“Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published” writes Guy Adams in his article, “After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All,” The Independent, May, 2010. At the time of his death in 1920, Twain left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs and notes with instructions: Do no publish until 100 years have passed! In November of this year, the University of California-Berkeley (holders of the Twain manuscript) will publish the first volume of the author’s autobiography.

Twain knew how to sell books in his day and knows, even now, a hundred years later, how to create a ruckus in a market-driven world, some have joked.

Why the long wait? Or is this the question to ask?

Scholar Michael Shelden, quoted in Adams’ article, suggests Twain had a “public image” to protect; his private comments on U.S. imperialism would hurt that image. (Twain made public and unpopular statements about President Theodore Roosevelt during his lifetime). Nonetheless, Shelden suggests that in the autobiography, Twain expresses “doubts about God” and he “questions the imperial mission of the U.S. in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.” Twain, Shelden continues, takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there. A possibility.

I want to know more about Twain’s private comments about slavery. I know of Old Jim, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And Jim is hard for a Black reader to accept as anything other than a caricature of liberal wishful thinking when it comes to Black Americans.

New York Times writer, Larry Rohter, notes that Twain’s “opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines” was “well known even in his own time,” “Dead for a Century, Twain Says What He Meant.” But Twain, in the autobiography, Rohter argues, “makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep.” Twain refers to American troops as “our uniformed assassins” and describes their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.” “Uniformed assassins,” I presume, would be politically incorrect in any era but “weaponless savages”? If, Rohter suggests, Twain made these comments in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan he would lose his title as the “most American of American writers.”

Twain, the “most American of American writers” was adamant about his hatred for imperialism and imperialist presidents but Twain on slavery, racism, to be specific, the handmaid of imperialism - Rohter writes this. Twain confesses: “‘in my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it.’”

Well, at least one critic, Malcolm Jones, writing in the Grunta: Literary Magazine questions the Twain hysteria. We have been told to wait a hundred years for the real Twain to speak to us; however, Jones asks - where does this “most American of American writers” belong in American literature? “You can’t imagine American literature without him - but once that’s established, where precisely does he belong?” (“Where do we put Mark Twain?”). Not with Hawthorne or Melville, Jones chirps. That “seems all wrong.” Should he be placed in the company of other U.S. fiction writers? No, he states. That, too, seems off.”

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are both novels about boyhood, but otherwise they could not be more different (sometimes it seems as though he wrote Huck to make amends for Tom Sawyer, a novel about the upper South in the mid-19th century that says almost nothing about slavery).

“Almost nothing about slavery” - but we have this immortalized character, Jim, sometimes referred to, under the American collective breath, of course, as “Nigger Jim.”

That Mark Twain disliked the idea of shipping boat loads of good Christian missionaries to rescue the souls of African barbarians warrants a point a two for this ‘most American of American writers” only if you consider that some secular liberals have reached that conclusion today. They do not want to save souls of Africans but, instead, establish schools, complete with the trappings of Western, preferably, American culture.

But Twain as the “most American of American writers”? I agree. American, if by American you mean what philosopher Slavoj Zizak calls the “naïve progressive liberal,” the one who can see or talk about racism but who, nonetheless, can smell imperialism against the colored races miles away.

That title could not be granted to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is not as accessible these days for the average liberal and the efforts of the feminists have nearly removed him from the shelves. Chauvinist! American feminists see chauvinist!

But Racism - at home? Well, that has never been something Americans, in particular, liberals and academics want to look at head on.

So I understand why the release next month of the Autobiography of Mark Twain is causing a stir. The liberals and academics will have someone to hold up, someone from the past who shares their concerns about U.S. imperialism, and someone who, born in 1835, 30 years before the end of slavery, has little or “nothing” to say about slavery.

William Faulkner, to my knowledge, does not have an unedited autobiography hidden away on a university campus. But he has those novels, also barely read at colleges and universities in the U.S. and certainly avoided, for the most part, by liberals. The man’s writing, many argue, is “too difficult.” Granted, the long sentence, sometimes running a full page, and embedded with parenthetic phrases, fill the pages of most of his works. But, these critics do not really mean Faulkner’s sentence structure is the reason for putting his books aside - far aside, so far aside that college graduates, even English majors, are not required to struggle through anyone of his texts that confronts racism in the U.S. Rather, as I know from students I have taught in the past - Faulkner’s works makes white Americans “comfortable.” Twain, on the other hand, only makes sensitive Black folks uncomfortable. Who cares about sensitive Black folks?

Faulkner left behind what are for some questionable representations of Black Americans. We have with Faulkner the infamous Mammy - Mammy Dilsey - modeled after his actual and beloved Mammy Caroline. There is Joe Christmas whose murder of a white woman Faulkner tries to suggest had enough of the stresses of being Negro in America. Historian John Henrik Clarke once chided a predominantly Black audience about its acceptance of American movies’ good guy and bad guy dichotomy. Clarke stated: “You can’t deal with the fact that there are dramas in the world in which there’s not a good guy in the bunch.” Yet, the Southern from Mississippi, Faulkner, unlike his literary compatriots, remained in country; he did not, in others, go seeking another culture to claim as his own. He stayed in Oxford, Mississippi and wrote about racism in U.S. - head on.

If Twain’s Jim is the wished-for “happy,” non-threatening Negro in the American (U.S.) literary tradition, Charles Bon of Absalom! Absalom! Could be read as representing an early Malcolm, King, or Huey Newton.

Similar to another famous or infamous man, Bon is racially mixed but passes for white. However young, Charles Bon is under no illusion about Emancipation, and his challenge, albeit alone and isolated, to the social and political implications of a post-slavery nation-state, is ultimately shattered by the “echo of a shot.” [1]

His father, the infamous slaveholder, Col. Thomas Sutpen from a poor tenant farming family in Tidewater, Virginia, became Col. Sutpen and owner of Sutpen’s Mansion after acquiring wealth in Haiti just before stirrings of a Black revolution. The young Sutpen thought he has also acquired a white wife until he discovered her mixed heritage. He flees Haiti (with a few enslaved Haitians), leaving behind a mother and son, neither of whom could be a part of his “design.” Following the design, he returns to the South, to Mississippi, where he erects his mansion, establishes business with Haitian free-labor, and marries a woman who delivers an heir and a girl.

Years, later, Bon, having arrived in the U.S. per instructions and directions from his mother, encounters his half brother, Henry Sutpen. The younger brother is Bon’s ticket to the father, and ironically, his return to the plantation - but not as an enslaved Black. During the Civil War, as they fought side by side, Henry becomes mesmerized by Bon, the latter modeling himself in attire, posture, language after the older friend. Introduced to Henry’s sister, Bon feigns love for Judith.

A wedding is planned to occur after the end of the Civil War - until Col. Sutpen discovers Bon’s agenda. The colonial calls Henry to his tent on the battlefield. He cannot marry Judith; he is her brother. You are brothers.

The brothers talk, but Bon persists.

The war ends and Col. Sutpen again requests a meeting with his son. “‘His mother was part negro.’”

Part Negro! Here is Faulkner depicting the inheritance of that irrational fear that without thought mobilizes its practitioners to violence.

Henry could not “‘remember leaving the tent…He knew what he had to do…since he knew that he would do it’.”

Then the two of them, “brothers,” as they say, on their horses, halt before the gates of Sutpen’s Mansion.

You cannot enter, one says.

Who will stop me?

Silence.

“‘ - So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear.’”

The younger brother “doesn’t answer.” He does not want to do it. He is a nice guy, an innocent son, following orders, keeping the peace, fulfilling his duty as son, brother, husband and father-to-be.

Socially comforting, conciliatory, humorous winks from author to reader are absent here. No Huck Finn, to relieve his readers of discomfort, will suddenly appear here and chuckling: “I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once, there wasn’t no getting it out of him” (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). No, the reader is trapped in a small room here, where the lights are dimming rapidly, and it is becoming increasingly cold, “tomb-like.” There is no escape. No avoidance mechanism works here.

It is the blood - the mixing of the races and the inevitable dominance of the darker races that Americans cannot bear!

It is not enough to receive an education at Harvard, to idolize the Father(s), to appear and think with less differentiation because Faulkner shows it runs along the bi-ways and highways in the U.S. It is in its institutions, behind gated-communities, and it enforces law and order in urban communities. It is the law and order and the unlawful and disorder. It is the religious doctrines and ideology of one nation under God. It is the corporate media, Wall Street, and the White House.

It is the blood and it is in the blood!

Racism is deep in the “marrow” of U.S. traditions! Well-funded ideas of racial superiority, today, fuel the Tea Party and its affiliated white nationalist organizations as well as mobilized yesterday’s armies of capitalist crusades such as those Twain noted operating in Cuba or the Philippines. Yesterday - Asian and Latin American nations, slavery and colonization. Today, it is still unjust laws and indifference, silence. Incarcerated Black, Brown, and Red peoples, Agra-corporations in Africa and Haiti, and troops, tanks, aircraft, and drones used to subdue people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.

But it is not hard to understand why for liberals and academics Mark Twain is the man of the hour.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.