The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

Ok, so I know that I just posted a forum called Racial Satire, but this is what I'm turning in to Greg tomorrow, I think this is a better forum discussion topic so we'll use this one! :)

Mr. Twain won my vote this week. Mark, yes we are on a first-name basis now, I think, did a much better job of presenting satire of racism than Chesnutt did in "Po' Sandy." While Chesnutt does a great job of setting up satire about slavery, ghosts, and religion, I believe that Mark does him one better on style as well as satirical form.

As I stated in one of my forum topics, I believe that Chesnutt does a great job of satirizing the difficulty that it takes to keep a family of slaves together and the lengths that one will go to in order to keep that family together. I also believe that Julius’ story may very well be completely “cunjah’d up.” The reasons that I believe that it could have been complete farce is that only after Uncle Julius tells this story does the Sandy Run Colored Baptist Church split and need a place of worship. This, in my opinion, could be Chesnutt’s way of satirizing the fact that most white people (definitely the narrator) think that “colored” people aren’t smart,

“You wouldn’t for a moment allow yourself,” I replied, with some asperity, “to be influenced by that absurdly impossible yarn which Julius was spinning to-day?”

“Po’ Sandy” p. 610

But Julius was able to get a free place of worship with a simple story. Chesnutt is an amazing writer in setting up this brilliant plot for Uncle Julius to tell at the lumber mill, which they were shopping at for a house that just so happens to be in Lumberton Plank Rd., so that the Sandy Run Colored Baptist Church seceders could have a place of worship. Also, by calling the church “Sandy Run” Chesnutt brings on the irony by basically saying what Sandy should have done instead of listening to Tenie. This story is very much akin to the story of Adam and Eve. Sandy, similar to Adam, was sad about leaving but going to be obedient and was going to work for the few months he was given away and then come back to Tenie. However, Tenie, similar to Eve, wanted to oppose what her master said and keep Sandy there with her, which ultimately causes them both to languish to death; Sandy by saw and Tenie by sorrow.

Mark sets up this situation for "the best of all possible worlds" by having Roxy switch her child and her master's child at birth, with the only people being able to tell the children apart are Pudd'nhead Wilson who had kept track of everyone's fingerprints and herself, of course. However, quite ironically, the trade that Roxy believed would make her better off, actually was just as bad seeing as her own child was treating her, and the real "young master," horribly.

“He struck me, en I warn’t no way to blame – struck me in de face, right before folks. En he’s al’ays callin’ me nigger-wench, en hussy, en all dem mean names, when I’s doin’ de very bes’ I kin. Oh, Lord, I done so much for him – I lift’ him away up to what he is – en dis is what I git for it.”

Pudd’nhead Wilson p. 81

This is where I think Mark speaks his first point of purpose, which is that it isn’t what you are born as, it’s what you are raised as. It is often taught to many children of higher class and status and is called entitlement. He clearly supports this point because when “Tom”, who really is Chambers, believes that he deserves all of these things, he treats everyone horribly and believes that he can do that because that’s what he’s entitled to. He makes his point stronger when Roxy tells “Tom” that he is actually a “nigger” born of her womb. Tom sulks in the horrid idea of being so lowly as to be a “nigger.”

“Every now and then, after Tom went to bed, he had sudden waking out of his sleep, and his first thought was, ‘Oh, joy, it was all a dream!’ Then he laid himself heavily down again, and with a groan and the muttered words, ‘A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!’”

Then, Mark makes probably the biggest point to be made in the first section of the book, when Tom thinks about why black people and white people had to be different and had to have these dichotomies in place.

“‘Why were niggers and whites made? What crime did the uncreated first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him? And why is this awful difference made between white and black? … How hard the nigger’s fate seems, this morning! – yet until last night such a thought never entered my head.’”

Mark obviously placed his view of what slavery was and what a horrible institution not only slavery was but the distinction between blacks and whites all together. Also I found a few things to be ironic in the book. The first being that when “Tom” is face to face with “Chambers” the first time after he finds out he is really a nigger, he tells “Chambers” to get out of his sight. For the next four chapters at least, we see nothing of “Chambers.” Secondly, Mark did an amazing job of creating the ironic situations that “Tom” is presented with readily after he finds out that he is in fact a nigger. However, of all of the situations “Tom” is presented with, the most ironic is the one with his Uncle Judge Driscoll.

“He dreaded his meals; the ‘nigger’ in him was ashamed to sit at the white folks’ table, and feared discovery all the time; and once when Judge Driscoll said, ‘What’s the matter with you? You look as meek as a nigger,” he felt as secret murderers feel when the accuser says, ‘Thou art the man!’ Tom said he was not well, and left the table.”

Mr. Mark Twain, for reverence sake, has done a considerably amazing job of satirizing race. From right off the bat of trading the “rightful place” of the white child and putting a “nigger” (that’s 1/32^nd black, by the way) in his place, to having Roxy’s son mistreat her highly, to creating a situation for the nigger son to realize that he isn’t white after all, Mark creates a case that you can’t refuse. (While Pudd’nhead can’t make a case at all, or win it anyway.) While that’s not to discredit Monsieur Chesnutt for the job that he did, with a better plot and more opportunities to really confront the issues of racism and slavery in general, Mark wins my vote.