Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [27]
Which is why Gillett is mostly white. The wet, granular Delta soils just south of the Arkansas River—where the towns are mostly African American—were just what early rice-growing slave owners wanted. But until 1909 the land around Gillett was prairie—and, in the town’s historical memory anyway, poor prairie, where German Americans from the Midwest struggled to raise cattle on sage grass. The relatively thin prairie soils overlay a hardpan of packed clay, which eventually proved to be a blessing. The hardpan, it turned out, could trap water nearly as effectively as plastic sheeting; if you built levees and pumped in water, the earth would flood—holding the water, ready for rice.
Soil, here, is demographic destiny. Still, the farmers of Gillett owe a genuine debt to those of the Gambia and Niger rivers—if not for the establishment of rice around Gillett proper, then for the existence of an American rice industry at all. It’s a debt not lessened in the slightest by the fact that it goes unacknowledged.
At the edge of town, a black-and-white sign has a picture of a startled-looking raccoon and the town slogan: GILLETT: HOME OF FRIENDLY PEOPLE & THE COON SUPPER. It’s a rice-growing town. But it’s the Coon Supper that brought Clinton, and decades of governors and Miss Arkansases, and it’s what brings me.
The Quarles farm was in the region called Little Dixie. Flanking the Missouri River, Little Dixie was settled, in the plurality, by white farmers from slaveholding states like Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Many of the farmers brought enslaved men and women with them from their home states and grew corn, tobacco, and hemp to ship downriver to New Orleans. By reputation at least, Little Dixie was not as brutal as the worst cotton- or rice-growing regions, and there’s no record of physical cruelty on John Quarles’s part (except, of course, for the raw fact of forced bondage). He was typical of the region, having arrived from Tennessee in the 1830s with the intent of setting up as a tobacco farmer.
During his childhood summers, the boy Sammy Clemens spent weeks with the slaves—playing with the children, tagging along with the adults. He believed that one of them, Aunt Hannah, was old enough to have talked to Moses; another, Uncle Dan’l, was a potent figure who would live on vividly in the mind of Mark Twain. “We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and advisor in ‘Uncle Dan’l,’” he wrote in his Autobiography, “whose sympathies were wide and warm. . . . It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.”
But even as a child, he understood that truly good and honest friendship wasn’t possible under the divide of slavery; he later wrote that “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” Of course, it’s not taking any kind of leap to say that the “subtle line” looked considerably less subtle to the boys standing on the other side of it; there’s no doubt that the farm that Twain remembered so clearly and so well had many secret pathways, many places hidden to him.
Twain loved secret places. His literary double, Tom Sawyer, thrived on them, as when Tom “entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the center of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak. . . . Nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a wood-pecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound.” But Tom’s routes were those of play, as he flung himself through woods to Robin Hood’s lair,