Identity, Morality, and the One-Drop Rule in Pudd'nhead Wilson

In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain explores morality as it is tied to identity, slavery, and the “one-drop” rule.   Written on the heels of Plessey v Ferguson, Pudd’nhead Wilson looks at the lives of Roxy, a slave, her son Valet de Chambers, and their owner’s son Tom Driscoll.  Roxy was “to all intents and purposes… white as anybody” (14).  However, because she was one sixteenth black the 15 parts white in her were “outvoted” and “she was a slave, and salable as such” (14).  Her son Valet de Chambers has a white father and as such is only one thirty-second black despite the fact that he “had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade,” and that not even “the father of the white child was able to tell the children apart” (14).  In a moment of crisis, fearing that her child could be easily sold down the river, Roxy switches the two boys, because of they looked identical no one noticed the change, after all people could only tell them apart because of their clothing.  As easily as changing clothing the slave became the master and the master became the slave.  Roxy had to go on with a perfect behavior towards the two so that the fiction she created could continue.  Eventually her repeated lies became real, permanent parts of her internal psyche: “the forms soon concreted itself in habit’ it became automatic and unconscious” (28). Roxy had allowed her deception to become so ingrained that it was no longer a deception; “the mock reverence became real reverence” and Roxy’s child was no longer her child but her “master and deity” (28).   The former Valet de Chambers and now Thomas a Beckett Driscoll grew up to be the master, he lorded over his former master and mother, he became a bully and coward, he received fine schooling, and he lived his life with no one the wiser that he had been born a slave until his mother told him who he was.  After this revelation Tom experienced a paradigm shift, his entire world was rocked and the sudden knowledge that he had one drop of black blood changed his perspective on everything.  Suddenly, without any actual changes occurring other than the knowledge of who he was born to, he was struck with the horror that he was “a nigger.”  His behavior didn’t change but his perspective on his behavior did, suddenly his “low places he found lifted to ideals, some of his ideals had sunk to valleys,” he justified his bad behavior – stealing, for example – as the “nigger in him” (69).  With this realization he suddenly was “afraid to enter and sit with dreaded white folks on equal terms” (69).  The belief that blacks were naturally inferior was so ingrained in the culture of the time that Tom couldn’t help but let the “nigger in him assert its humility” (69).  Through the character of Tom, Twain satirizes the “tradition” that simultaneously cannot be legislated but that was legislated in Plessey v Ferguson.