“If I Warn't Too Drunk to Get There…”: On Race

The prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just at a jump. -Mark Twain The Hannibal of Mark Twain's youth was permeated by what Forrest Robinson called "bad faith": the unthinking hypocrisy of people who daily violated the moral norms to which they paid lip service while pretending they were doing nothing of the sort. Twain eventually came to understand the phenomenon and the self-delusion and communal collusion required to sustain it. By dissecting the human relations obtained in the world of his childhood, Twain would become an acerbic analyst not only of "bad faith but of its close cousin, the lie of silent assertion" that could hold an entire nation in its thrall. A whitewashed fence is one thing. A whitewashed history is another. -Shelly Fisher Fishkin The first really beautiful day during my first visit to Berlin was on the day we went to visit the Sachsenheusen concentration camp. The weather seemed out of place somehow-brilliant with a slight chill. As we neared the gates, my German friend pointed to several houses and commented that it was there that the SS officers lived with their families. In slightly strained English he commented on how those officers would come home after murdering hundreds of men, women, and children to their own families where they were good fathers and husbands. "Double faced" is the term he used, and after some thought I agreed that this term was probably more accurate than "two-faced" because it didn't carry the same negative connotation. A person who is two-faced pretends to be one thing when in fact he is another. These soldiers were not pretending or attempting to deceive-in fact it could be argued that they were genuinely both cold killers and good fathers, pleased with the work they did on both fronts. Each was a part of who they were. It was hard to believe that the people who lived in those houses could be such cold-blooded killers. Everything about the places-the lace curtains at the windows, the gardens in the back, even the fences around the yards-suggested a normal domestic life. For a short period as I stared at those houses, it was easy to fall into the trap of thinking of these men as simply monsters-twisted, lacking the part of humanity which separates us from beasts. "How could they?!" was the constant question in my mind. But as I continued to look at those houses, a strange thing happened. We passed by one with a gated yard, and a memory flashed through my mind of a white picket fence, and a small boy painting it on a Saturday morning. The fence here, north of Berlin, was not so different from a fence Tom Sawyer was painting in Missouri. And I remembered how the little slave boy Jim came along on an errand from Aunt Polly. Whereas I had often taken this image in a romantic setting before, I was now jarred by the discrepancy. How could figures as likable as Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, and the other people in that Missouri town support such a notion of slavery? The answer to my earlier outrage was to be found in a small river town thousands of miles away. Those people here in Sachsenheusen, those brutal soldiers were not that different from the rest of us. In truth, their normalcy was one of the things that should make us all the more cautious. We like Aunt Pol, but we must remember that the same woman we like is also the one in charge of Jim the slave. There are many instances in American society where we attempt to distance ourselves from our more shameful moments and embrace those that are more flattering to us. Nor are we the only ones to do so. Twain comments on the phenomena in The Innocents Abroad when he is passing through Versailles and sees that all the images being recalled are of victories, not of their defeats or embarrassments. The same is evident in America. It is impossible not to be moved by the Holocaust Museum on The Mall in Washington, D.C., and one of the underlying motifs of the Museum is how America acted as the Grand Savior in coming in and helping free the Jews from concentration camps. …