Virginia House and into a residence of their own. Marshall had it built on a twenty-foot-wide lot for $330, the money supplied by a cousin in St. Louis, a lawyer named James Clemens Jr. It was an ordinary two-story wood-frame building a few doors up from Marshall’s rickety hotel and general store, at 206 Hill Street; but it would one day stand as the most famous frame house in America: the storied Boyhood Home. Pamela and Orion enjoyed separate rooms; Sammy and Henry shared a small bedroom on the second floor, facing the street. Sammy often awakened at night to the soft catcalls of his friends. Easing himself out the window, he would creep along the roof of the ell, drop to the top of a woodshed and then to the ground and his waiting gang, to commence his legendary explorations of the Hannibal night.
Often, a ragged phantom joined Sammy and his friends. “Why, that’s Tom Blankenship!” Pamela Clemens cried when she heard someone read the section of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that introduced him.7 Mark Twain confirmed this four years before his death,8 yet the figure’s identity has been debated. Perhaps he was an amalgam of all the boys, a version of their idealized outlaw selves—including the dreaming child who would one day immortalize him in a timeless river novel.
Huckleberry Finn makes his entrance in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as “the juvenile pariah of the village,”9 draped in garments cast off by grown men and clutching a dead cat. He is a doorway sleeper and master of profanity, an oracle of superstitions, charms, the ways of witches’ incantations, graveyard protocol, the ghosts of murderous men—and he is utterly unconstrained by adult discipline, by schooling or religion. In Tom Sawyer, he is a secondary character, the hero’s gaudy sidekick. Later, in his own book, Huck Finn liberates himself from Mark Twain’s customary boundaries, and takes on a depth and dignity that awed even his author.
By the 1850 census, Tom Blankenship was about four years older than Sammy: the second of eight children in a down-and-out family that had drifted up from South Carolina. His father Woodson was a laborer, and one of the town’s leading drunks, along with Jimmy Finn. His mother bore the beautiful name Mahala, a fairly popular name for early 19th-century women who had both Arabic and Native American roots. In their abjectness, the Blankenship family suffered humiliations beyond Woodson’s reputation as a drunkard. Mahala’s six daughters, as they came into their young womanhood, were accused as prostitutes, a charge never proven.
By the early 1840s Hannibal was shedding its provincial-outpost status, adopting American styles as they arrived from the East. Hoop skirts came into style. Boys and men were strutting around in slouch hats and long cloaks lined with bright plaid. “Worn with a swagger,” Mark Twain recalled. “Most rational garment there ever was.”10 Girls plaited their hair into long tails and wore white summer frocks and embroidered pantalettes. People sang to one another. Sheet music, printed in Philadelphia and New York with ornate typefaces under lavish chromolithographic covers, carried popular tunes via stage and steamer into the interior. Twain remembered “Oft in the Stilly Night,” “Last Rose of Summer,” “Bonny Doon,” “Old Dog Tray.” Pamela Clemens gave lessons in piano and guitar, and Sammy became proficient in both.
The minstrel show came to town and stayed for a week when he was ten, and featured Thomas “Daddy” Rice himself. Sammy Clemens loved the minstrel show. Samuel Clemens would always love the minstrel show. In the 1870s and ’80s, he was fond of entertaining dinner guests at his Hartford estate by jumping from his chair to perform “breakdowns” in an uncanny imitation of Rice—and Jim Crow. He cherished the memory of the minstrel show—only he didn’t call it the “minstrel show”—into the last years of his life, even after the founding star’s name had mostly slipped his mind (“Where now is Billy Rice?”11). His sensory recall of that introductory spectacle remained near-photographic; and the “photographs” offer damning evidence in the one debate that has towered above all others in the ninety-five years since his death: was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or was he not, a racist?
He was not always the best witness in his own defense—at least judged by the standards of a later time, a time that began with the American civil rights movement. His autobiography affirms his boyish delight in Rice and his performers with their “coal black hands and faces,” their coats of curtain calico and their outsized clumsy shoes. “Their lips were thickened and lengthened with bright red paint to such a degree that their mouths resembled slices cut in a ripe watermelon.”12 He never called it the “minstrel show,” however, and the word he used in its place serves, for a great many people, as final proof of hisracial iniquity. The summit of entertainment for him, he declared in his autobiography, always remained “the real nigger show—the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show—the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience.”13
Certain facts are incontrovertible. Those performers with coal-black hands and faces were white men, not Negroes, and everyone in the tent knew it, including Sammy. Their comedy consisted in shrill, outlandish arguments with one another in an extreme “Negro dialect”—until they were separated from one another by “the aristocrat in the middle,” a figure clad in “the white faultless evening costume of the white society gentleman” who spoke in a stilted, artificial, “painfully grammatical form of speech”14—the living embodiment, in short, of the disdainful “frame story” narrator. Once “Banjo” and “Bones” were tamed, every blackfaced trouper on stage would do a round or two of shuffle dancing, followed by some sentimental songs in the Stephen Foster vein. Thus the nonpareil entertainment form for Samuel Clemens was a burlesque of slave behavior, created and performed by men of the oppressing race.
But are those the elements on which Clemens’s enjoyment of minstrelsy depended? The minstrels’ extravagant clothing, Mark Twain was at pains to note, “was a loud and extravagant burle
sque of the clothing worn by the plantation slave of the time; not that the rags of the poor slave were burlesqued, for that would not have been possible; burlesque could have added nothing in the way of extravagance to the sorrowful accumulation of rags and patches which constituted his costume; it was the form and color of his dress that was burlesqued” (emphasis added).15 Elsewhere in the reminiscence, he dwells on the hilarity, the delight, the silly punning of the performers; the convulsions and hysterics they evoked; the sweetness of the singing. Without torturing the point, it seems fair to conclude that (a) the young, uncritical Samuel Clemens was tainted by the Original Sin of Negro slavery, and by the assumptions of control and superiority that his slaveholding culture enjoyed; that (b) his enjoyment of the minstrel show derived from the universal absurdities of human strut and vanity that it evoked, and not from its inescapable undertone of cruelty; and to point out that (c) the long trajectory of his life is in many important ways a self-forged path upward and outward from that Original Sin, and toward an egalitarian vision of the races expressed in his best literature and in a range of personal and social gestures. As much as he rejoiced at Bones and Banjo, Sammy was equally distraught as he witnessed the wailing grief expressed by members of slave families when they were separated and sold. Mark Twain wrote about this theme repeatedly: in “A True Story” (1874), in Chapter 21 of A Connecticut Yankee (1889), and in Chapter 3 of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894).
No one who knew him, including Frederick Douglass, ever accused him of animosity or condescension to the Negro race. Far from embracing the Bible defense of slavery, he disdained biblical interpretation in general, gravitating as a young man toward egalitarian Enlightenment-derived ideas, such as those of Tom Paine. William Dean Howells, a discerning and progressive man who knew Clemens about as well as anyone, called him “the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men,” and added, “I never saw a man more respectful of negroes.”16
And finally, one must consider (unless one is hopelessly prejudiced against it) the testimony of Mark Twain himself: “I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices…I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”17
A LITTLE over a year later, Sammy watched a man die from a point-blank gunshot wound to the chest—the first premeditated murder in Hannibal’s history. The shooter was William Perry Owsley, a transplanted Kentuckian, town merchant, and the father of two of Sammy’s friends. Owsley gunned down a farmer named Sam Smarr after tiring of Smarr’s drunken tirades labeling Owsley as a thief and pickpocket. Owsley waited until the farmer returned to town a week later, sober, to sell a side of beef; stepped up behind the man less than a block from the Clemens house; drew a pistol out of his pocket; called, “You, Sam Smarr,” and drilled him twice at four paces as the farmer turned. While Marshall Clemens gathered depositions, Sammy watched Smarr be carried into a drugstore on the corner and laid on his back on a table, where it took him half an hour to die.
“[T]here was nothing about the slavery of the Hannibal region to rouse one’s dozing humane instincts to activity,” Mark Twain wrote.18 Yet virtually in the next breath, he “vividly” recalled seeing several men and women slaves chained together and sprawled on the levee pavement like sacks of flour, bound for the dreaded Deep South. And not many months after the Smarr shooting, he watched a local slave master lash out at one of his charges for some small mishap. The slave master had a hunk of iron ore in his punching hand. It took the slave an hour to die.
There were further horrors. On a hot August afternoon in 1847, the eleven-year-old Sammy and some friends crossed the Mississippi in a skiff to Sny Island, near the far shore. They tied up the boat and waded the shallow waters of Bird Slough, a sandy stretch between the island and Illinois, idly foraging the bushes for blackberries and pecans. It was an ordinary lark on an ordinary day, until the corpse of a Negro slave abruptly rose up out of the water and stared at them sightlessly. The body was that of Neriam Todd, who had escaped from his Missouri owners, swum the river, and hidden out on the island. Todd had been discovered a few days later by Bence Blankenship, Tom’s older brother. Despite the bounty on the slave’s head, Bence had looked after him for several weeks, venturing several times across the Mississippi with food that he’d stolen to give to the man. (In Huckleberry Finn, Huck comes across the runaway slave Jim hiding out on a Mississippi island, and launches out with him on the immortal raft odyssey downriver.)
Eventually a rumor arose that something suspicious was happening on Sny Island. A group of woodcutters found Todd and chased him into the slough, where they murdered him, mutilated his body, and left the remains to rot. The corpse had floated feet first with the current until it jammed in the sand. The boys’ disruption of the sediment probably set the body in motion again. The children fled the island and paddled madly back to the Hannibal shore, believing in their terror that the corpse was following them.
MARK TWAIN wrote, “when I was a boy everybody was poor but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.”19 Wealth, and prospective wealth, tantalized Samuel Clemens throughout his life. His relations with money, even during his reign as a wealthy prince of literature, were nearly always tortured. He was “never comfortable with money nor satisfied without it,” Lewis Leary has accurately written.20 He alternately ruminated about money’s corrupting powers (“Vast wealth, to the person unaccustomed to it, is a bane; it eats into the flesh and bone of his morals”) and riffed on its lustrous appeal (“I’m opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position”),21 but neither pose did him much good; he foraged for money throughout his life, and it always got the best of him. He left no doubt as to the origins of money’s spell over him. “It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich,” he mused in 1897–98; “—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the whole size of the curse of it.”22
“Curse” was hardly an exaggeration. Despite his strong intellectual gifts, Marshall Clemens could scarcely ever rub two Liberty Cap pennies together while he lived in Hannibal. Nothing worked for him. His tenants at the Virginia House seldom paid their board, while the customers of his general store helped themselves to food and supplies on credit that they never intended to settle. Exasperated, Marshall sent Orion to the town newspaper, the Journal, to learn the printing trade—a move that profoundly affected both Orion’s and Sam’s futures.
MARSHALL’S FAILED ventures soon ate up whatever capital the Clemenses had brought with them from Florida, which did not include five of the six slaves they owned at the time of their marriage. Those had been sold. Marshall advertised his legal services; but, like Pudd’nhead Wilson, he found little demand. He turned to the one remaining fungible asset left over from his days of gentility: Jennie. Jennie had been a part of the Clemens household since Tennessee days. She had helped Jane keep Sammy alive in his sickly early months. In Hannibal she had saved him from drowning in Bear Creek. Marshall sold Jennie toward the end of 1842 or early 1843, to a trader considered wolfish even among owners of blacks in Hannibal. William Beebe was known as “the nigger-trader” because of his unrepentant dealings with the New Orleans slave market.
It is not clear whether the “tall, well formed, nearly black” Jennie was sold against her will or whether she naïvely requested the transaction herself, as Mark Twain maintained.23 In “Villagers,” Mark Twain recalled that “Judge Carpenter” “[h]ad but one slave—she wanted to be sold to Beebe, and was. He [that is, Beebe] sold her down the river. Was seen, years later, ch[ambermaid] on a steamboat. Cried and lamented.”24 Mark Twain describes this woman as being “like one of the family,” and suggests that she had been beguiled by Beebe with “all sorts of fine and alluring promises.”25 A fate with strikingly similar components is visited on the nearly white slave Roxana of The Tragedy of Pudd’nh
ead Wilson.
The sale of Jennie did nothing to augment the Clemenses’ fortunes. Marshall apparently never collected on her price. He ended up with two promissory notes from Beebe, probably marking the Jennie business and some other transaction, totaling about five hundred dollars. The notes proved roughly as valuable to him as his Tennessee land.
SOON, THE Virginia House slipped out of Marshall’s grasp. Marshall naïvely agreed to stand behind some loans to the unscrupulous land speculator Big Ira Stout. When Stout defaulted, the Virginian ponied up. Mark Twain recalled that this honorable action “bankrupted” his father. No records have been found that document this deception, but in 1841 Marshall Clemens surrendered the title of the Virginia House to a St. Louis merchant who had stocked the general store on credit. Even this transaction failed to wipe out Marshall’s debt. Although the merchant may have been satisfied, Marshall’s code of honor did not allow him to escape with minimal “satisfaction.” Sammy and the other children looked on as their parents stripped down their household, offering up their furniture, forks and spoons, and even the family cow in a prideful effort to pay off every cent that they owed. They continued to live in the building as tenants for a while, but eventually quit the house. None of their addresses for about a year are known. Orion, seventeen, sought work in St. Louis as a journeyman printer. He lived on bread and water, read the Bible, and got up before dawn. He was elected president of the St. Louis Apprentices’ Association.