Marianne Cord and Nigger Jim: Parallels Between The Life of Samuel Clemens and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In my previous post “Two Fathoms or Safe Water: Mark Twain’s Pen Name,” I talk about Twain’s dual personality as a “southerner and a northerner” afforded him a unique world view and understanding of people.  This duality could be a good thing but Ken Burn hints that it may be a source of inner discontent with Twain.  According to Burns, Twain was afraid of the extent of his own prosperity.  Though Burns never goes into depth about his fear, he does draw connections between Twain’s fear and the duality in his life.  This is perhaps because the wealth and notoriety he gained moved him further from his southern roots and the life he understood as a boy.  This move was brought to his attention keenly by Marianne Cord, a servant at Quarry Farm and a former slave.  One evening Twain remarked to Cord that she “can’t have had trouble” in her life because her eyes were always laughing and he never heard her sigh.  She responds to this by telling Twain her life story, a story that would continue to have a profound influence on Twain for many years to come.

Born a slave, Cord eventually married and had seven children.  Because they were slaves, her family was broken up and sold to various other owners.  When they came for her last son, Henry, he tried to run away and proclaimed that he was going to buy their freedom.  Cord clung to Henry and cried desperately “you shan’t take him” (qtd in Burns).  Years later Cord was approached by a young man, she took one look at the young man and “all the sudden [she] know’d” it was her son Henry that she had lost.  She was over joyed that she “got [her] own again” (qtd in Burns). This story never left Twain, it reminded him, a slave owners son living in a post-emancipation America, of the realities of slavery and the difficult life that many still lived.  That summer Twain began working on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a story that eventually led to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a complex book trying to deal with the world he lived in and the world he lives in now. 

 

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and Jim – a slave – are on the river and Huck sees Jim mourning for the children he left behind.  In this moment Huck realized that Jim “cared just as much for his people as white folks does for ther’n” and then comments that “it don’t seem natural, but “he reckon[s] it’s so” (Twain 239).  This is a profound moment in Huckleberry Finn where a young boy realizes that Jim is a man with the complex emotions and 3-deminsional character like any man.  This realization is a huge leap for Huck and goes against everything he had been taught to know about slaves and about Jim. 

This moment in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn hearkens back to the exchange with Marianne Cord and Huck’s realization mirrors Twain’s own realization about the complexities of the society he lived in.  Twain didn’t try to idealize the realities he was presenting; instead he laid this realization at the feet of America and asks them to see the tough circumstances and choices slaves lived with.