Book review
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain
(Literary Classics of the United States, NY: 1982)
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
In this delighful novel involving
miscegenation, forensic science, murder, twins, and antebellum
intrigue on the banks of the Mississippi River, in Missouri, Mark
Twain has written a masterpiece.
In a scenario redolent of Twain's more
widely celebrated tale, THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, a 1/32 Negro
infant is switched with his white half-brother, by its slave mother
and joint nursemaid, “Roxy,”to prevent its sale “down the
river,” the dreaded bane of all slaves and their mothers. The white
infant's mother was dead and its father was too busy to know the
difference or to tell them apart.
The Negro infant grows up thinking he's
white and assumes all the hereditaments and characteristics of a
slave master. The white infant grows up thinking he's a colored slave
and observes the diffidence, and obsequies, of a slave, even
absorbing the accents and inflections, along with the cuffs, kicks,
scorn.
Twain is at his storytelling best in
this novel! He employs the complete catalogue of trope and figures of
speech, to show that white “race superiority” is at best
farcical, at worst a lie! He does this while perfectly mimicking the
vernacular of that era which makes copious use of the epithet,
“nigger.”
Roxy becomes Twain's “Lady MacBeth,”
of Shakespeare fame. She manipulates and leverages her knowledge of
who's who and what's what with artfulness, grace and craft to her
advantage while keeping her irresolute, gambling, thieving and
self-absorbed Negro son who thinks he's white in check!
In the end, through, it is the
lawyer-without-a-client, Pudd'nhead Wilson, whose “compulsory
leisure” involves such curious habits as fingerprinting and
meticulously cataloguing into forensic collections. Such enable him
to dramatically solve a baffling murder mystery of the town's leading
citizen.
This murdered judge is the chivalric,
Virginia-borne, testator, uncle, benefactor of —the presumptive
Negro “master” who thought he was “white.” Pudd'nhead –a
disdainful nickname bestowed upon him by Dawson Landing's
provincially inane whites—solves the crime with his fingerprints, a
new-fangled notion, the DNA of that era. He adduces the evidence in a
remarkable court room scene which wins him praise of and accolades
from the formerly vapid villagers, whom he educates and astounds!
Move over Atticus Finch of To Kill A
Mockingbird! Pudd'nhead Wilson's got you beat!
I derived great enjoyment from this
short, 141-page classic. So will you!
#30
