IN A STATE OF PUZZLEMENT, and in a low spirit, I made my way out onto the boiler deck, my mind too troubled to attend to my usual studies: My hands were shaking. Wandering up to the wheelhouse, I found Clemens at his post, and while I felt too ashamed to mention the momentary disharmony in my life, he was in a lively mood.
“Come and join me, my friend,” he said. “And take the wheel, Henry: Hold it steady as we go.” Then, as we approached a broadening of the river, he said: “Tug the wheel slightly downward and to your left.” As I began to turn the wheel downward—its enormous weight and the force necessary to move it surprising me—the steamer, heading out over clear waters, glided west. I was not long there at that wheel, but my successful operation of the craft, momentary as it had been, proved salutary to my soul.
BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED in St. Louis, some days later, all was mended between me and my father.
As for Clemens, at journey’s end, when all the passengers were disembarking, he sought me out on the deck: “I’ll be heading back to New Orleans day after tomorrow,” he told me. “You can always look for me in the pilots’ association rooms of that city, but if you should like to write to me, this is my sister’s address in this city.”
And he gave me a slip of paper that said:
Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, c/o Mrs. Pamela Moffett, 168 Locust Street, St. Louis
And that was how we left things for the time being.
FOR SOME NINE MONTHS IN 1860, my father and I traveled up and down the river, such journeys, of a two-month duration, broken up by month-long interludes in New Orleans, where we carried out the efficient running of Mr. Stanley’s various enterprises. I had gotten over our little differences by then: Whatever may have happened, I could not forget that Mr. Stanley had taken a boy—short of figure, poorly clad, and of little interest to the world—and made him into a gentleman.
AFTERWARD, EVERY NOW AND THEN I would receive at Mr. Stanley’s residence a letter from Mr. Clemens, some including clippings of the short and humorous articles he had written under the name of Sergeant Fathom and several somewhat older ones written when he was a youth that were credited to a certain W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, which were of a highly imaginative nature. Among them was an article he’d published in the New Orleans Daily True Delta, a satire about a riverboat pilot named Captain Sellers, to which he affixed, for the first time, I believe, the name Mark Twain, the pilot’s term meaning the safe depth of two fathoms, or twelve feet. He even sent me a few pages of what he considered a preliminary bit of autobiography regarding his early training and initiation as a pilot—for he thought such things might be good one day for a book and asked my impression of it. River gossip regarding the possibility of Southern dissent toward the North he also reported to me; his fellow river pilots shared his apprehension that the shipping trade might be disrupted in the event of a war—“unlikely as it would be to have white men fight one another over slaves.”
Statistics appealed to him very much: “Henry, did you know that just last June, the packet City of Louisiana made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in sixteen hours and twenty minutes?” Then, too, he wrote to me about the books he was reading—Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (which I had known from the little library at St. Asaph’s) and other historical romances having recently caught his fancy. And he would ask me to keep my eyes open for tales of interest that I might pass on to him, as he was a collector of Mississippi lore, and he recommended that I carry with me, as was his habit, a vellum notebook. As he put it in one of his missives, “Surely if we are not brothers by relation, we can be brothers of the written word.”
For my part, I kept him informed as to which steamers Mr. Stanley and I were to take to which destinations on which days. While I thought we would soon enough encounter one another, he remained aboard the Arago, and our paths did not cross on that ship again.
I Go to Arkansas
BY SEPTEMBER, MR. STANLEY, emboldened by an old idea, began to speak to me about the opening of a store upriver, at a “tactical point where such goods as we could offer would be greatly wanted.” He favored a location along the Arkansas River for its rich backcountry and access by steamer to many other points along the greater Mississippi. Often, as we sat eating dinner, he would mention his knowledge of a country store at a place called Cypress Bend, below Pine Bluff on the Arkansas River, owned by a merchant named Mr. Altschul, a Jew who, “though formed by questionable religious proclivities and a natural inward inferiority,” was a good and savvy shopkeeper then in need of a capable assistant. Far upriver from New Orleans, and situated on its own island, Mr. Altschul’s store was the sole provider of grocery goods and other necessities in a region that had recently seen the establishment of many new cotton plantations. It was the kind of place where a bright young man, with numerous skills of the sort I possessed, could learn the workings of such a trade. Though I pointed out to Mr. Stanley that I already had a great knowledge of the running of a store, given my experience at the Speake and McCreary warehouse, he corrected my false assumption that a river outpost could be run in the same way as a big-city store. Mr. Stanley framed the proposition in terms of my learning the river trade “in a more thorough manner”—from the perspective of a clerk working directly with the pioneering planters and the other sorts who frequented those climes.
“What is to be learned from such a place, sir?” I asked him.
“You’ll learn every need and want of the local people. Trust me, young man, should you know their habits, so different from the city folk, you will have the key to the inhabitants of all the Mississippi.”
“But when will I see you, Father?” I asked.
“In time. There is no hurry. This is the South; and in the South things are done in a certain fashion.” Then he told me on one of those evenings: “Hard as it is for me to part from you, I have arranged for you to undertake your apprenticeship in Cypress Bend with the merchant Mr. Altschul. Much will you learn from this, and by much will you profit. Once you have become aware of the particular customs of that place, than we can speak of where we might open our own store, in an advantageous locality. Within a few months of this learning, we will embark on yet a new enterprise: This I promise you, my son.”
TO SOFTEN THE ABRUPTNESS of my transition, my father thought it best that I first become acquainted with the region by staying on the Arkansas plantation of a riverboat acquaintance, a certain Major Ingham, who happened to be in New Orleans on business at the time of our discussion. One night, Mr. Stanley invited him to dinner. An aristocratic Southerner, tall and gallant in manner, he had some newly acquired forestland of many acres that he hoped to clear to make way for the planting of a cotton crop. Mainly slaves worked the property. He made it clear that my labors were to be of a physical nature, an idea that I was not entirely averse to. In no rush to begin work in some distant country store, and thinking it wise to get a sense of the land, I agreed with Mr. Stanley that it would be good for me to spend some time there. Major Ingham was to remain in New Orleans for another two weeks, at which point we were to depart together upriver by steamer, and upon the seventh day, at a point south of a settlement called Longview, enter the Saline, from whose banks Major Ingham’s plantation was a few miles inland. From there I would eventually embark for Cypress Bend, a day’s ride away.
No sooner had this plan been made than did Mr. Stanley receive an urgent letter from Havana, Cuba, informing him that his older brother, Captain Stanley, was quite ill with the yellow fever. Shortly he booked passage and, within a day or so, Major Ingham and I accompanied him and his baggage aboard the brig as it was about to depart from the harbor.
We waited beside him as he calmly began to unpack and review the contents of his portmanteau, crammed with ledgers, documents, and books, and though my father did not speak of it, I knew he was greatly preoccupied over the health of his brother. Finally, the ship’s whistle blew and a porter came down the corridors calling out, “Visitors aboard ship must now depart.” My father
followed us out to the gangplank and promised that he would write me as to his doings.
OF THE NEXT EPISODE, WHEREBY I resided at the estate of Major Ingham, I will speak but briefly. It did not remain, as I had imagined at first, a place congenial to my spirits, for within a short time I was put to the hard work of cutting down timber with a broad ax alongside a gang of slaves: I did not mind the manly labor, and found it a poetic thing to be working in the midst of a forest, with its high trees and mysteriously changing light and shade, as if I had been dropped into a fairy-tale setting. I came to like the smell of burning resin from the large fires that dispensed with the wild branches and brush, and in general I looked forward to those mornings when the sun streamed freshly through the woods and the air had never seemed so sweet.
It was neither those labors that offended me nor my accommodations in the major’s large pine-log house, which was staffed by many slaves, mainly females who tended to every domestic service.
No, it was not this that made me come to dislike my brief time in that place; rather, it was the unavoidable and distasteful company of the slave overseer, who, on account of the finery I had worn on my arrival, had taken me as some New Orleans dandy and rode me for it. In short, he struck me as the lowest form of white man, the like of which I hoped was not common to those parts. Like Mr. Kennicy, though in an amplified way, he hated the slaves and carried with him a black snakeskin whip that he cracked at every opportunity.
One morning, while we were clearing a patch of forest, as some fellow was struggling with a heavy piece of log, the overseer gave him an order, and when this fellow did not hear his command, he struck the whip over the boy’s bare shoulders with such force as to leave a deep gash in the skin. The log fell from the boy’s arms and crushed the foot of another slave nearby. When the injured slave cried out, the overseer beat him, too; then as the slave repeatedly pleaded for mercy, and as a few others tried to intercede, the overseer pulled out a pistol, fired off a few shots overhead, and threatened to shoot them if they did not back away. Later, when I sought out Major Ingham about the matter, he was reclining in an easy chair on his porch and seemed perplexed by my concern.
That same evening, I resolved to leave the plantation, and I sought refuge with one of Major Ingham’s neighbors, a certain Mr. Waring, whose own lands were at the other end of a deep wood. I made no mention of why I had abruptly left, putting it to him that I had merely wanted to rest there for the night. In the morning he arranged a carriage to retrieve my trunk from Major Ingham’s house and made a further arrangement to send it off to Mr. Altschul’s store ahead of me, as I told him I would be covering the forty miles or so of countryside and forest toward the Arkansas River on foot, so as to acquaint myself with the region.
AFTER TRAMPING WITHOUT INCIDENT through various interesting terrain (and the deepest woods I had entered into until I went to Africa), I finally arrived at my destination, at dusk, two days later. Only a crooked sign on a tree had pointed me to the place. From a kind of road of sandy loam, defined by the deep grooves made on hard earth by wagon wheels and a horseshoe trail, I had crossed over a rickety wooden bridge to reach the island, where moss covered every spot on the banks and tree trunks. With the sun just descending on the river, and with dragonflies floating over the waters, I saw the store standing in a spot of great natural splendor, and for that reason it seemed a promising place to be.
The store itself was a long, one-story affair constructed from logs and divided into four separate chambers, with all kinds of goods—guns and anvils; dresses and finery; comestibles and groceries—arranged therein. Mr. Altschul himself was a smallish and thin man, with large, slightly jaundice-rimmed eyes, a balding head, and dark features. He had been in a state of anticipation as to my whereabouts, as no date had ever been set for my arrival. Greeting my presence as a godsend, he called forth his two clerks and some family members to welcome me.
It was gratifying to find several letters waiting for me at Mr. Altschul’s store. These were from my father in Havana, the first conveying news of his safe passage and reporting on his brother’s condition, the fever having left Captain Stanley in a grievous state. The doctors of Havana were as baffled by such diseases as were the physicians of New Orleans, and yet it was Mr. Stanley’s hope that the captain, of a strong constitution, would eventually recover: “I have prayed for such,” he wrote, “but as the will of God is a separate thing from the workings of this world, I would hold no grudge at a sad outcome, for there is a natural order to things.” The second letter, of general encouragement and practical advice, had been written in a calmer hand, and at this I took heart.
I HAD BEGUN MY TENURE in that store in November of 1860, and indeed, with time, I slowly became acquainted with the peculiarities of the locals. We had about one hundred or so regular customers, among them wealthy planters whose character and manners were defined by the customs of the “Old South.” Beneath them were the planters with smaller estates and tradesmen; then the backwoods farmers working their little plots—and as one went down the social scale, it was my observation that fine manners gave way to ascending heights of crudity and incivility. Being frontier lands, in the sense of having been settled in fairly recent times, during the cotton-boom years of the 1840s, such places upriver, perhaps a day’s ride from the nearest constables of law, seemed more like isolated kingdoms, where little news of the outside world crept in to disrupt their provincial ways. The first rule to be followed, I learned, was one of self-protection: Most of the backwoods men carried bowie knives and revolvers, if not shotguns. And they often walked into the store with bloody game slung over their shoulders or with jugs of liquor in hand. The ever-present heat and humidity of those swamplands left many of them irritably disposed, and many, I’d heard, were quick to fight over the slightest provocation: The kinds of arguments that in New Orleans would have been resolved by genteel discourse or through arbitration became, in Arkansas, an insult to a man’s “honor,” and the fighting of duels, often to the death, was common enough in those parts.
Slaves, I noticed, were treated differently here. In New Orleans I had seen them walking the streets, side by side with the glut of Creoles, freedmen, and whites that were the population of that city, but in this region they were more strictly kept in their plantation compounds.
Then there was the matter of indecorous behavior in regard to the females. Whatever notions of propriety might have tacitly prevailed in New Orleans in relation to slave concubines, these were discarded in Cypress Bend, for occasionally a gentleman entered the store with one or two young and healthy Negro beauties following behind him, such “items,” I heard, being regularly won or lost in card games or swapped at a whim among fellow planters. About that easy abandonment of morals (such as I would later see in Africa) I had written to Mr. Stanley, in frank complaint of witnessing such things.
Out of necessity, as a merchant and German Jew in those Christian parts, Mr. Altschul owned a slave, a burly giant named Simon, whom he used as a bodyguard. But otherwise Mr. Altschul kept no slaves in his household—he had a fine house about a quarter mile away from the store on that island—and he said that in his faith, such things, being considered wrong, were not permitted. It was no wonder to me, then, that I saw Mr. Altschul treated wrongly—more than once had I witnessed planters spitting a spur of chewed tobacco down at his shoes. And although the store was necessary to the practical provisioning of the local plantations, one could read a sort of resignation upon the faces of those who had to enter the “Jew’s” premises, for to go against local customs seemed to them the mark of the hostile foreigner.
When not attending to my duties, I filled my spare hours not with books (it was often too hot and humid for that) but by learning to shoot a rifle and a pistol, old cans and bottles set out in the yard being my targets. Though I could not have imagined how such skills, honed over many hours, would serve me well in other places, I took to it quickly and, mastering the art of holding a barrel steady with the rec
oil, became a superb marksman and was able to shoot a sprig off a tree at twenty paces. In time, as was the custom in that place, I carried, as did my fellow clerks, a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver, its pearly white handle evident in a special side pocket. In those swamplands, to have no pistol on one’s person would have been the equivalent of a New Orleans clerk turning up to work without his trousers on, as a firearm was considered an indispensable accoutrement to manly attire.
NOW, IN THAT PLACE, MALARIAL AGUE was prevalent, a disease for which there was no explanation as to its cause. Local superstition placed its transmission on exposure to miasmic swamp gases, those will-o’-the-wisps that, capturing the moonlight in their swirls, floated in a ghostly way along the banks of the river and across the swamps at night.
Though I had asked a local doctor, a boarder in Mr. Altschul’s house, if there were any means to avoid this pernicious disease or if there were precautions to be taken against it by way of pills or medicines, he had wanly smiled at me and said: “Yes, there is. Leave as soon as possible.” That, however, was not in my makeup.
As I was attending to my duties in the store one morning, my hands began to inexplicably shake, and then my whole body began to violently tremble. With that came the chills. Helped to my room by the clerks, I lay in my bed shivering, as if I had been packed in ice. I remained in that state for several hours, until a spell of burning fever came over me, followed by delirium: I heard voices and saw the disembodied faces of persons I had known in the past floating before me. For a time I had the very strong impression of being somewhere else, as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship or in the room of a house somewhere in England. In my hallucinations I imagined a visitation from Mr. Stanley, my benefactor sitting by my bedside and reading me verses from the Bible, but no sooner had I taken heart at his presence than the vision went away.