MARK TWAIN IN BLACKFACE-

MINSTREL FORM IN HUCKLEBERRY FINN

JOHN ASHMEAD, JR.

For some seventy years now we have lacked the fullest under­standing of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Critic after critic has praised the novel as a great American classic, and critic after critic has condemned the burlesque ending, the mock-heroic escape of Nig­ger Jim. Has some vital clue to the meaning of Huckleberry Finn been overlooked, forgotten with the passage of the native art form on which, I believe, the novel was modelled?

When the form of Huckleberry Finn is discussed at all it is call­ed, usually inaccurately and often contemptuously, "picaresque." I am excepting here a new and unclassifiable critical tendency to refer to the Mississippi River as some sort of river god who spiritually cleanses anybody who falls into his river. Even Old Possum Eliot, a Missouri boy himself, has a river theory: that since the river has no beginning or end-a debatable proposition-the book doesn't need design either.

So far as the term "picaresque" has any meaning at all, Huckle­berry Finn does not qualify. It is not from start to finish a loosely connected series of episodes, in true picaresque novel fashion, but rather a group of such episodes, inserted between a closely unified story of flight down the river, and the equally unified burlesque es­cape of the ending. Nor is it about the adventures of a rogue or near-rogue (picaro); rather, it is about two innocents, one white, one black-Ruck and Jim.

No, for a real understanding of the power of Huckleberry Finn -and it is one of the most powerful works in any literature-we need not turn to a worn-out, European form of novel. Close at hand, as if waiting for Mark Twain's instinctive adaptation, was the still fresh and vigorous native art form which he loved above all others, and which was, perhaps, the first inter-racial art form in any literature-the American minstrel show.

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Again and again, in the first version of Life on the Mississippi (1875), in Tom Sawyer (1876) and as late as 1906 (in a passage published in Mark Twain in Eruption) he refers to the striking im­pression produced on him by Hannibal's first minstrel show (probably in 1849) and he mentions the minstrel show which he and other Hannibal boys immediately staged in imitation.

In 1906 he wrote praise of "the genuine nigger show, the ex­travagant nigger show-the show which to me had no peer and whose peer has not yet arrived, in my experience .... " As late as 1908 he imagined at the Aldrich Memorial ceremonies the figure of Aldrich speaking the familiar introductory formula: "How is you tonight, Brer Bones? How is you feelin', Brer Tamorine? How's yo symptoms seem to segashuate dis ebenin'?"

Scattered throughout Mark Twain's works are such minstrel terms as breakdown, banjo, cake-walk, clog dancing and juba. He was fond of performing a typical minstrel act, a "crippled colored uncle" (probably some version of the old Jim Crow routine). We know that when he went to minstrel shows he went over and over again-he went repeatedly to see his beloved San Francisco Minstrels in New York in 1856. In Hannibal, the Comstock, San Francisco, New York, Hartford, New Orleans, Boston, London-even (perform­ed by amateurs) in Vienna in 1898, the minstrel show was available.

We should put aside any recollection of that travesty of the old­time minstrel show which occasionally appears today in movie short subjects, and which has given the term "minstrel" the meaning of "false to negro life." Mark Twain, originally a southerner, records his high opinion of the original minstrel show's portrayal of negro costume, speech and emotions. Records of minstrel actors show one buying clothing from a colored man he wished to mimic; another actor followed a Negro vvatermelon man a whole day in order to copy his gait accurately. And the best of the minstrel literature which has survived (much of it is forever lost) is of a surprisingly high quality.

Mark Twain's own interest in the minstrel show becomes the more significant when we recall that he did not care particularly for novels, or for the legitimate stage either (except as a means of mak­ingmoney). His scattered statements on the art of writing show that he paid little conscious attention to the construction of his

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works in general or of Huckleberry Finn in particular. What could be more natural, in view of his tastes and background, than an in­stinctive turning toward the art form he had known since child­hood?

Critics now usually agree that Huckleberry Finn is in three dis­tinct sections: (1) the flight of Huck and Jim down the river, (2) the series of episodes beginning with the feud and ending with re­enslavement of Jim, (3) the burlesque escape of Jim. This form shows striking points of similarity to the usual minstrel show form of First Part, Second Part or Glio, and Third Part or Burlesque.

The setting of the minstreL First Part was the river and its levees. Here may be only an accidental correspondence. When we come to the First Part cross fires or catch questions we begin to sense a re­markable similarity.

Fortunately Mark Twain has left his own record of a minstrel First Part. W eknow from this, from playbills, from minstrel hand­books, such as Dick's Ethiopian Scenes (New York, 1879), and from Carl Wittke's helpful study, Tambo and Bones (Durham, N. C., 1930) that this section of the minstrel show consisted of a series of these crossfires between the white interlocuter (middleman) and one or both of the blackface endmen who sat at his right and left, Bones with the dried jawbone of a horse, and Tambo with his tambourine. The dialogue was interrupted at intervals by songs sung by the whole minstrel company, usually of a sentimental kind--many of Stephen Foster's best known songs (Old Folks at Home or Massa's in de Cold Ground) were minstrel songs.

Mark 'Twain's wornout example of crossfire will do as well as any. The white interlocuter asks Bones how he manged to survive on a starving ship. Bones replies:

"vVe lived on eggs." " You lived on eggs! Where did you get eggs?" "Every day, when the storm was so bad, the Captain

laid to."

Compare this passage. Huck and Jim are on Jackson's Island (ch. VIII), Huck asks:

" Well, are you rich?" "No, but I ben rich wunst, and gwyne to be rich ag'in.

"\Vunsh I had foteen dollars, but I tuck to specalat'n', en

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got busted out." "What did you speculate in, Jim?" " Well, fust I tackled stock." "What kind of stock?" "Why, live stock-cattle, you know ... "

Rere in the novel we may see the same series of catch questions (questions with a catch in them) and answers found in the minstrel crossfires. Indeed, the rest of the passage, the wonderful description of how Jim went from $ 14 to ten cents, and finally to nothing, end­ing with Jim's remark that as a slave he is worth $ 800 and he wishes he had the money, is all in crossfire form, with every remark of Jim an answer, and every remark of the white interlocuter, Ruck, a catch question. Even the pathos of the ending is typical of the minstrel show. Dan Bryant, famous blackface comedian, had as one of his most affecting routines this; when asked if he had had any­thing to eat he would reply seriously; "I had a pea-nut la~st week."

Again and again in Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain drifts into the pattern of crossfire, of catch question and answer. This pattern is especially noticeable in what might be termed the First Part of Huckleberry Finn (chs. I-XVI) for here Ruck and Jim quite natural­ly slip into the familiar roles of interlocuter and endman. Note for example the debate between the two of them, 'Was Solomon Wise?' (ch. XIV). Not only in form but in subject matter, in its parodying of the Bible, with an underlying tone of criticism of white justice, it strongly resembles such minstrel masterpieces as 'Row Adam and Eve Turned White' (in Dumont, Burnt Cork, New York, 1881, 1899).

Interspersed with the crossfires in the first part of Huckleberry Finn we may also observe lyrical interludes: "The moon was so bright I could 'a' counted the drift-logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything ... smelt late." (Ch. VII). Or the following: "It was mighty cool and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside." (Ch. IX).

These lyrical interludes correspond, formally at least, to the sentimental songs of the minstrel show which gave a relief from the steady flow of dialogue.

No great significance need be attached to the use of Jim as a

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Negro name in minstrel drams. Of more interest is the common re­ference to Negroes in these dramas as fearful of ghosts--there was even a fright wig, a contraption for raising the hair of the blackface comedians. When Jim first spies Ruck on Jackson's Island, "Re bounced up and stared at me wild." Rere is a common bit of minstrel action.

Of still more interest is the emphasis put on the supposed Negro talent for exaggeration in both Huckleberry Finn and in the minstrel plays. We all remember Jim's claim (in Ch. II) that the witches rode him all over the state, then down to New Orleans; finally he states that they rode him all over the world.

So in Charles White's The Mischievous Nigger (first performed in 1853) Antony Snow tells of two intruders:

I tell you all about it; fust dar was fourteen robbers cum in wid swords-one ob dam got me by de wool-sez he, I want your money or dem babies-den de oder nineteen took ob my wool, and de hull forty·five said all at once, one after de odder, gib us yer momey or dem babies. Take de babies, sez I-I didn't say dat-I said, take my money, 'cos I didn't hab a red cent, you know. Den de fust t'ing dat I knowed, de hull fifty o'em knocked me down-about one hundred and fifty jumped on me, carried off de Siamese Twins-and dat's all.

This is certainly inferior to Mark Twain's account, but the source of the humor is the same.

A minor detail of this kind might as easily have come from other kinds of hum or, though their cumulative weight is impressive. Of more importance is the relation between white and Negro in the first part of Huckleberry Finn, made clear at the end of Chapter XV, 'Fooling Poor Old Jim.' After Ruck has deceived Jim by telling him their separation was a dream, Jim remarks: "En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash,.· en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." It is made quite clear when Ruck apologizes that the negro may be the underdog, but in wit (as in the Solomon passage) and in ethical standards he is superior. Just such a feeling about the true relation of white and black is conveyed by the best minstrel crossfires,

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those In use before 1885, the year of the publication of Huckleberry Finn.

In a number of minor touches, then, and in the crossfires, in the lyrical passages, in the relation between Negro and white, we may see resemblances between novel and minstrel show, Part One. To this point the minstrel form may be compared to that of the first movement, say, of a symphony, in which two intertwined themes are developed.

The Second Part of the minstrel show, as Paskman and Spaeth go on to suggest in 'Gentlemen, Be Seated!' (Garden City, N. Y., 1928), may be compared to that variety of musical fantasia which consists of a collection of themes. This second section of the minstrel show, or Olio, began with a stump speech, a parody of political, re­ligious, or even just personl oratory. There followed a group of variety acts (vaudeville is thought to have developed from this part of the minstrel show) which ranged from single performances to farces or short plays.

Rere again in the middle section of Huckleberry Finn we find marked resemblances to the minstrel show. Ruck's famous mono­logue on conscience in Chapter XVI is quite similar to the stump speeches in form. Ruck asks himself, in monologue style, if he should give up Jim, the runaway slave; he decides not to, and concludes:

Well, then, says I, what's the use you learnig to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

In form and spirit this is a stump speech, that spirited minstrel monologue which builds in satirical fashion to a final revelation of irony and laughter.

These monologues occur again and again in Huckleberry Finn: witness Pap's speech, 'Call this a govment,' or the passage in which Ruck decides that he and Jim will not "borrow" crabapples and persimmons, but will restrict themselves to those fruits which are both good to eat and in season. CJim at one point even thinks of "King Sollermun" as standing on a stump).

But Ruck's monologue on conscience, which begins this middle

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or second section of Huckleberry Finn (and which is used to con­clude it as well, in ch. 31), has more than a formal resemblance to minstrel stump' speeches. For a surprising number of these-or so it seems to me-satirized much the same subject: rigid beliefs in hell, religion and conscience. Quite a few of these speeches are labelled" sermons." For exarriple, in Dick, there is 'A Sermon on Keards, Hosses, Fiddlers, and Foolin' with the Gals, in which the congregation is warned:

an' whar will yeou be, my bretherin-yes, whar will you be, I say, when Satan comes a huntin' his own, or as is remarked in thar Scripters, like a rorin' lion goin' round to see what he kin devour? Take kear, my bretherin, take keer.

This is much the same mock anguish over hell that Twain expressed through Huck's monologue.

We all remember the hypocritical Dauphin in ch. 20 and his speech of repentance to the crowd in which he pretends to be a re­formed pirate; on his behalf a collection is taken up. This episode is of the same type as that implied by another stump speech from Dick, delivered by "a unlarnt hard-shell Baptist preacher," and titled 'Where the Lion roareth, and the wang-doodle mourneth.' Too long to quote here, in its uproarious combination of religious hypocrisy, revival technique, and commercialism, it closely parallels the Dau­phin's effort.

Long before Mark Twain harried religious hypocrisy of the hard­shelled kind, the minstrel players were on the job. And one of the best stump speakers of them all was Billy Birch, of Twain's beloved San Francisco Minstrels. May we hear in Huckleberry Finn faint echoes of his long lost art?

After the stump speech which began the minstrel Olio or Second Part, there came a series of acts. And in the second section of Huckleberry Finn there are the well known, quite distinct episodes, from the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, to the attempt to defraud the Wilks girls. These six or seven scenes approximate the acts of the minstrel Olio in number.

Here too are references to minstrelsy. Huck, pretending to be an English servant, tells J oanna Wilks that English servants "never go to the circus, nor theater, nor nigger shows, nor nowheres."

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There is the painting of Jim blue as a "Sick Arab." A striking number of minstrel olio acts contain situations in which a negro is painted, usually whitewashed, though in one of the most popular, Daddy Rice's Virginia Mummy (first performed in 1835), the Negro Ginger is painted white, black, green blue and a variety of colors. The Virginia Mummy in its obvious relish for corpse humor is typi­cal not only of a number of minstrel plays, but of the same theme in Twain, both in Huckleberry Finn in the Wilks episode, and else­where, as in Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.

The minstrel olio acts show a weakness for satires on Shakes­peare (Mark Twain's San Francisco Minstrels were noted for this kind of parody). One of these by Charles White called Guide to the Stage (first performed in 1849, printed in 1875) makes fun of having a male character play Lady Macbeth; Bones and Simpson, both out of work and seeking to make money out of acting Shakespeare, go on to discuss doing Richard III and Hamlet. When Mark Twain's 70 year old Dauphin attempts the role of Juliet, and when the Duke and Dauphin mangle Richard In and Hamlet in their efforts to raise money, it is hard to resist the feeling that Twain must have had the familiar minstrel pattern in mind.

Also common in the minstrel literature are passages of 'Shake­speare Improved' not unlike the one provided by Mark Twain (in ch. 21). The one from Dick reads:

Polonius. Beware of entrance to a quarrel, if/You can sneak out of it by a back door,/But, being in for it, handle thy bunch of fives/So that a Mansard roof will speedily arise/Above thy opponent's left eyebrow, or see he be provided/With a tin ear as soon as possible.

Mark Twain's begins:

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin / That makes calamity of so long life; / For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane/But that the fear of somethieg after death/Murders the innocent sleep ...

Mark Twain's is superior, but cast in the same mold. More significant than these minstrel touches is the continuing

presence of Nigger Jim in almost every episode of this second part of Huckleberry Finn. It is Jim's voice that comes as a welcome,

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human sound, as the feuders try to kill the helpless Buck and Joe in the first episode. It is Jim again who says flatly that he doesn't want any more kings if the Duke and the Dauphin are samples. After the obscene show of the Royal Nonesuch Ruck is not surpris­ed, but Jim calls the royal pair "reglar rapscallions."

Immediately we learn of Jim's one evil deed, and of his bitter re­gret at having struck his poor little 'Lizabeth when he was still un­aware of her deafness. This deed, and his human repentance, set off by contrast the unrepented actions of . the royal rapscallions and of a long list of real royalty as well. And after the Wilks episode, when Jim welcomes Ruck back to the raft, "full of joy," we feel here at last is a human friendship, unlike the sullen, suspicious treatment of Ruck by the two rascals.

We had read in Ch. XIX that it was a Negro who warned the Dauphin and thus gave him a second chance~his fellow whites in­tended to tar and feather him. At the end of the second part of Huckleberry Finn it is Nigger Jim, sold back into slavery by the Duke and Dauphin, who tells Silas Phelps of their obscene show, and so is ultimately responsible for their tarring and feathering, for their being brought, in a crude sense, to justice.

Jim's role, and the Negro role, in the second part of Huckleberry Finn, is a powerful one. As in the first part, the Negro is, though apparently inferior, actually superior, the true hero in that the action revolves around him. So in the minstrel acts of the Olio, or Second Part.

Juniata, heroine of the famed Bone Squash (performed in 1835) of Daddy Rice, is armed with a notebook; she says: "I always put down every 'diculous custom ob de white folks." In Charles White's The Black Statue (performed in 1855) the Negro Jake is not taken in by the fake statue which deceives the white miser Squintum. Frequently the Negro seems freer, even happier than the white actor in these olio plays. As a Negro slave says in White's Sam's Courtship (performed in 1852, printed in 1871) "de niggers are more free'er dan de white folks." Freer not only to express emotions (says Brown in Bone Squash: "why, when natur make me, he make me all for music.") but freer to express honest emotions. Again and again in the olio acts, the negro criticizes white society, is not deceiv­ed by its shams, is a happier, more sympathetic figure. On the

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superficial level he is a figure of fun,. at a deeper level he is a critic of white society.

It is not hard to see why the Olio or Second Part developed in the minstrel show. It provides, as the First Part does not, a chance to range widely and wildly over the whole of society. This range provides an artistic balance to the restricted First Part. We move naturally from the restricted criticism of the interlocuter to the criti­cism of the whole society, from the symphonic first movement with its two themes in Black and White, to the fantasia with its group of themes. In the novel we can observe much the same pattern, from Jim and Huck and their catch questions, to a broad cross section of society, with Jim in the background as the Negro who observes "ebery 'diculous custom ob de white faolks-" observes, and judges.

The Third Part of the minstrel show was a burlesque. Mark Twain's The Stolen White Elephant (1878) includes just such a minstrel burlesque as part of the story. His San Francisco Minstrels were noted for burlesques of plays and books (they did Thackeray's Virginians in 1875, The Black Crook and Pinafore in 1879, Beadle's Pirates in 1880, and many others).

We know from Mark Twain's note on the manuscript to Huckle­berry Finn that he had Dumas's Count of Monte Crista very much in mind as his object of burlesque in the third part of Huckleberry Finn. Here Jim becomes that engaging minstrel figure, Edmond Dantes in blackface.

Thought I have found no minstrel burlesque before 1884 based on the Count of Monte Crista as a whole, the count himself did ap­pear as a blackface character in The Ring Demons, performed by the San Francisco Minstrels from Jan. 15 to Feb. 5, 1876 (Mark Twain is thought to have begun writing Huckleberry Finn in 1876 or 1877). From 1877 to 1883, years during which we know Mark Twain work­ed, at irregular intervals, on Huckleberry Finn, there was much in­terest in stage versions of the Count of Monte Crista, with many performances by Fechter, by Studley, and especially in 1882 and 1883, by O'Neill, who became legendary in the part. It would have been natural for Mark Twain to think of the Count in that period in 1883 in which he was writing the last part of Huckleberry Finn.

The burlesque ending to Huckleberry Finn has bothered almost all the critics of the novel. vVhy does it come at the end of an

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otherwise seriously comic novel? Does it, as many critics have felt, destroy the mood' of our great American epic?

Perhaps the answer is to be found by considering the function of the burlesque ending of the minstrel show. For here, if ever in art, form follows function.

If we take the minstrel show seriously, as a folk art which ex­presses significant forces in American life, we can find an answer. As Brander Matthews saw, the minstrel show sprang up to express the uneasy relationship between the African and the European ex­patriate.

The white American, like Mark Twain himself (his father was a slaveowner) was technically free and educated, but actually enslav­ed by a rigid code of behflvior. The illiterate Negro, on the other hand, was literally shackled, but not to a hypocritical code. Together these two races had to learn from each other-less than the Negro hoped, but more than the white suspects. Part of this mutual learn­ing took place, then as now, through art; in the nineteenth century almost the only artistic medium shared by both races was the min­strel show.

The complex question of why slavery should be an issue from 1877 to 1883 must be left to another time. Enough to say here that this was the period in which, by a series of . political maneuvers and supreme court decisions the Negro was for a second time enslaved, this time as a Second Class Citizen. Through his politics, his acquaintance and lecture tour with Cable, and his support of such Negroes as Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain was very much a part of this struggle. As he worked on Huckleberry Finn, the Negro ques­tion was again, as it had been during the Civil war, dangerous, with threats of a new civil war expressed openly from some parts of the south. The change from the innocuous Negro boy Jim of Tom Sawyer in 1876 to the adult Nigger Jim of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, shows the effect of this strenuous period on Mark Twain. And Nigger Jim is the only picture of the average Negro slave in nine­teenth century fiction was appealed white and Negro critics as a real character.

In what way was the minstrel form, and particularly its burles­que Third Part, peculiarly fitted to express, and by expressing to re­lieve, this tension?

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Logically we should expect in the Third Part of the minstrel show, or in the novel, a final resolution of the growing criticisms of white society posed by the blackface actors in the First and Second Parts.

Such a final, direct attack on the question of racial relations would have wrecked any minstrel house, north or south, in the period in which the minstrel show flourished, from about 1835 to 1885. And it is inconceivable that Mark Twain, southerner and (briefly) Confederate soldier, married into a northern family with abolitionist sympathies, a writer who knew and loved south and north, west and east, white and black, could have written such an ending.

The burlesque is the clue to the mystery and the meaning of the form. Is it merely a final razzle dazzle which lets either minstrel show or novel evade the issue? On the superficial level, perhaps. But, more deeply, does not the burlesque suggest, by its form, in a way which is agreeable to all sides, and not just to the already convinced, that white-Negro relations are a burlesque of what, ideally, they should be? The minstrel Third Part, developed and perfected, like the rest of the minstrel show, in thousands on thousands of performances all over America, was an instinctive attempt to express racial tensions and to resolve them in a soci;:tlly acceptable way.

All can enjoy the burlesque, and all can, in varying degrees, take away the notion, that white-Negro relations are, like the burlesque

itself, topsyturvy, upside down. Where a work like Uncle Tom's Cabin might well be said to

have urged on civil war, the minstrel show probably worked in the opposite direction, to lessen tensions. At any rate it gave white society important criticisms from Negro society in an acceptable disguise. For an inter-racial art form which is to reach all factions, the concluding burlesque is not only the appropriate form, it may well be the only form which can quietly suggest reform to all sides without arousing a fatal resistance.

Mark Twain by an unusually happy choice of burlesque subject improves on his folk art form, pushes it toward that inspired mastery of subject matter which is genius. It is no accident that he burlesques the romantic escape of his blackface Dantes. This is the perfect conclusion to his novel, not an anti-climax, a weakness, as

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critics usually suggest. What does this burlesque, romantic escape signify?

Remember Ch. XL, 'A Mixed-up and Splendid Rescue,' which, to make a rash comparison, is like that common minstrel finale, the cakewalk or walkaround, a circular dance which enlisted the whole strengh of the minstrel company and which ends where it begins. So in the novel, Ruck, Tom and Jim are back where they began. But with a difference, for Ruck now knows that there is no solution, no escape, no rescue neeeded for Jim. Jim has been free during most of the novel, while Ruck was chained to his conscience. This is a burlesque rescue in every sense of the word. The real freeing of Jim took place before Ch. XL, in Ruck's mind. Ruck made this

clear by saying: When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a

Sunday· school book, I ain't no ways particular how it's done so it's done. What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday· school book; and if a pick's the handiest thing, that's the thing I'm going to dig that nigger with; and I don't give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about it nuther.

Jim is free as soon as Ruck thinks him free; no need to worry about the method then. In a sense, the white who frees a Negro is always performing a burlesque action, for the Negro has always been free. As Myrdal made painfully clear in American Dilemma, there is a white problem, but no Negro problem.

Long before Myrdal, Mark Twain wrote down this truth in Huckleberry Finn, our first true, inter-racial novel, solidly indebted to the first true inter-racial art form, the minstrel show. Only in this context can we begin to grasp the significance of Mark Twain's achievement. Unlike many so-called inter-racial novels of today, Huckleberry Finn can reach all sides; it does not divide, it embraces.

Today as we enter a new period of white-Negro relations, one in which we seek not only freedom but equality for the Negro, we can still turn to Huckleberry Finn to learn and relearn that we free the Negro-or make him equal-first of all in our minds. By so do­ing we free not the Negro, but ourselves.

And Huckleberry Finn may even have a larger significance in a world of racially disunited .nations-it is, for eX'lmple, popular in

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Russia today. Perhaps it contains the secret of not only inter-racial, but of international art.

How easy to write an Uncle Tom's Cabin, a Native Son, an In­visible Man-these are all works which, for all their merits, divide! Where today is the great inter-racial-or even more important, the great international novel, which, like Huckleberry Finn, will embrace? Writers with this aim in mind may find new inspiration, as, in­stinctively, Mark Twain did, in the old blackface form of First· Part, Olio and Burlesque.