“It seems to be one of the self-punitive characteristics of tyranny, whether the tyrant be a man, a community, or a caste, to have a pusillanimous fear of its victims.” But Cable does not over-idealize the Negro. He is sharp toward the mulatto caste—“the saddest slaves of all.”
Your men, for a little property, and your women, for a little amorous attention let themselves be shorn even of the virtue of discontent.... I would rather be a runaway in the swamp than content myself with such a freedom.
Although Cable helped to establish the tragic mulatto stereotypes, his portraits of this caste are drawn from a specific situation in the past, more pronounced in New Orleans though widespread in the South. The stereotype has fascinated later writers who have fallen under Cable’s charm. But they are without his information and sympathy, and are therefore less truthful. All in all, Cable is one of the finest creators of Negro character in the nineteenth century.
Twain. Like Cable, Twain was of southern birth and upbringing, and fought in the Confederate army (but for a short time only, in a spirit of horseplay, learning only how to retreat). The two men lectured together. Both had sympathies for the underdog and both attacked the sham chivalry of the South. Mark Twain insisted that he was almost completely without race prejudice and that the color brown was “the most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions vouchsafed to man.” He loved the spirituals best among music. In his youth he grew up with slave boys as playmates; in his manhood he paid a Negro student’s way through Yale, as “part of the reparation due from every white to every black man.”
Twain’s first treatment of Negroes in The Gilded Age (1873), however, is largely traditional, unlike “A True Story (Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It)” which is a bitter memory of cruelty and separation, contradicting Thomas Nelson Page’s formula stories.
In Huckleberry Finn (1884) the callousness of the South to the Negro is indicated briefly, without preaching, but impellingly. Huck informs Aunt Sally that a steamboat blew out a cylinder head:
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky because sometimes people do get hurt....”
In this book Twain deepens the characterization of Jim, who, like Tom and Huck and the rest of that fine company, was drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Running away from old Miss Watson, who, though religious, “pecks on” him all the time, treats him “pooty rough” and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi. His talks enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s