Those Extraordinary Twins: Negroes and Whites

Abstract

there lingers some doubt about his attitude toward Negro. has been criticized for using such disparaging designations as nigger. His works, both fictional and autobiographical, have been carefully combed to find traces of racial prejudice expected of Southerner. That one can abhor slavery and still retain a prejudice against Negro is, of course, a commonplace,' one that has been recently popularized by late Malcolm X in his efforts to unveil true Abraham Lincoln. Whether this charge can be applied to Mark Twain is, however, questionable. His hatred of slavery seems, at times, to have been intimately connected to a personal sense of responsibility for injustices inflicted upon black William Dean Howells has written of Mark Twain that he was the most desouthernized Southerner he had ever known. He held himself responsible for wrong which white race had done black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of reparation due from every white to every black man. 2 Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson seems to be another such act of reparation, an exposure of white man's moral decay resulting from Negro slavery, as well as an expression of Mark Twain's sympathetic understanding for those who, he believed, suffered most from that decay, products of miscegenation, those who are white in color, yet Negro by that American fiction of law and custom that labels a man, and thereby condemns him, for merest drop of Negroid blood. The Italian twins that figure in Pudd'nhead Wilson were originally Siamese, a 'freak'-or 'freaks' . . . a combination consisting of two heads and four arms joined to a single body and a single pair of legs. As Mark