You can read Part 1 of my reflection of Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain here.
What Twain finds on his journey into the deep south
is not just the language differences between North and South, not just the
cultural differences that had always and still to this day exist, but psychological
differences. As the nation psychologically
suffered a deep wound from the Civil War, the South as loser, suffered the
brunt of the change. The North changed
in that it became more industrial; the South changed in that it developed
demons.
IN the North one hears
the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as
once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved
of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six
gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly
five--were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to
one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of
conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it
will remain so but a little while. If
you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little
of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them
years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.
The case is very
different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every
lady you meet saw the war. The war is
the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in itis vivid and constant;
the interest in other topics is fleeting.
Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues
going, when nearly any other topic would fail.
In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things 'placed' as
having happened since the waw; or du 'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right
aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or
aftah the waw. It shows how intimately
every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better
idea of what a vastand comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get
by readingbooks at the fireside.
At a club one evening,
a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside--
'You notice, of course,
that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't
anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest
for us. And there is another reason: In the war, each of us, in his own person,
seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience; as a
consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will
certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war--and
out he comes with it. Of course that brings the talk back to the war. You may try all you want to, to keep other
subjects before the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be
but one result: the most random topic would load every man up with war
reminiscences, and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop
presently, because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've got a
crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning to fetch out.'
The poet was sitting
some little distance away; and presently he began to speak--about the moon.
The gentleman who had
been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:' 'There, the moon is far enough from
the seat of war, but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody
about the war; in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.'
The poet was saying he
had noticed something which was a surprise to him; had had the impression that
down here, toward the equator, the moonlight was much stronger and brighter
than up North; had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans, many
years ago, the moon--
Interruption from the
other end of the room--
'Let me explain that.
Reminds me of an anecdote. Everything is
changed since the war, for better or for worse; but you'll find people down
here born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. There
was an old negro woman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her presence, "What
a wonderful moon you have down here!" She sighed and said, "Ah, bless
yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo' de waw!" '
-from Chpt XLV, “Southern Sports”
All
excerpts taken from Literature Network.
That “everything has changed since the war,” is the
central contrast from the two halves of the memoir. People have changed, the mood has changed,
the culture has changed, the landscape has changed. Twain makes one of the most insightful
observations of southern culture, pre and post Civil War. The pre-Civil War South was built on an
idealism largely traced to Walter Scott’s novels.
Then comes Sir Walter
Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of
progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and
phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded
systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs,
sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished
society. He did measureless harm; more
real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most
of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all
of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully
as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization
of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott
Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense,
progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated
speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of
charity ought to be buried. But for the
Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to
Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of
modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further
advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter
that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a
Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value
these bogus decorations. For it was he
that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste,
and pride and pleasure in them. Enough
is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions
of Sir Walter.
Sir Walter had so large
a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is
in great measure responsible for the war.
It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should
have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument
might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the
American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but
the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather
more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or
person.
-from
Chpt XLVI, “Enchantments and Enchanters”
And then comes the most remarkable turn of
events. Twain arrives to his home town,
the very town where he dreamt of piloting river boats in his youth.
DURING my three days'
stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for
in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in
the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime
I had been seeing those faces as they are now.
-from Chpt LV, “A Vendetta and Other Things”
The memoir here is at the climax of the
narrative. Twain has journeyed back to
himself and recalls a place where once the town jail stood. It had burned down.
THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and
so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy
Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?'
Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of
time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the
calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium
tremens and spontaneous combustion. When
I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The
calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless
whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about
his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to
relish speaking of it.
-from
Chpt LVI, “A Question of Law”
A town drunk who was caught in a fire. But Twain knows more about that fire and the
drunk’s death than anyone else.
That tramp was
wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and
begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a
troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging
and annoying him. I assisted; but at
last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with
a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such
sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away
and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as
to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An
hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by
the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title.
A group of boys, of which Twain is a part, harass
the drunkard, but ultimately Twain gives the tramp some matches for his
pipe.
At two in the morning,
the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the
rest. The tramp had used his matches
disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the
room had caught. When I reached the
ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed
with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron
bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp;
he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the
light at his back. That marshal could
not be found, and he had the only key. A
battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the
door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering,
and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too
strong; they did not yield. It was said
that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and
that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this,
I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading
through the bars was seen by others, not by me.
With those matches, the drunk accidently set the
jail on fire and he stuck behind the bars was burnt to death.
I saw that face, so
situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as
guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he
might burn himself up with them. I had
not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were
found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my
memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves
distressed me then. If anybody spoke of
that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be
said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected;
and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it
often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks,
gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me
shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody
dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder
will out!'For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo.
He believed to be guilty of the man’s death. He had harassed him; he’d given the matches
to a drunkard; he knew the drunk was incapable of being careful. So the journey back for Twain is to find that
he was just as immoral as any other, that at the root of what was innocence
harbored sin, and that sin was there all along ready to blossom into full scale
immorality. The Mississippi nurtured innocence
and sin alike, a source of joy and a source of gloom. It was the great bifurcator of the country
and also of the soul.
