Transcript N-Word - History of Redding, Connecticut

Understanding Mark Twain:
Mark Twain’s Novels
At my blog, TwainProject.BlogSpot.com, I post
Twain related articles and photos that showcase
his time in Redding, Connecticut.
One day, after a post about one of the
Centennial Celebrations we were having to
commemorate his life in Redding,
I received the following comment/rant…
“Mark Twain is the kind of boring writer that my
teachers tried to push down my throat in Middle
School and High School. If there is any way to
learn about the way people lived back then,
reading Twain is not it. If there’s a literary icon
or role model for the 19th century, Mark Twain is
not the one.”
“His scatterbrained stories have no meaning or
reason behind them. He simply wrote for the
sake of writing…”
The remarks echoed those made by Danbury
CT’s High School English Department Chairman
last year in the Danbury News-Times:
“His [Twain’s] influence is waning. It’s a lot
more difficult to get kids interested in his
writings. Sometimes, it’s because it’s more
satirical and less blunt humor than they hear
today.”
The issue here is real- teachers & students
don’t get Twain because they don’t know Twain.
After a great deal of thought & discussion with
others, I concluded that we
may be teaching Twain wrong.
What if kids got to know Twain first?
Maybe if they better understood his life
experiences, they’d understand why he wrote
what he wrote and want to read his works.
Here is a preview of my solution to this
issue, and what I’d like to present to
classrooms across America.
Hello…my name is
Samuel L. Clemens.
A.K.A. Mark Twain!
“I came in with Halley’s Comet in
1835. It is coming again next year
(1910), and I expect to go out
with it. It will be the greatest
disappointment of my life if I
don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”
-Mark Twain, a Biography
In 1910, Halley’s Comet reached perihelion on
April 20th and Mark Twain died on the 21st.
Halley’s Comet
Died:
04/21/1910
Born:
11/30/1835
Florida, Missouri
Redding, Connecticut
Sure…
You could call me
“Rags to Riches”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in this cabin
in the small frontier settlement of Florida, Missouri.
Interior of Florida, Missouri home
He was born two months premature, on
November 30th 1835.
The sixth child of
John and Jane Clemens.
Premature babies at that time period did not
usually survive. The frontier was a harsh
environment and children routinely died from
diseases such as measles, smallpox, scarlet
fever and malaria.
“When I first saw him I could see no
promise in him.”
Jane Clemens, his mother.
Sam survived, but would spent a good amount
of his first four years of life in bed. There he
would absorb and retain many of the sounds
and voices that surrounded him.
Hearing is believed to develop very quickly in
premature babies and Sam would exhibit an
unusual ability to retain the sounds he heard
around him in his younger years, especially, the
dialects of speech.
“He never stopped performing the earliest
songs and spirituals he heard, and as a mature
writer he could reproduce entire blocks of
spoken conversation.”
“His capacity to transform commonplace spoken
language into literature, like any artist’s gift,
remains beyond understanding.”
-Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life
Other Talented Premature Babies:
Pablo Picasso
Isaac Newton
Albert Einstein
Charles Darwin
Renoir
John Keats
Franklin Roosevelt
Stevie Wonder
Many, if not all, of Mark Twain novels and
stories were directly tied to his life experiences.
His earliest life experiences, specifically his
exposure to slaves and slavery, are brought to
life in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In many ways Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn is autobiographical.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Although the Missouri he grew up in never
joined the Confederacy, it was a world in which
slavery was accepted and practiced by most
white families… Sam's parents owned slaves,
his Uncle John did too.
In fact, slavery was defended by all of
Missouri’s public institutions, including the
churches.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
In Twain’s Notebook #35 he writes:
“In those slave-holding days the whole
community was agreed as to one thingthe awful sacredness of slave property.”
“It shows that that strange thing, the conscience
- the unerring monitor - can be trained to
approve any wild thing you want it to approve if
you begin its education early & stick to it.”
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Unlike many Missourians, Twain left Missouri in
his teens and traveled to several Northern States
that frowned upon Slavery and the hatred that
fueled it.
Sam’s teenage travels… 2,000+ miles
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
As he matured, he came to realize the wrongs
that he had unknowingly been a part of and
through his writings he exposed the wrongs that
he had seen committed.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
In Following the Equator, he says:
“When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a lump of
iron-ore at a slave-man in anger, for merely doing
something awkwardly- as if that were a crime. It bounded
from the man’s skull, and the man fell and never spoke
again. He was dead in an hour… Nobody in the village
approved of that murder, but of course no one said much
about it.”
(Chapter 38)
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
His association with Slavery left him with a
legacy of guilt, guilt that he tried to lessen
through acts of charity. He donated money and
made special appearances at fundraising events
for numerous African American Churches,
Institutes, and Associations. He also supported
individuals.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
In 1885, the year Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn was released, he anonymously paid the
tuition for Warner T. McGuinn, a struggling
African American law student at Yale Law
School.
In a letter to Yale’s Law School Dean, he noted:
“We have ground the manhood out of them, &
the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay
for it.”
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is powerful
because of it’s realism. The situations, the
topics, the conversations, and the dialects he
uses in those conversations all come from
Twain’s unique life experiences.
Jim’s words and the way he speaks are all
tied to Twain’s childhood…
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life
“He heard his first slave voices before the age
of four, and sought them out through the rest
of his childhood and beyond.”
“…no human voices, save his own mother’s,
caught his imagination quite like those of the
Negro slaves…”
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
“Those voices spoke in a way different from the
people in his family: quick, delicious, throbbing
with urgencies half-named, half-encoded. They
conjured mind-pictures: lightning bolts,
apparitions from the spirit world, chariots
swooping down from heaven… the slave voices
treated language as a cherished creature, to be
passed around, partaken of…”
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
One of the slave voices that influenced Sam’s life
was a middle aged slave known to him as
“Uncle Dan’l”
He’d later recall the “privileged nights” he, his
cousins & the slave children clustered at Dan’l’s
feet to hear him tell his thunderous stories.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
“He has served me well, these many, many
years…spiritually I have had his welcome
company… & have staged him in books as his own
name and as “Jim”…
It was on the farm that I got my strong liking
for his race and my appreciation of… its fine
qualities.”
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took Twain
8 years to write. Between manuscript 1 and 2,
he made more than 1,700 revisions. 88 percent
of these revisions being: word changes,
spelling, punctuation and adding emphasis. He
used the words he used for a reason.
The “N-Word” appears 219 times in the novel
and its usage is deliberate.
"The difference between the almost right
word and the right word is really a large
matter – it's the difference between the
lightning bug and the lightning."
-Mark Twain
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
The “N-Word” appears 219 times for two
reasons.
1. Its usage is historically correct. That is
how white people referred to AfricanAmericans in that time period.
2. It shows/screams at us how wrong
and hurtful that mindset was.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
As the novel progresses, Huck matures and
realizes the wrongs of the slavery society he’s
grown up in; much like Twain himself did.
Huck’s decision to reject that society’s values
and “go to Hell,” rather than betray his friend
Jim is one of the novel’s most powerful
moments.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Huck discovers "you can't pray a lie" and that
helping Jim is the right thing to do -- even if
society's most pious and learned insist that
aiding a runaway is perverted and wicked.
Understanding Huckleberry Finn
Twain once described the novel as:
"a book of mine where a sound heart and a
deformed conscience come into collision and
conscience suffers a defeat." He also once said:
“My books are simply autobiographies”
and in many ways Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn is just that…
In summary…
I am not a
Racist.
Now… back to
my life story.
Many of Twain’s characters, including Huckleberry Finn,
were a product of his childhood experiences in Hannibal.
Sam’s family moved to nearby Hannibal, Missouri in 1839,
where he’d enjoy his boyhood in the presence of the broad
Mississippi River.
Location, Location, Location
Hannibal was the center of America at a time
when America was making the transition from
East to West. Sam had a very unique, front row
seat to civilization… Immigrants, Merchants,
Speculators, Gamblers, Thieves, Politicians,
Preachers, Runaways & Indians… he saw it all
on the river front and he soaked it all in.
The Great Frontier
The West is largely unsettled by
Americans.
United States in 1835
Location, Location, Location
Because of Hannibal’s River-side location and
America’s Westward expansion, Sam would
experience a very diverse group of individuals
or as Ron Powers’ notes in Mark Twain, a Life:
“…a continuing vaudeville of floating humanity.”
“When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or
biography I generally take a warm personal
interest in him, for the reason that I have
known him before--met him on the river.”
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Location, Location, Location
The education that Sam would receive in
Hannibal from the age of four to the age of
seventeen would come through loud and clear
in his novels:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
From here I would go on to describe his
childhood, education, teenage travels, etc…
Feedback is welcomed, please e-mail me at:
[email protected]