Book 31 - Pudd'nhead Wilson - Mark Twain
Roxy, a black slave woman, who due to generations of breeding with white men is only 1/16 African, gives birth to a boy, Chambers. Chambers is the son of yet another white southern aristocrat, making him 1/32 black, but no less a slave than Roxy. In fact, he has so little African blood that he very closely resembles the master's son, Tom, who was born on the same day as Chambers.
Roxy, fearing that Chambers will be "sold down the river" into what is commonly regarded as a worse life as a slave on a large plantation, switches Chambers with Tom, and due to a fortuitous replacement of the other house slaves and the death of Tom's mother, is able to raise the two children in their alternate roles. Chambers, now known as "Tom," grows to be a spoiled brat who has little regard for people, much less slaves, and after dropping out of school, wrestles with a gambling addiction which leads him to being disinherited from the family fortune more than once. Meanwhile, the real Tom, now known as "Chambers," lives the life of a slave, and is forced not only to simply endure his Tom's sadistic personality, but being the stronger of the two boys is often called on to fight his master's battles.
Luigi and Angelo, a pair of identical twins who claim to have traveled the world performing in side-shows arrive in town. Initially they enthrall the townsfolk. However once Judge Driscoll, Tom's uncle and adoptive father, is found killed by a knife owned by the twins - with the twins standing over the body, they are accused of the murder. It is only the forensic skills of Pudd'nhead Wilson that allow not only the identity of the real killer, but also the truth about "Tom" and "Chambers" to be revealed.
This book, while set in the South 10-30 years before the Civil War, was actually written about 30 years after, during Twain's "dark period." The book has somewhat of a cynical tone. No one simply lives happily ever after. Roxy gains her freedom, and manages to work and save money, only to lose it all in a failed bank, and to be sold back into slavery by her son. She escapes, and at the end is receiving a stipend from the real Tom, but her spirit is broken, and she lives out the rest of her days in sorrow. "Tom" escapes the gallows, but perhaps meets a worse fate. "Chambers" returns to his "rightful" station, but after years of living as a slave cannot adapt.
My edition of the book also contains "Those Extraordinary Twins." Twain tells us that when he first started the story, it was a farce about a pair of conjoined twins who each had their own head, shoulders and arms, but shared the rest of their body between the two of them. Twain claims that over the course of writing the story, another story emerged, a tragedy, and he was forced to perform a "literary Caesarean operation" to extricate the farce and leave the tragedy. The excised story, "Those Extraordinary Twins," shares many of the same characters in name, but is quite a different story. The fact that the twins are conjoined rather than identical make them the center of attention, not just auxiliary characters, and many principal characters from Pudd'nhead Wilson fade into the background. Twain humorously explores the problems with two distinct personalities sharing the same body. One is religious while the other is not. One is a teetotaler, while the other freely imbibes. If one of them is convicted of a crime, is the other guilty? While this is initially entertaining, Twain explores this with the same heavy hand as he did with Tom and Huck trying to free Jim in Huckleberry Finn, making the joke a bit tired after a while. The story is short, however, and therefore still quite funny.
It is interesting to compare and contrast the two stories, as together they offer an insight into the evolutionary nature of Twain's writing process. They are both good reads, so if you choose to read Pudd'nhead Wilson, I recommend that you find a version that has both stories (mine is Penguin Classics), so that you can see the differences.
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