Puddn’head Wilson
Dawson’s Landing
 P.1: “In 1830 it was a snug little
collection of modest one and two-story
frame dwellings whose whitewashed
exteriors were almost concealed from
sight by climbing tangles of rose vines,
honeysuckles, and morning-glories.”
 “a garden in front fenced with white
palings”
“I wish I owned half that dog”
Pudd’nhead: p. 4
black
white
mulatto
mulatto
white
quadroon
quadroon
white
octoroon
octoroon
white
quintroon
mulatto
black
Sambo, griffe
sambo
black
(Mongroon)
mongroon
black
black
Racial Calculus
 “Phipps was designated
as ‘black’ in her birth
certificate in
accordance with a 1790
state law which
declared anyone with at
least one-thirty-second
‘Negro blood’ to be
black” (1).
To “wash the African stain from
one’s blood” required…
 1796: John Stedman: 1/16 African, or
three generations of whites, erased
“blackness”
 1801: Julien-Joseph Virey: 1/32 still
consituted “blackness”
 Moreau de Saint-Mery (Santo Domingo):
any more than 1/512 African blood
constituted “blackness”
Racial Calculus
 By the nineteenth century, American law
declared that “one drop” of African blood kept a
person from being white.
Racial portraits
 “Glory”: 34, 41
 Codes of behavior: stealing, dueling
(71).
Washing
 Herman Melville, Moby Dick: “As though
a white man were anything more
dignified than a whitewashed negro”
 Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We may yet find
a rose-water that will wash the negro
white”
The Slave’s Friend (abolitionist journal)
 “the chestnut has a dark skin…But its
kernel is all white and sweet. The apple,
though it looks so pretty, has many little
black grains at the heart…”
 “Now little boys and girls can’t be
abolitionists until they get rid of all these
black grains in their hearts.”
A Review of The Scarlet Letter
 “the language of [Hawthorne], like patent
blacking, ‘would not soil the whitest
linen,’ and yet the composition itself,
would suffice, is well laid on, to Ethiopize
the snowiest conscience that ever sat
like a swan upon that mirror of heaven, a
Christian maiden’s imagination.”
Tombstone inscription, 1780
 Here lies the best of slaves
 Now turning into dust
 Caesar the Ethiopian craves
 A place among the just.
 His faithful soul is fled
 To realms of heavenly light,
 And by the blood that Jesus shed
 Is changed from Black to White.
Pudd’nhead Wilson
“It rained all day long, and
rained hard, apparently trying
its best to wash that sootblackened town white, but of
course not succeeding” (105).
Passing
 Certain clues were asserted to be a
means of detecting those suspected of
“passing”
 --fingernails
 --whites of the eyes
Pudd’nhead Wilson
Roxy says, “’Ain’t nigger
enough in him to show in his
finger-nails, en dat takes
mighty little—yit dey’s
enough to paint his soul’”
(87).
“slave and black became
synonyms”
 After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “the
presumption was that people with black
skins were slaves unless they could
prove they were free” (Kenneth Stampp).
 Work performed, social status, economic
potential came to be defined in terms of
color.
The accusations against persons lynched were:



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

41 per cent for felonious assault
19.2 per cent for rape
6.1 per cent for attempted rape
4.9 per cent for robbery and theft
1.8 per cent for insult to white persons
22.7 per cent for miscellaneous offenses or no
offense at all
 11.5 In the last category are all sorts of trivial
“offenses” such as “disputing with a white man,”
attempting to register to vote, “unpopularity”,
self-defense, testifying against a white man,
“asking a white woman in marriage”, and
“peeping in a window.”
Still in the 1850s…
When African-Americans wore
make-up, it was viewed as an
attempt to look “white”
A journal states that these
“Beautiful black and brown
faces…assume unnatural tints,
like the vivid hue of painted
corpses”
 In the minstrel show white  During MT's times most
white commentary on
entertainers put on
blackface and "imitated" or minstrelsy assume its
accuracy, its essentially
"caricatured" slaves in the
faithful imitation of AfricanSouth and ex-slaves in the American speech, singing
North.
and dancing.
Blackface minstrelsy
 European immigrants
mocked AfricanAmerican class
pretensions by
imitating slaves on
stage
 These minstrel plays
allowed immigrant to
learn “white” behavior
by mocking and
rejecting the other
(“black”).
Pudd’nhead Wilson
“The town was bitter against the
unfortunates, and for the first
few days after the murder they
were in constant danger of
being lynched” (120-121).
 According to the Tuskegee Institute
figures, between the years 1882 and
1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the
United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293
white.
 The largest number of lynchings
occurred in 1892. Of the 230 persons
lynched that year, 161 were Negroes
and sixty-nine whites.
Ida B. Wells

In 1892, when lynching reached high-water mark, there were 241 persons
lynched. The entire number is divided among the following States:













Alabama.........
Arkansas........
California......
Florida.........
Georgia.........
Idaho...........
Illinois........
Kansas..........
Kentucky........
Louisiana.......
Maryland........
Mississippi.....
Missouri........

Of this number, 160 were of negro descent. Four of them were lynched in New
York, Ohio, and Kansas; the remainder were murdered in the
22
25
3
11
17
8
1
3
9
29
1
16
6
Montana..........
New York.........
North Carolina...
North Dakota.....
Ohio.............
South Carolina...
Tennessee........
Texas............
Virginia.........
West Virginia....
Wyoming..........
Arizona Ter......
Oklahoma.........
4
1
5
1
3
5
28
15
7
5
9
3
2
Ida B. Wells

South. Five of this number were females. The charges for which they
were lynched cover a wide range. They are as follows:



Rape..................
Murder................
46
58
Attempted rape...... 11
Suspected robbery...
4






Rioting...............
Race Prejudice........
No cause given........
Incendiarism..........
Robbery...............
Assault and battery...
3
6
4
6
6
1
Larceny.............
1
Self-defense........ 1
Insulting women.... 2
Desperadoes......... 6
Fraud...............
1
Attempted murder....
2

No offense stated, boy and girl.............. 2
 http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
Other jokes
 “Ownership”
 Roxy: self-sale papers
 Will
 Twins: “ours” 34
 Roxy: bank money
 Theft: knife
 Tom: slave=no prison
Clothing
 Babies
 Tom and the “old deformed negro bell
ringer” (27)
 Tom’s disguise as a girl (gender is
essential even if race isn’t).
 Roxy’s disguise as a man.
It is more than a little amusing,
though, to one who knows
experimentally the autocracy of a
"black mammy," to read how Roxy,
after the exchange, was surprised
to see how steadily and surely the
awe which had kept her tongue
reverent, her manner humble
towards her young master, was
transferring itself to her speech
and manner toward the usurper.
Roxy must have been a mighty