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James C. Johnston Jr.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens never saw the inside of a University unless he was lecturing there usually to a packed house. Sam Clemens was not a conventionally well-educated man, but he was, and is, one of two of this nation’s most brilliant writers of the perspective of both imagination and style. The other American genius in this capacity is Frederick Douglass.
I always found it interesting that Clemens, or as he is better known as Mark Twain, is most likely one of the most celebrated writers to be commemorated on the stamps of Russia. I suspect that the reason for this was that our Mr. Clemens saw himself as the implacable foe of Russian autocracy even when symbolized by the somewhat liberal reformer Alexander II. Twain really hated the reactionary Alexander III, with good reason as he did the obnoxious Anti-Semitism of Nicholas II.
Mark Twain was also celebrated by the world of academia in both Great Britain and his own nation of the U. S. of A. Sam Clemens was a man who was indeed ahead of his time. Men of great academic achievements like William Dean Howells, novelist, philosopher, editor, and intellectual, were happy to call Sam Clemens “Friend.” Clemens, or Twain, was received by presidents, kings, celebrities, intellectuals, and most of all by the average person with warmth and more than a modicum of respect. Clemens also grew in the respect for his fellow man, and he discovered both virtue and humanity in places where a boy born in a small slave-owning Missouri town, like Florida, Mo., was not expected to find such virtues.
Yet Twain did find nobility in the person of the escaped slave, Jim, in what I consider his greatest work, Huckleberry Finn. The escaped slave Jim is possessed of intrinsic nobility, wisdom, and a wonderful humanity that people-of-color were not supposed to have possessed even in the 1880s United States when the novel was written. Yet Clemens celebrated these wonderful qualities that Jim had in abundance, because these were qualities that Twain had observed in his own lifetime among people-of-color even during his youth in slave-owning Missouri..
Huckleberry Finn is a great American anti-hero, who spits in the eye of middle-class affectation and convention and the so-called contemporary morality that supported the accursed and widely accepted notion of “White Supremacy.” Twain did not favor this presumed superiority in his writing of this period. The legion of ignorant and bigoted white supremacists to be found in such fine All-American organizations as The Ku Klux Klan surely show us that there is nothing intrinsically superior about being white from any point of view. The truth of the matter is that all of the earth’s people have the elements of human genius within them that takes many forms. We know that Intelligence comes in three principal shapes: Intellectual, mechanical, and social. One may have a well-developed level of competence in one or two of these areas, but almost never in all three.
One may be a genius in the academic world, or in the mechanical world, or the social world of human interaction. To excel in all three principal areas of human endeavor is extremely rare. Race does not enter into the question of ability. There may be gross differences of availability of opportunity, but even this hurdle can and has been overcome. And Mark Twain, or Sam Clemens as you will, admirably points this fact of life out to us by the evidence of his life experience. This is true to even a greater degree when one looks at the extraordinary life of Frederick Douglass as told to us in the pages of one of his own great autobiographies.
One only has to read the autobiographies and biographies of the escaped slave Frederick Douglass to know that even an untutored man, who was taught to read by very ordinary people, embodies the realization of real genius. A kind woman taught Douglass, along with her own children, the rudimentary lessons that got him on his way to a real education, but what he learned about the academic world was mostly on his own. He used his mistresses’ children’s’ old copy books to expand his intellectual horizons in the early- mid-19th Century. Douglass educated himself while in bondage, and he learned that he was the equal of any man who breathed.
He was physically powerful and personally very brave, but most of all, he was a very acute student of human nature. When sent to a noted “Slave –Breaker” to be tamed and made more docile, Douglass beat the living Hell out of the bully, and then he told the well-thrashed Breaker-of-Willful-Slaves that if he wanted to keep his reputation intact as a successful man in his unique line of brutal work, he would do well to keep silent about his great defeat at the hands of a mere young bondsman who had so thoroughly thrashed him before another man also held in slavery.
Douglass tells us that when the Breaker-of-Slaves was being batted by Douglass, he called out to the slave to help him subdue Douglass. The slave who witnessed the whole affair thought a brief moment then said that his master who had rented him out to the slave breaker for field and other work would not approve of his getting involved in the fight then going on. The hired slave then went on to state that he was valuable property and his master would not be best pleased if he got himself injured, because this would greatly reduce his value. I guess that under the right circumstances this unnamed lad would have become an attorney-at-law who would at least have become as talented as Clarence Darrow!
Douglass is a great writer of what I call clear and uncluttered prose and things historic. If you would read his work, you would be very impressed by his enthralling style. When I first read Douglass, I really could not stop. His biographies are page-turners! I count myself fortunate to actually have a couple of first editions of this great man’s writings. Along with Mark Twain-Sam Clemens, Fredrick Douglass is my favorite American writer.
Both of these men arose up from the most common elements of their people. Sam Clemens had it much “Better-Off” than did Frederick Douglass, because nothing in the “White World” could really be compared to slavery in the United States of the Pre-Civil War Period from the point of view of intellectual constriction. Born in Cordova, Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass was separated from his mother and raised by his grand-mother along with dozens of other small black children held in slavery.
At birth an infant slave was worth about two-hundred dollars, and that slave would slowly increase in value as he or she developed skills and strength. As a precociously strong and intelligent child, Frederick was hired-out at a pretty-good rate, and he was also exposed to the greater-world in a seaport with all of its possibilities for escape to the North and freedom. After a lifetime of adventures in survival at a genius level, Frederick Douglass did escape to freedom, ended-up in Massachusetts, and began a career as a powerful and spellbinding orator and master of standard American English; he was the equal of the best orators of the day.
But Douglass did not just build a life for himself and his wife Anna Murray and their children; he embraced Abolitionism and became a leader of the Abolitionist Movement in Massachusetts. His life-story is one of the great tales of a genuine American hero. I encourage anyone looking for a “Great Read” to get a Douglass book and treat yourself to a sublime literary experience. Who knows, you might even consider making a trip to the local Ray Memorial Library in Franklin, Mass. which is where readable books are actually kept in abundance. The building itself is a living architectural and art-filled local wonder which is worth a tour.
Douglass became famous, a celebrity, a friend and acquaintance of the mighty and also-famous, and a United Stated diplomat. At the time of his death in 1895, he had achieved what very few of his race had achieved, but the road had been paved for others to follow. During the next 136 years huge strides have been made. Thousands of great talents, Douglass’ spiritual descendants, have come to flower in this America in every field of human endeavor ever dispelling the myth of racial superiority of one people over another predicated on ethnicity or color.
Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass are an ideal pairing of the best examples of American genius. They were human, sometimes all-too-human, as are we all. I am not interested in their individual faults. I am interested in looking at their talent and achievements. Too many academics, no doubt in quest for some focus for a doctoral dissertation, like to snipe at persons-of-greater-achievements than themselves. I guess it makes them feel superior which only demonstrates their need for some meaningful psychological therapy. Good luck to them. I shall celebrate Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass as my co-equal favorite American writers. Please give yourself a treat and read Douglass’ autobiographies, and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Mysterious Stranger, A Tramp Abroad, and The Innocents Abroad. It will provide a good start in the enjoyment of a long-denied great adventure in Americana during Black History and any other month. This experience will provide a real insight into the mind of genius and great historic insight.
James C. Johnston, an author and a retired Franklin educator, is a frequent contributor to Franklin Observer
