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MARK TWAIN IS AN AUTHOR whose work can be read with delight and wonder, a writer as deep and humane as Henry James or Joseph Conrad. Yet Twain hated Indians, expressed this hatred quite viciously in books that remain very popularand no one in the American literary and cultural establishment has looked closely at this hatred and its violently racist expression. I want therefore to ask two questions: first, why Twain hated Indians so fiercely1; second, why this silence about his hatred?
An individual psychological explanation for Twain's hatred, I will suggest, would involve what the pre-adolescent Sam Clemens saw, and who showed it to him, in McDowell's Cave near Hannibal, Missouri-the site, in Tom Sawyer, where Mark Twain says he killed Injun Joe.2 Behind the critical silence, however, is the fact that a good many scholars cannot accept that there have been Holocausts on this continent, evidently believing that such things could only be done overseas and by un-American monsters.3 A pattern for such denial is clear in Twain's work: we can see how the "screen memories" of Tom Sawyer cover the events of Twain's lifetime-both of his individual and of American communal history. Moreover, if we went on from viewing Tom Sawyer to see how Twain, a man of great and generous soul, in his later years worked free of these psychic knots, this fury of Indian-hating, and turned his rage against the real American monsters, we could see more clearly the dimensions of his later work, which critics and biographers have tended to devalue in favor of his work up to Huckleberry Finn in 1886-but that may wait for another occasion.
1. Injun Joe, Tom Sawyer, and the Critics
Two things about Tom Sawyer astonish me. The first is that at every reading its racism seems more obvious; the second, that every time I ask people whether it is a racist book they look amazed and say it is not.4 Moreover, some of these readers tell me that Huckleberry Finn IS racist-taking, it seems, the view that heroicizing the slave Jim is at best plantation-owner paternalism-while sniffing at Tom Sawyer as "just a boy's book," with hardly any slaves in it: no slaves, therefore no racism.5 Here for instance are the editors...