ABSTRACT
As Shelby Steele certainly knows, America relied on more than cautionary tales to maintain racial boundaries during its Jim Crow/apartheid era. In the Supreme Court’s landmark 1896 decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson, near the beginning of that era, the Court not only created the “infamous” separate but equal doctrine, it also in effect declared that mixed-race people (such as Obama and Steele) did not, legally speaking, exist. In the 1890s they would have been “negroes” or “colored” or “black,” and it would not have mattered how many white ancestors they had, or how many advanced degrees they had earned from Harvard Law (Obama) or the University of Utah (Steele). They
still would have been arrested, like Homer Plessy on that June day in 1892, if they had tried to sit down in a railroad car designated for whites only. For Plessy, a New Orleans Creole, was seven-eights white, and his complexion was light enough for him to “pass” easily as a white man. By upholding his conviction for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, the Supreme Court gave a spurious constitutional legitimacy to a plethora of Jim Crow discriminatory laws passed by Louisiana and other states. It also tacitly legitimatized the so-called one drop rule that a single drop of Black blood (i.e., a single Black ancestor) was enough to relegate an individual to the “hard fate” of being a second-or third-class citizen of the United States. Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens’) 1894 Pudd’nhead Wilson is an especially
somber and problematical cautionary tale on this theme. Though set in the antebellum South between 1830 and 1850 when slavery was legal, Twain wrote and published it at the same time that Plessy vs. Ferguson was wending its way through the American legal system, and Jim Crow racism was becoming entrenched in much of the United States. Consequently, the novel can be read both as a critique of slavery and its injustices and as an expression of the fears and anxieties of the Jim Crow era as embodied in the bad character and dismal fate of its antihero protagonist, Tom Driscoll. Tom is a changeling: a man whose “true” name and identity are unknown to him for much of his life and whose “false” identity was constructed and foisted upon him by his slave mother, Roxy, when she switched him with her master’s son when they were infants. Since Tom’s dualistic identities are Black and White, a slave who is supposedly a white master and the son of one of his town’s leading citizens, the novel is-as some critics have notedone of the more brooding and disturbing fictional efforts to comprehend the psychological problems and social injustices that can be traced to racism as it was developing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 In addition, the novel is structured as a crime or detective story, and the deadly detail that reveals Tom’s “true” identity is his fingerprints. Since this is a method of identification that was only beginning to be used by police officials, Pudd’nhead, like Conan Doyle’s tales, is also a harbinger of the twentiethcentury’s fascination with forensic science as a means to control criminality and resolve legal and social conflicts. Twain’s own persona throughout much of Pudd’nhead is very much that of
the realist, either deadpan or openly scornful, who has set himself to the task of demolishing a society’s Romantic illusions about itself and its values. However, in Twain’s case the realist’s harsh truths are sweetened and partially concealed by his “humor,” with the jokes, gags and ironic mockery, that were his creative forte and had made him one of the most popular authors of his time. As he told the President of Yale when that University gave him an honorary M. A. in 1888, humorists practice a “useful trade,” because humor, despite its “lightness and frivolity,” had “one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty … the deriding of shams, the exposure of
pretentious falsities … and who so is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and liberties.”2
Injustice, royalty and privilege are to be “decrowned,” to use Bakhtin’s term, but this must be done with humor and also-as Twain emphasizes in the first sentence of his introduction to Pudd’nhead-with realist precision and verisimilitude. The climatic scene in the novel is a trial, and, as Twain warns his readers, a “person who is ignorant of legal matters is always liable to make mistakes when he tries to photograph a court scene with his pen.” Therefore, he had given the “law-chapters in this book” to a friend who was a lawyer so they were subjected to “rigid and exhausting revision and correction” before they went to press (Berger 1980: 1). Photography, one of the nineteenth-century’s arts and practices most associated with science and verisimilitude, not mere storytelling, was to be Twain’s model. Equally significant, the book has been examined by a “trained barrister,” a legal professional who will vouch for its accuracy. The most visible subject of Twain’s satiric humor and realism in
Pudd’nhead is the constellation of attitudes and values that may be described as Southern chivalry, the belief that the way of life that prevailed in the South before the Civil War was based on a paternalistic slave system and a cavalier code of honor and valor that made Southern “civilization” superior to the culture of the more mercantile and mercenary North. Twain had attacked the same target a decade earlier when he had described the “sham castle” of the Louisiana state capitol in Life on the Mississippi and blamed its architecture on the pernicious influence of Sir Walter Scott’s “medieval romances” with their “fantastic heroes … and romantic juvenilities” (Clemens 1980: 235). In that book, Twain had debunked Southern chivalry by documenting-with quotations from newspapers he placed in footnotesthe violence that occurred when white Southern males of various classes set out to defend their honor for provocations that were often trivial and outcomes that were generally lethal: a General and a Major from Knoxville, one of them a bank President, who settled their differences with shotguns and revolvers; a “Professor” at a “Female College” in Somerville, Tennessee, who blew his brother-in-law’s brains out in a local pool hall, a “course [of action that] met with pretty general approval in the community,” according to a local newspaper.3
