remember it very well, though I was but two and a half years old at the
time. The family packed up everything and started in wagons for
Hannibal, on the Mississippi, thirty miles away. Toward night, when they
camped and counted up the children, one was missing. I was the one. I
had been left behind. Parents ought always to count the children before
they start. I was having a good enough time playing by myself until I
found that the doors were fastened and that there was a grisly deep
silence brooding over the place. I knew, then, that the family were
gone, and that they had forgotten me. I was well frightened, and I made
all the noise I could, but no one was near and it did no good. I spent
the afternoon in captivity and was not rescued until the gloaming had
fallen and the place was alive with ghosts.
My brother Henry was six months old at that time. I used to remember his
walking into a fire outdoors when he was a week old. It was remarkable
in me to remember a thing like that, which occurred when I was so young.
And it was still more remarkable that I should cling to the delusion,
for thirty years, that I _did_ remember it--for of course it never
happened; he would not have been able to walk at that age. If I had
stopped to reflect, I should not have burdened my memory with that
impossible rubbish so long. It is believed by many people that an
impression deposited in a child's memory within the first two years of
its life cannot remain there five years, but that is an error. The
incident of Benvenuto Cellini and the salamander must be accepted as
authentic and trustworthy; and then that remarkable and indisputable
instance in the experience of Helen Keller--however, I will speak of
that at another time. For many years I believed that I remembered
helping my grandfather drink his whiskey toddy when I was six weeks old,
but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my
memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could
remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are
decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the
things that happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all
have to do it.
My uncle, John A. Quarles, was a farmer, and his place was in the
country four miles from Florida. He had eight children, and fifteen or
twenty negroes, and was also fortunate in other ways. Particularly in
his character. I have not come across a better man than he was. I was
his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after
we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old. I have
never consciously used him or his wife in a book, but his farm has come
very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In "Huck Finn" and in
"Tom Sawyer Detective" I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six
hundred miles, but it was no trouble, it was not a very large farm;
five hundred acres, perhaps, but I could have done it if it had been
twice as large. And as for the morality of it, I cared nothing for that;
I would move a State if the exigencies of literature required it.
It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. The
house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting
it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of
that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me
cry to think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig, wild and tame turkeys,
ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants,
partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat
cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on
the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, pease, Irish
potatoes, sweet-potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber";
watermelons, musk-melons, cantaloups--all fresh from the garden--apple
pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't
remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the
main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance,
the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken.
These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no
one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The
North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross
superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern
corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the
Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and
this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and
Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience
that is speaking. In Europe it is imagined that the custom of serving
various kinds of bread blazing hot is "American," but that is too broad
a spread; it is custom in the South, but is much less than that in the
North. In the North and in Europe hot bread is considered unhealthy.
This is probably another fussy superstition, like the European
superstition that ice-water is unhealthy. Europe does not need
ice-water, and does not drink it; and yet, notwithstanding this, its
word for it is better than ours, because it describes it, whereas ours
doesn't. Europe calls it "iced" water. Our word describes water made
from melted ice--a drink which we have but little acquaintance with.
It seem a pity that the world should throw away so many good things
merely because they are unwholesome. I doubt if God has given us any
refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes.
Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every
eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady
reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get
for it. How strange it is; it is like paying out your whole fortune for
a cow that has gone dry.
The farmhouse stood in the middle of a very large yard, and the yard was
fenced on three sides with rails and on the rear side with high palings;
against these stood the smokehouse; beyond the palings was the orchard;
beyond the orchard were the negro quarter and the tobacco-fields. The
front yard was entered over a stile, made of sawed-off logs of graduated
heights; I do not remember any gate. In a corner of the front yard were
a dozen lofty hickory-trees and a dozen black-walnuts, and in the
nutting season riches were to be gathered there.
Down a piece, abreast the house, stood a little log cabin against the
rail fence; and there the woody hill fell sharply away, past the barns,
the corn-crib, the stables and the tobacco-curing house, to a limpid
brook which sang along over its gravelly bed and curved and frisked in
and out and here and there and yonder in the deep shade of overhanging
foliage and vines--a divine place for wading, and it had swimming-pools,
too, which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us. For
we were little Christian children, and had early been taught the value
of forbidden fruit.
In the little log cabin lived a bedridden white-headed slave woman whom
we visited daily, and looked upon with awe, for we believed she was
upwards of a thousand years old and had talked with Moses. The younger
negroes credited these statistics, and had furnished them to us in good
faith. We accommodated all the details which came to us about her; and
so we believed that she had lost her health in the long desert trip
coming out of Egypt, and had never been able to get it back again. She
had a round bald place on the crown of her head, and we used to creep
around and gaze at it in reverent silence, and reflect that it was
caused by fright through seeing Pharaoh drowned. We called her "Aunt"
Hannah, Southern fashion. She was superstitious like the other negroes;
also, like them, she was deeply religious. Like them, she had great
faith in prayer, and employed it in all ordinary exigencies, but not in
cases where a dead certainty of result was urgent. Whenever witches were
around she tied up the remnant of her wool in little tufts, with white
thread, and this promptly made the witches impotent.
All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we
were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a
modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and
condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of,
and which rendered complete fusion impossible. We had a faithful and
affectionate good friend, ally and adviser in "Uncle Dan'l," a
middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro quarter,
whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and
simple and knew no guile. He has served me well, these many, many years.
I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I
have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged
him in books under his own name and as "Jim," and carted him all
around--to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the
Desert of Sahara in a balloon--and he has endured it all with the
patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was
on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation
of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have
stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment.
The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that
there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing;
the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us
that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter
need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind--and then
the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves
themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.
In Hannibal we seldom saw a slave misused; on the farm, never.
There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched
this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not
have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all
these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired
from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of
Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends,
half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery
spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was,
perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping,
laughing--it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day,
I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had
been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand
it, and _wouldn't_ she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes,
and her lip trembled, and she said something like this--
"Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and
that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and
I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I
must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would
understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad."
It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home,
and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large
words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective
work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was
capable with her tongue to the last--especially when a meanness or an
injustice roused her spirit. She has come handy to me several times in
my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer's "Aunt Polly." I fitted her
out with a dialect, and tried to think up other improvements for her,
but did not find any. I used Sandy once, also; it was in "Tom Sawyer"; I
tried to get him to whitewash the fence, but it did not work. I do not
remember what name I called him by in the book.
I can see the farm yet, with perfect clearness. I can see all its
belongings, all its details; the family room of the house, with a
"trundle" bed in one corner and a spinning-wheel in another--a wheel
whose rising and falling wail, heard from a distance, was the
mournfulest of all sounds to me, and made me homesick and low-spirited,
and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead: the
vast fireplace, piled high, on winter nights, with flaming hickory logs
from whose ends a sugary sap bubbled out but did not go to waste, for we
scraped it off and ate it; the lazy cat spread out on the rough
hearthstones, the drowsy dogs braced against the jambs and blinking; my
aunt in one chimney-corner knitting, my uncle in the other smoking his
corn-cob pipe; the slick and carpetless oak floor faintly mirroring the
dancing flame-tongues and freckled with black indentations where
fire-coals had popped out and died a leisurely death; half a dozen
children romping in the background twilight; "split"-bottomed chairs
here and there, some with rockers; a cradle--out of service, but
waiting, with confidence; in the early cold mornings a snuggle of
children, in shirts and chemises, occupying the hearthstone and
procrastinating--they could not bear to leave that comfortable place and
go out on the wind-swept floor-space between the house and kitchen where
the general tin basin stood, and wash.
Along outside of the front fence ran the country road; dusty in the
summer-time, and a good place for snakes--they liked to lie in it and
sun themselves; when they were rattlesnakes or puff adders, we killed
them: when they were black snakes, or racers, or belonged to the fabled
"hoop" breed, we fled, without shame; when they were "house snakes" or
"garters" we carried them home and put them in Aunt Patsy's work-basket
for a surprise; for she was prejudiced against snakes, and always when
she took the basket in her lap and they began to climb out of it it
disordered her mind. She never could seem to get used to them; her
opportunities went for nothing. And she was always cold toward bats,
too, and could not bear them; and yet I think a bat is as friendly a
bird as there is. My mother was Aunt Patsy's sister, and had the same
wild superstitions. A bat is beautifully soft and silky: I do not know
any creature that is pleasanter to the touch, or is more grateful for
caressings, if offered in the right spirit. I know all about these
coleoptera, because our great cave, three miles below Hannibal, was
multitudinously stocked with them, and often I brought them home to
amuse my mother with. It was easy to manage if it was a school day,
because then I had ostensibly been to school and hadn't any bats. She
was not a suspicious person, but full of trust and confidence; and when
I said "There's something in my coat pocket for you," she would put her
hand in. But she always took it out again, herself; I didn't have to
tell her. It was remarkable, the way she couldn't learn to like private
bats.
I think she was never in the cave in her life; but everybody else went
there. Many excursion parties came from considerable distances up and
down the river to visit the cave. It was miles in extent, and was a
tangled wilderness of narrow and lofty clefts and passages. It was an
easy place to get lost in; anybody could do it--including the bats. I
got lost in it myself, along with a lady, and our last candle burned
down to almost nothing before we glimpsed the search-party's lights
winding about in the distance.
"Injun Joe" the half-breed got lost in there once, and would have
starved to death if the bats had run short. But there was no chance of
that; there were myriads of them. He told me all his story. In the book
called "Tom Sawyer" I starved him entirely to death in the cave, but
that was in the interest of art; it never happened. "General" Gaines,
who was our first town drunkard before Jimmy Finn got the place, was
lost in there for the space of a week, and finally pushed his
handkerchief out of a hole in a hilltop near Saverton, several miles
down the river from the cave's mouth, and somebody saw it and dug him
out. There is nothing the matter with his statistics except the
handkerchief. I knew him for years, and he hadn't any. But it could have
been his nose. That would attract attention.
Beyond the road where the snakes sunned themselves was a dense young
thicket, and through it a dim-lighted path led a quarter of a mile; then
out of the dimness one emerged abruptly upon a level great prairie which
was covered with wild strawberry-plants, vividly starred with prairie
pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests. The strawberries were
fragrant and fine, and in the season we were generally there in the
crisp freshness of the early morning, while the dew-beads still sparkled
upon the grass and the woods were ringing with the first songs of the
birds.
Down the forest slopes to the left were the swings. They were made of
bark stripped from hickory saplings. When they became dry they were
dangerous. They usually broke when a child was forty feet in the air,
and this was why so many bones had to be mended every year. I had no
ill-luck myself, but none of my cousins escaped. There were eight of
them, and at one time and another they broke fourteen arms among them.
But it cost next to nothing, for the doctor worked by the year--$25 for
the whole family. I remember two of the Florida doctors, Chowning and
Meredith. They not only tended an entire family for $25 a year, but
furnished the medicines themselves. Good measure, too. Only the largest
persons could hold a whole dose. Castor-oil was the principal beverage.
The dose was half a dipperful, with half a dipperful of New Orleans
molasses added to help it down and make it taste good, which it never
did. The next standby was calomel; the next, rhubarb; and the next,
jalap. Then they bled the patient, and put mustard-plasters on him. It
was a dreadful system, and yet the death-rate was not heavy. The calomel
was nearly sure to salivate the patient and cost him some of his teeth.
There were no dentists. When teeth became touched with decay or were
otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do: he fetched his
tongs and dragged them out. If the jaw remained, it was not his fault.
Doctors were not called, in cases of ordinary illness; the family's
grandmother attended to those. Every old woman was a doctor, and
gathered her own medicines in the woods, and knew how to compound doses
that would stir the vitals of a cast-iron dog. And then there was the
"Indian doctor"; a grave savage, remnant of his tribe, deeply read in
the mysteries of nature and the secret properties of herbs; and most
backwoodsmen had high faith in his powers and could tell of wonderful
cures achieved by him. In Mauritius, away off yonder in the solitudes of
the Indian Ocean, there is a person who answers to our Indian doctor of
the old times. He is a negro, and has had no teaching as a doctor, yet
there is one disease which he is master of and can cure, and the doctors
can't. They send for him when they have a case. It is a child's disease
of a strange and deadly sort, and the negro cures it with a herb
medicine which he makes, himself, from a prescription which has come
down to him from his father and grandfather. He will not let any one see
it. He keeps the secret of its components to himself, and it is feared
that he will die without divulging it; then there will be consternation
in Mauritius. I was told these things by the people there, in 1896.
We had the "faith doctor," too, in those early days--a woman. Her
specialty was toothache. She was a farmer's old wife, and lived five
miles from Hannibal. She would lay her hand on the patient's jaw and say
"Believe!" and the cure was prompt. Mrs. Utterback. I remember her very
well. Twice I rode out there behind my mother, horseback, and saw the
cure performed. My mother was the patient.
Dr. Meredith removed to Hannibal, by and by, and was our family
physician there, and saved my life several times. Still, he was a good
man and meant well. Let it go.
I was always told that I was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and
uncertain child, and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the
first seven years of my life. I asked my mother about this, in her old
age--she was in her 88th year--and said:
"I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me?"
"Yes, the whole time."
"Afraid I wouldn't live?"
After a reflective pause--ostensibly to think out the facts--
"No--afraid you would."
It sounds like a plagiarism, but it probably wasn't. The country
schoolhouse was three miles from my uncle's farm. It stood in a clearing
in the woods, and would hold about twenty-five boys and girls. We
attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week,
in summer, walking to it in the cool of the morning by the forest paths,
and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought
their dinners in baskets--corn-dodger, buttermilk and other good
things--and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is
the part of my education which I look back upon with the most
satisfaction. My first visit to the school was when I was seven. A
strapping girl of fifteen, in the customary sunbonnet and calico dress,
asked me if I "used tobacco"--meaning did I chew it. I said, no. It
roused her scorn. She reported me to all the crowd, and said--
"Here is a boy seven years old who can't chaw tobacco."
By the looks and comments which this produced, I realized that I was a
degraded object; I was cruelly ashamed of myself. I determined to
reform. But I only made myself sick; I was not able to learn to chew
tobacco. I learned to smoke fairly well, but that did not conciliate
anybody, and I remained a poor thing, and characterless. I longed to be
respected, but I never was able to rise. Children have but little
charity for each other's defects.