Dear Ron, I may be misunderstanding what you're saying here, and forgive me if I am, but I would like to invite you to take another look at "A True Story." While Twain portrays "Misto C" as a naive idiot, he clearly *portrays* the character as a naive idiot. And while this story might be his own scathing assessment of his youthful naivete, it remains a scathing assessment, rather than a "true story" of his own feelings. Twain, like Huck, tells the truth with "some stretchers." While the evidence is clear that Twain tried to replicate Cord's story as she told it, I would suggest that the set-up for her story is a frame that attempts to force readers to face the very point you raise, that most Americans "failed to see the bleakness of slavery, and many still do." The narrator and the author are distinct from one another, here, and yet, part of why Twain's works remain compelling is because he does not take a moral high ground. We know Mark Twain is also Mr. Clemens, and that he once held such opinions and still had to struggle against some of them. He's the first to admit that he can be an idiot and a jerk, and I think it is one of the reasons we listen. There can be no doubt that as a youth, Clemens accepted the society he was born into and that his early world view was founded on white supremacy and class disdain, in spite of, or perhaps because of his family's increasingly humble conditions. And yet, by the time he wrote "A True Story," Twain/Clemens was fully aware of what a young idiot he had been, and what an idiot he often still was. No one was harder on Sam Clemens than Mark Twain. As a youth in New York, in 1853 I think it was, Sam had characterized the ethnic mix of children around him as "trundle-bed trash" and "vermin." The man who he grew up to be, who was devastated by the loss of his beloved younger brother in 1858 and his own son in 1872, simply did not and could not have the same attitudes toward human life in 1874, when he published "A True Story." Her story of loss must have thrilled his nerves and filled him with self-loathing for his former life and self. To me, the piece presents a conscious and deliberately scathing indictment of "Misto C--." I am not saying that Twain did not make naive assumptions or that he was free of racist feelings or class prejudices. But he was conscious of many of the prejudices and ruthless about exposing himself. In doing so, he looked ahead, grew up and tried to drag white America along with him. I'd enjoy hearing what you and others on the Forum think. Best, Sharon McCoy