Sam Clemens, from his earliest days writing squibs for his brother’s newspapers, dealt with perceived issues with humor. This was his medium all through his life. The issues changed and perhaps he became a bit more acerbic in his later career, but the humorous vein remained. He employed a number of techniques, many deriving from his early days listening to the stories of his Uncle Dan’l.

One of these techniques was the use of dialect. Twain was noted for his facility with recognizing and recording dialects. His discovery of the writings of Joel Chandler Harris gave him opportunity to further hone his skills, as exhibited in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Because of his use of dialect and the language of the time and place, this book is frequently described as racist and subject to censorship and sometimes removal from library shelves, a rather unfair treatment but a sign as to the general inability of people to recognize and/or understand irony, the basis for much of Twain’s humor. The book challenges closely held beliefs of far too many people. It is much easier to ignore rather than confront ignorance and change one’s mind. To make a claim that Twain was not a racists is also a mistake. He most certainly was, but also believed that Negroes had been unfairly treated and restitution must be made. The fact that Sam Clemens could never accept the indigenous people of North America only confirms his racism.

The Uncle Remus tales have also been censored and stamped as racist, primarily because of Harris’ use of dialect. One tactic used to make both Twain’s and Harris’ stories presentable to the general public is to “defang” them, remove anything controversial, “Disneyfy” them. Julius Lester, in the introduction of his tamed edition of “The Tales of Uncle Remus” says he wanted his book to retain “the same affectionate sense of play and fun as the original, but without evoking associations with slavery”. He wanted them used as entertainment. Lester was not interested in displaying any sense of the life and times in which the stories were told. As with Uncle Remus, Tom Sawyer has been thoroughly Disneyfied. Even Twain’s home town of Hannibal is a “Disneyfied” version of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”.

What Lester did was remove the dialect and substitute his own. It seems that reminding readers of slavery is too controversial and must be suppressed. The fact that dialect is not a “racial” trait and has nothing to do with why such slavery existed is not important. It is my understanding that Harris did an accurate job of recording the speech patterns of the Antebellum slaves as it was spoken and that the tales originated from the African folklore of those people forced across the ocean, against their will, to serve as slaves on the Mississippi River plantations.

Much of what creates a “people”, a culture, or if one must, a “race” is found in their language and their stories. This is why, if the aim is to destroy or eliminate a “race”, one must remove that language and relegate whatever stories remain for entertainment only. People do like to be a-mused.

The “schools” that Native American children were forced into, away from their families, away from their language, away from their cultures, are examples of this process of erasing cultures.

Along with use of dialect, Twain is also employed other techniques. John H. Davis, in his article, “The Shape of the Story…” (Mark Twain Journal v 57 n 2 – Fall 2019) describes Twain’s use of framing. Stories may be told by a narrator, a meta story if you will, an Educated Narrator telling of an Uneducated frontier narrator telling the story. Davis writes “ … his frames—as in ‘Jumping Frog’--contrast narrators and attitudes, but without condescension. They can be multi-layered, not initially or easily recognized, can alter or reverse themselves, and even dissolve or disappear as stories progress.” The Uncle Remus tales are also “framed” with the character of Uncle Remus telling a tale to a listening child. A technique I noticed while looking at Harris’ Tar Baby story, the story stops without finishing, at least not until some later time. This is the first frame of the Arabian Nights tales and Scheherazade, a favorite of Sam Clemens. From the Tar Baby story found in the Gutenberg version of “Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings” (the second story in the collection). "Dat's all de fur de tale goes," replied the old man. "He mout, an den agin he moutent. “Some say Judge B'ar come 'long en loosed 'im—some say he didn't. I hear Miss Sally callin'. You better run 'long."

Harris doesn’t pick the story up again until the fourth story. I can’t recall Twain ever directly employing this technique except for possible vestiges in such as Grandfather’s Old Ram or the Ascent of Mt. Vesuvius. And, as with Brer Rabbit in the Uncle Remus tales, Twain is known for employing Tricksters in his works, although Tom Sawyer is the only character I’m aware of that consistently exhibits trickster like traits – as opposed to merely corrupt or just plain bad (like Jack Elam said about his villainous characters) like the Duke and the King, or generally malevolent.

Jeanne Campbell Reesman, in her introduction to “Trickster Lives”, quotes Lewis Hyde about the possibility of tricksters in the modern world. “Do tricksters appear in the modern world? … Not really, … or not as they once did, since they need a traditional, sacred context.” … “if by ‘America” we mean the land of rootless wanderers and the free market, the land not of natives but of immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything at any time, the land of opportunity and therefore opportunists, the land where individuals are allowed and even encouraged to act without regard to community, then trickster has not disappeared. ‘America’ is the “fabled land of immigrants, of betrayal of the last generation, of opportunity, blues at the crossroads, and confidence games; the land whose government appeared ‘in the course of human events’ and whose flag has changed its design a dozen times. It its thus fertile ground for trickster and his (cross-cultural) whims.” This is the land described by Mark Twain in “Roughing It”.

This seems to be the trickster familiar to Mark Twain. The articles “Deadpan Trickster” and “The Trickster God in ‘Roughing It’”, from “Trickster Lives” portray trickster behavior that appears to originate from Twain’s malevolent Calvinist God. For myself, I would prefer to retain the title of “Trickster” for his more playful incarnations. For myself, once the behaviour of the trickster becomes the modus operandi of society at large, he looses the identity as a trickster. The Trickster should always remain resistant to the status quo. Tom Sawyer is that.