“Strawberry, Strawberry!”
“Yeh?”
“Hi!”
“Hi”
“Why are you wearing shoes?”
“My sister Made me.”
“Are you going to wear em?”
“Of course I ain’t!”
Now this is one of many conversations between these two girls.They are thesisters of the famous Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Tom sister Is Robin. Huck’s sister is Strawberry.
Strawberry got her name because her hair was red and the freckles made her look like a Strawberry.
Robin got her name because when she was born she looked like a baby robin.
Their not like other girls, back than.They didn’t like dolls, dresses, shoes, cooking, sewing, (some stuff was erased here.)
None of them have mothers. Tom and Robin lived with their aunt.
Huck and straw live with their older sister and her husband.
Tom and Robin live with their cousin Mary, and half brother Sid. Mary is alright, but is too starched. Sid is a person you don’t like just by looking at him.
Sid was also a fink.
Strawberry and Robin weren’t well liked by the girls. The boys didn’t mind them.
They have the whole Saturday off.
“Wheres Tom and Huck?” asked straw.
“Swimmin I guess.”
“That’s right lets go!”
They rand down to the lake. The found Huck and Tom spalshing in the water. They went behind a tree.
“Get their clothes.” ordered strawberry.
“not me”
“I thought of it!”
“Be Quiet they’ll hear us.”
“You get Tom’s and I’ll get Huck’s.”
“Alright.”
“Com’ on.”
They crawled along the ground, Between two bushes. Both of them took a set, then climbed the nearest tree.
They just made it, Huck came out of the water. Then suddenly!
“They got ‘em” Screamed Huck.
As Tom bout Out of the water…
“Who got what?”
“Straw and Robin got our clothes”
Meanwhile in a tree.
“Let’s get out of here.” Advised Robin.
After getting out of the tree, they tried to figuer out what to do.
“What do you want to Do?” asked Robin
“I don’t know.” answered Straw.
“I have a feeling we’re bein watched.”
“Thirs noone watching……
“SLASH”
Two buckets of water came from a tree. They sat on the ground soaken wet.
“Robin.” Called Strawberry.
“What?”
“We was being watched.”
“yep”
Than roar of lagher came from the tree.
HUCK and Tom were the ones laughing.
:”Pardon us.” said Tom.
“You must excuse us.” Added Tom.
They then ran off, leaving Robin and Strawberry standing wet.
“Robin, you want to go swimming?”
“Yeh, Strawberry!”
As they started to leave Straw saw Huck’s dirty feet.
“You want to go swimmin Huck.” Asked Straw.
Huck agreed and jumbed down from the tree, Tom followed.
They jumped in, clothes of course.
They used a large rock as a pirate shop.
“I’ll be the captain!” yelled Tom.
“I’ll be the first mate!” added Huck.
“Can I be a pirate?” asked Strawberry. Knowing what the answer would be.
“Of course you ain’t.” said Huck.
“You ain’t alled either, Robin.” Added Tom.
Strawberry jumped on Huck and Robin jumped Tom. Rolled around in the water. Fanilly Mary came along and told them to stop. All of them went home to eat supper.
Sunday theywent to churck. They hated Sunday school. That wasted two hours of freedom.
Sidney and Mary liked it. How That Robin and Tom couldn’t understand.
After churc services they went to church services. Tom had a girlfriend but he meet someone different this day. Across the asile. She wore a yellow dress that cold pick up every piece of dust if it was Straw or Robin wearing it. She shoes were shined, she wore yellow ribbons in her hair and a matching bonnet.
Strawberry turned around to where Robin was sitting.
“See that girl at the door in the yellow dress?” Straw asked Robin.
“Yeh?”
“That dress has got to be covering something ugly.”
The Sunday teacher stepped in the room. Her name is Miss Wood.
“Children we have a new pupil.”
The girl stood in front of the room.
“This is Rebecca Thatcher.” Continued Miss Wood.
Strawberry turned around to Robin.
“Rebecca?”
“I hear.”
Miss Wood went on.
“Rebecca sit in back of Robin Sawyer.”
Robin turned around it was too late the seat was empty.
“Robin stand up, please.”
Robin stood up and sat down. As Rebecca went by she noticed the patch on Robin’s dress, the tear was made from climbing a face. Robin thought she should try to get along with her and smiled as she passed. As Rebecca went by she said…
“I don’t associate with vulgarity like you.”
Strawberry turned around with with asking what she did. Robin said nothing, Though the whole hour Rebecca kept fixing her hair and brushing her dress.
On the way home Tom started talking about her. The way she talked, the lovely way she spoke, and the way she dressed.
“Robin, did she say any thing to you,” Mary asked politly.
Robin tossed her head.
“I don’t associate with vulgarity like you.” Than ran up to meet Strawberry.
“Hi, Strawberry!”
“Hi, Robin. Did you say anything to that new girl?”
“No. I sittin there and she said that to me.”
“I have a feelin she ain’t gonna like u s.”
Yeh, but Tom likes her.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.
But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at all.
The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not
know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow." It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
seemed unable to accept the tribute.
I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow, a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and said, "Ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost an instant in replying to Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the matter again. "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool,"
Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of the self-abasement.
To me Clemens wrote a week later, "It doesn't get any better; it burns like fire." But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time
came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising Clemens's burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in
Clemens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child's note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I
am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.
Politely put, Mark Twain was not known for his skills as a dramatist. Despite one early commercial success and many subsequent attempts, most of Twain's output as a playwright is, as one scholar puts it, ''well worth burying.''
This fall, however, the University of California Press is publishing a three-act play it says is not only worthy of Twain's legacy as America's greatest humorist but that also has already been optioned by a Broadway producer.
The play, a comedy titled ''Is He Dead?,'' was unearthed by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of American studies and English at the University of Texas and a noted Twain scholar. Ms. Fishkin says she came across the script in October 2001 in the course of researching a book about Twain and race at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, which holds the world's largest archive of Twain's papers.
She didn't expect much. ''I knew most of them were totally awful,'' Ms. Fishkin said of the Twain theatrical canon. ''But I felt I needed to become as familiar with them as I could, as bad as they were.''
But what she found surprised her. The manuscript of ''Is He Dead?,'' its edges still marked with corrective notes in Twain's handwriting, was well thought out, well structured and, most important, funny.
''I think it has a lot of Twain's characteristic humor in it,'' she said. ''It has some really intriguing characters and sets up complicated situations that he also knows how to unravel.''
Written in January 1898 while Twain was living in Vienna, ''Is He Dead?'' tells the story of a group of destitute painters outside Paris who, in a desperate effort to deal with their debts, fake the death of one of their friends to try to drive up the worth of his paintings. Along the way, Twain takes jabs at artists, art dealers, art buyers and art journalists, as well as at Frenchmen, Irishmen, Germans and Americans.
Several scholars had read ''Is He Dead?,'' elements of which are based on an earlier Twain short story, ''Is He Living or Is He Dead?,'' without making much note of it. But Ms. Fishkin said she found herself laughing out loud.
''I thought, 'Am I crazy?' '' she recalled. ''But in my mind's eye, I could see it onstage.''
Ms. Fishkin, however, didn't trust her theatrical taste. So she began seeking out other opinions, one of them from -- who else? -- the actor Hal Holbrook, who has been playing Twain in various incarnations and in various mediums for half a century.
Mr. Holbrook read the script and liked it. (In promotional material for the play, he calls the piece ''another gold nugget.'') Then, on the advice of a mutual friend, Ms. Fishkin sent the script to Bob Boyett, a former television producer who has produced several shows on Broadway in recent years. Mr. Boyett read the script in July 2002 and said he, too, was surprised that Twain seemed to understand how to write for the stage.
''The first time I read it, I almost read it as literature,'' Mr. Boyett said. ''But I thought this could absolutely be staged today and work.''
Twain no doubt would be happy to hear it. He had a lifelong interest in the theater, working as a critic and attending shows regularly.
Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley, said Twain traveled to Vienna in late 1897 in part to try to master the art of playwriting, spending time ''essentially apprenticing himself to several local playwrights,'' working on translations and trying to learn German.
There were a couple of reasons for Twain's sudden interest in playwriting, Mr. Hirst said.
''He's fed up with the way in which the works of fiction have failed to earn him much money,'' he said. ''And he's also looking for a project to do fast.''
Ms. Fishkin said Twain had reason to believe the theater could be his ticket out of the stifling debt that he had incurred after several bad investments. In the 1870's he had made a nice profit on a stage version of his book ''The Gilded Age,'' featuring the exploits of a rakish character named Colonel Sellers. There were also adaptations during his lifetime of his novels ''Tom Sawyer,'' ''Pudd'nhead Wilson'' and ''The Prince and the Pauper.''
That said, Twain's own later efforts as a playwright, like the obscure ''Ah, Sin,'' and the even lesser known ''Death Wafer,'' were largely ''boring, unreadable plays,'' Ms. Fishkin writes in the foreword to ''Is He Dead?''
Unlike those failures, ''Is He Dead?'' was written in a flash, probably in less than a month. (Twain was famous for writing some on a project, then dropping it, only to pick up with a new idea months or years later.) His speed is especially surprising, Mr. Hirst said, considering his money woes and that he was still struggling with a depression brought on by the death of his daughter, Susy, in 1896.
''He manages to knock it off fast, and he doesn't labor over it,'' he said. ''There's a newness to it.''
Twain was enormously optimistic during the writing of ''Is He Dead?,'' writing to friends that his wife had read the script and found it ''very bully.'' That hope, however, would soon curdle.
Shortly after finishing the script, Twain sent it to his London-based agent, Bram Stoker (author of ''Dracula''), who was unable to find a producer. Twain then turned to a friend, the industrialist H. H. Rogers, who tried to find an American producer, to no avail.
By August 1898 Twain was done with ''Is He Dead?'' and, to a large extent, playwriting as a whole.
''Put 'Is he dead?' in the fire,'' Twain wrote to Rogers. ''God will bless you; I too.''
Now, however, a mere 105 years later, there are plans afoot to allow American audiences to see the play at last. Mr. Boyett said yesterday that he had obtained the rights this spring, and that he planned to give the play two ''kitchen table'' readings over the summer to get a feel for the piece.
As indicated by Twain's notes on the original manuscript, it still needs work. With three acts and 23 characters, ''Is He Dead?'' will probably require some pruning, Mr. Boyett said, and may also require some sort of polishing by a present-day playwright.
Still, he said, no major changes would be made. ''If you're presenting a play by Mark Twain,'' he said, ''people want to hear Mark Twain's voice.''
It's exactly that voice, Ms. Fishkin said, that first had her laughing in the Twain archives. ''I sensed that there was just a lot of energy, and a lot of exuberance and wit,'' she said. ''Especially coming at a time when we tend to think of Twain as being very cynical and very gloomy.''
In the book's famous ending--variously maligned as a failure, a mistake, a retreat, or worse--what do we find? Incarcerated in a tiny shack with a ludicrous assortments of snakes, rats and spiders put there by an authority figure who claims to have his best interests at heart, Jim is denied information that he needs and is forced to perform a series of pointless and exhausting tasks. After risking his life to get the freedom that unbeknownst to him is already his, after proving himself to be a paragon of moral virtue who towers over everyone around him, this legally-free black man is still denied respect--and is still in chains. All of this happens not at the hands of charlatans, the duke and the king, but at the initiative of a respectable Tom Sawyer and churchgoing citizens like the Phelpses and their neighbors.
Is what America did to the ex-slaves any less insane than what Tom Sawyer put Jim through in the novel? Where do we go for a window on the "contrast between our ideals and activities," that was "inescapable" after "the war to 'free the slaves,'" as Ralph Ellison put it in our 1991 interview? "People didn't want to talk directly about it," Ellison observed. But Twain did take it on: "One of the functions of comedy," Ellison said, "is to allow us to deal with the unspeakable. And this Twain did consistently." What is the history of post-Emancipation race relations in the United States if not a series of maneuvers as cruelly gratuitous as the indignities inflicted on Jim in the final section of Huckleberry Finn? Why was the Civil Rights movement necessary? Why were black Americans forced to go through so much pain and trouble just to secure rights that were supposedly theirs already? Huckleberry Finn may end in farce--but it is not Twain's farce: it is ours. Twain's book is not escapist. It is an escape from the denial of the farce we've made of what was--and still is--a noble social and political experiment.
