Yes, en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’.
But he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and save money so he could buy his wife, and then they would both work to buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them. Huck is “frozen at such thoughts;” torn between what he had been taught was moral and his friendliness for an underdog. Jim is the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchman should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, “cain’t git no situation.” He tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever:
... En all uv a sudden I says pow! jis’ as loud as I could yell. She never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Almighty forgive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!” Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb—en I’d been a-treatin’ her so!
From the great tenderness and truth of this portrait Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Twain’s last novel concerning Negroes, falls a great way. In violent, ugly Dawson’s Landing a fantastic tale is set. Roxana, only one-sixteenth Negro, a handsome earthy Amazon, is the mother of a son, Valet de Chambre, fathered by a gentleman of the F.F.V’s. This baby was born on the same day as her master’s son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll, and looks exactly like him. In order to save the baby from slavery, Roxy exchanges the two. The boys grow up with their positions reversed; the false Valet is ruined by slavery, and Tom, ruined by pampering, becomes a liar, coward, gambler, thief and murderer. In desperate straits, he tricks his mother and sells her down the river. Although Tom’s character could be attributed to a rigid caste system that granted excessive power to petty people, Twain leaves many readers believing that he agrees with Roxy who, astounded by her son’s worthlessness, muttered: “Ain’t nigger enough in him to show in his finger-nails, en dat takes mighty little, yit dey’s enough to paint his soul.” Twain has little good to say for slavery in this book. Roxy’s terror of being sold “down the river,” and her experiences there under a vicious Yankee overseer are grimly realistic. Roxy is a first-rate preliminary sketch. By no means faultless, a petty thief and a liar, she is capable of sacrifice, and has intelligence, pride, and courage. If Twain had spent more time in developing her portrait, Pudd’nhead Wilson would have been a better novel.
Humorists. One of those humorists whose misspellings and satiric temper pleased Abraham Lincoln, Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke), wrote Nasby: Divers Views, Opinions and Prophecies (1866) and Ekkoes From Kentucky (1868), both showing post-war attitudes to the Negro. Pretending to be a Copperhead postmaster, Nasby reveals himself as an ignorant, besotted politician, forever dragging in the race question for personal gain. Some of Nasby’s shafts could well be used at southern rabble-rousers today. Nasby shows how the cry of Negro domination and amalagmation rose whenever the slightest effort was made for justice to the freedmen. Severely satirical of southern chivalry, Nasby shows the white daughters of John Guttle, a gentleman of Mobile, fighting against their Negro half-sisters over their father’s tomb, and concludes that “there wuz some disadvantages attending the patriarkle system.” To those who saw the Negro as unfit for freedom he wrote:
Three hundred niggers ... wuz wrencht from paternal care to starve, which the most uv ’em are industriously doin’ at about $3 per day.
He advises the legislatures to forbid Negroes to leave their country, and then to pass laws setting up a maximum wage for Negroes of five dollars a month. Thousands of Negroes will then die by midwinter and the rest will beg to be reenslaved.
We kin ... pint 2 their bodies and say in a sepulkered tone: ‘Wen niggers wuz wuth $1500, they wuz not allowed to die thus—behold the froots uv Ablishun philanthropy.’
For all of his burlesque, Nasby saw clearly and prophesied sanely. A whole school of southern writers came along and did in dead earnest what he had counselled in bitter jest.
Samantha On The Race Problem by Marietta Holley counsels colonization even so late as 1892, recounts the tragedies of a few superior mulattoes, and most important, shows the Florida Ku Klux Klan at its work of burning schools and terrorizing Negroes who were forging ahead.