dialects right (Fulton 5)." Fulton believes that "Twain’s desire for an artistic authenticity is itself an ethically oriented endeavor (Fulton 5)." If Fulton is correct than Twain didn’t just pull his characters strings like a Sambo doll, he crafted characters (from Prince and the Pauper to Tom Sawyer) to speak as people of their status would. It would’ve been unethical and unbecoming for Twain to make his characters talk more eloquent than they should have just for the sake of promoting the idea that blacks were intelligent. I don’t have room to expound on the content of Fulton’s book but he strongly supports Twain’s writings as realistic rather than romantic. Twain couldn’t scathingly attack racist ideas as effectively as ex-slaves like Frederick Douglass could. Men like Douglass, then Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, and finally Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were much more effective at broadside attacks on racism. Twain wondered if "any body of human beings existed who were able to look upon his fiery ideas without blinking (Budd 66)." We don’t see prominent male feminists so why should we expect a white man to come to the forefront of racial issues? Twain didn’t want to get "hanged" because dead men can spread their ethos no further. Twain was obviously concerned with his legacy considering the sheer amount of work he produced. The fact that he held back many works until after his death testifies to his dedication to his family because his later radical ideas could tarnish his name’s sterling reputation. He opened up a dialog on miscegenation with pioneering works such as Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Adventures of Huckelberry Finn but he does it subtly. In Nationalism and the Color Line in Cable, Mark Twain, and Faulkner, Barbara Ladd calls Pudd’nhead Wilson "a complex example of the use of black and white, foreign and domestic, northern and southern social bodies ...
