death after being trapped by the "Judge" in the cave (Gerber 219). This is ironic because the long and white hand of the law ends up killing the Indian while ostensibly only trying to protect and look after the town’s citizens. That series of events was happening in America. The Natives got locked up in reservations and starved by the white man looking to protect his own interests. Notice that the white children, lead by Tom, find the treasure that was in Injun Joe’s possession. This is akin to the U.S. and the prosperity that it is now enjoying although many natives languish in poverty. Twain did feel like he didn’t belong because as William Faulkner wrote he was, "the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs (152 Strout)." Twain sarcastically remarked at the 1881 meeting of the New England Society of Philadelphia, that "The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine (Ladd 96)." Ladd mentions that scholars usually "posit[s] a humane and sympathetic Mark Twain gently arguing . . . (from a paternal distance) . . . for black rights or an exploitative Mark Twain appropriating black voices for his own profit (Ladd 137)." Ladd decides that Twain’s true intentions fell somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. All evidence I’ve seen points to a Twain seeking to attack racist bourgeoisie values as much as he can through his most effective medium, humor. Since Twain’s comments on his ancestor’s being black elicits laughter he knows that racism is still alive and ready to be attacked. Only when the joke loses punch is the issue of racism pushed back down a degree. Twain had Aristocratic blood that he could’ve used as a claim to fame but he chose to live as a commoner and joke about being descended from slaves (Neider 28). Twain did profit from his use of black characters but only as he was writing about the things that ...
