Pudd’nhead Wilson
Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain 1894 and reprinted in 1964 American Publishing Company
[image error]I like to read a classic every once in awhile and study it for deeper meaning than what a teenager or college student might find.
I read Pudd’nhead Wilson many years ago and only remember that he used fingerprints to prove the guilt of a killer and the switching of a slave child with a white child. I should claim spoiler alert, but there is more to the book than that.
Wilson arrives in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri in 1830 and his irony causes him to be dubbed “Pudd’nhead” by the townsfolk. The name makes it impossible for him to pursue his career as a lawyer but he makes do with accounting and surveying. He also keeps busy collecting fingerprints.
Roxanna is a slave of Percy Driscoll. Percy’s wife and Roxanna have babies on Feb 1. The wife dies and Roxanna raises both boys. They both have blond hair and blue eyes. Twain explains that Roxanna is 1/16 Negro but she is still a slave even though she doesn’t look black. This fact is glossed over since the book was written in the 19th century, but it is a topic of discussion relevant to today.
How much black blood makes someone black? I am supposed to be German, but my DNA test showed very little German DNA left in me. The majority was English, Irish, and Swedish. Does that mean I’m not German? I don’t know. Is our DNA more important than culture? We can adopt cultures, but our DNA determines our inheritance of genetic traits.
This book emphasizes that topic. Even though Tom Driscoll is 100 percent white, he was raised as a slave. At the end of the book, Tom doesn’t fit in the white or the slave world. The nature versus nurture debate begins.
Then Twain presents the slave child, Chambers, who is raised white with a good education and spoiled lifestyle. He has a mean streak and isn’t humbled when Roxanna tells him she is his mother. He even sells his mother down the river to raise money to pay his gambling debts. Roxanna escapes her vicious slave owner and pressures Chambers to get the money to buy her freedom. He attempts to steal it, and kills his uncle, who took him in after his father died. He’s glad when the murder is pinned on someone else.
Another question is how did Roxanna end up 1/16 white? Twain provides a father, Colonel Essex, and she is proud of the blood flowing through Chambers, but this doesn’t face the darker question of rape and incest among white owners and slaves. For Roxanna to be 1/16 white, she would have had white fathers back through four generations. Usually the white father was a male in the household who raped the house slaves. This is another topic to debate.
The final pages are dedicated to the argument that although Chambers was guilty of murder, he was also a slave, and those who were collecting debts against Percy’s property, wanted payment by selling Chambers instead of letting him rot in jail. Ironically, he was sold down the river.
Slavery is an ugly part of our history. Some ignore it, some distort it, but an honest look needs to be made of it and lessons learned. The book may offend some, but in the context that it was written by someone who witnessed slavery, it should be read for a better understanding of how people thought and behaved during those times and the impact it has on our lives today.
More book reviews can be found at authorfreeman.wordpress.com
