>>It seems pretty clear to me that Twain was uncomfortable with
>>slavery as a young man though he did not quite recognize what
>>racism was. The related issues did concern him in his youth. I ran
>>across the retyped snippets[below]of his memories of abuses of
>>slaves by his otherwise gentle father and others in his very early
>>years. The pertinent retyped pages are copied from Chapter 2
>>,Volume 2 PGS 17,18,19 of his book "Following The Equator".  I'll
>>repeat again this great man never had one drop of racist blood in
>>his veins. His countless demonstrations of  humanity in so much of
>>his work renders me a sceptic of those searching so hard to uncover
>>that particular flaw. I'm sure he had some flaws.  Even if it is
>>discovered by someone that he had a tad of racism lurking somewhere
>>in his soul [ which I doubt], it is deeply smothered by his
>>overpowering magnanimous spirit. If our nation had leaders of the
>>caliber of Twain we would be living in a much better world. Maybe
>>the academics, looking for Twains flaws find it a challenge simply
>>because of the huge difficulty of finding any thing of
>>significance. I believe in research for truth, but their are so
>>many fruitful areas to mine for it. There ain't no mother load of
>>racism in Twain; I would abandon that mine as a  waste of my shovel.
>>Bob Brownlee
>>
>>from pg 17 [ bottom paragraph] FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR-- HARPER AND
>>BROTHERS ,The Complete Works of MT
>   ..........  "There was a vast glazed door which opened upon the
> balcony. It needed closing, or cleaning, or something, and a native
> got down on his knees and went to work at it. He seemed to be doing
> well enough, but perhaps he wasn't, for the burly German put on a
> look that betrayed satisfaction, then without explaining whay was
> wrong, gave the native a brisk cuff on the jaw and then told him
> where the defect was. It seemed a shame to do that before us all.
> The native took it with meekness, saying nothing, and not showing
> in his face or manner any
>pg 18
>resentment. I had not seen the like of this for fifty years. It
>carried me back to my boyhood, and flashed upon me the forgotten
>fact that this was the usual way of explaining one's desires to a
>slave. I was able to remember that the method seemed right and
>natural to me in those days, I being born to it and unaware that
>elsewhere there were other methods; but I  was also able to remember
>that those unresented cuffings made me sorry for the victim and
>ashamed for the punisher. My father was a refined and kindly
>gentleman, very grave, rather austere, of rigid probity, a sternly
>jusut and upright man, albeit he attended no church and never spoke
>of religious matters, and had no part nor lot in the pious joys of
>his Presbyterian family, nor ever seemed to suffer from this
>deprivation. He laid his hand upon me in punishment only twice in
>his life, and then not heavily; once for telling him a lie--which
>surprised me, and showed me how unsuspiciou he was, for that was not
>my maiden effort. He punished me those two times only, and never
>member of the family at all; yet every now and then he cuffed our
>harmless slave-boy, Lewis, for trifling little blunders and
>awkwardnesses. M father had passed his life among the slaves from
>his cradle up, and his cuffings proceeded from the custom of the
>time, not from his nature.  When I was ten years old I saw a man
>fling a lump of iron ore at a slave man in anger, for merely doing
>something awkwardly--as if that were a crime.  It bounded from the
>man's skull, and the man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an
hour. I
>PG 19
>knew the man had a right to kill his slave if he wanted to, and yet
>it seemed a pitiful thing and somehow wrong, though why wrong I was
>not deep enough to explain if I had been asked to do it. Nobody in
>the villiage approved of that murder, but of course no one said much about
it.
>It is curious-- the space-annihilating power of thought. For just
>one second, all that goes to make the me in me was a Missourian
>village, on the other side of the globe, vividly seeing again these
>forgotten pictures of fifty years ago, and wholly conscious of all
>things but just those; and in the next second I was back in Bombay,
>and that kneeling native's smitten cheek was not done tingling
>yet!".............