1
Reed
*NOTE: A summary of the novel follows the endnotes*
The Wagers of Whiteness, The Wagers of Blackness
Gambling and Race in Pudd’nhead Wilson
In the late 1980s, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (PW [1894]) was rediscovered by literary critics interested in the negotiation of race in American literature. The text poses the question: if a “black” baby who is phenotypically “white” is raised as a white man, is there a solvency to his blackness that will make its presence known?[1] Critics have seen the novel as a literary harbinger of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the landmark Supreme Court case that found intra-state railroad segregation constitutional, a line of criticism inaugurated by Eric Sundquist, who argued that the “fanatical adherence to ‘one-drop’ definitions of negritude” that Plessy relied on also dominates the end of Twain’s novel.[2] But while Sundquist’s reading of the novel has an obvious force, it fails to attend to the engine of much of the novel: Tom Driscoll’s compulsion to gamble, which leaves him at risk of being disinherited by his uncle, Judge Driscoll, and sends him on a devolving spree of thefts that culminate in his uncle’s murder. If the gambit of PW is whether or not Tom’s “blackness” will be rendered legible, we must think about Tom’s “blackness” through Tom’s gambling, for it is the recurrent cycle of debt and theft initiated by his gambling that leads to the murder and thus to his unmasking as black and as a slave. Gambling thus provides a means to see PW’s management of racial difference as a question not only of biology but also of economic behavior, specifically behavior towards property.[3]
The logic of race based on economic behavior is evident in two lines of legal inquiry at the close of the nineteenth century. The first line comes out of Plessy. Homer Plessy argued that segregation deprived him of the property of his reputation of whiteness; the Court denied his claim by scrupulously guarding a biologically defined whiteness as a property interest. When Plessy is read with its competing property claims in mind, it can be productively put in the context of the Supreme Court’s turn-of-the-century interpretation of property rights, spawned by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s protection of property rights was inextricable from its understanding of the liberty also guaranteed by the equal protection clause of that Amendment, and in Plessy, the Court narrowly delineated the “liberties” of blacks by using the protection of property rights as an alibi. The second line of legal inquiry reveals that Plessy was not representative of the majority of legal cases regarding segregation on the railroads. Earlier challenges to railroad segregation rendered segregation as a matter, not of biology, but of behavior. This broader legal-historical contextualization, along with a reading of the novel focused, not on biological racial legibility, but on the legibility of race through behavior with property, ultimately paints a portrait of late nineteenth-century American race relations in which it remained nearly impossible, as Saidiya Hartman worries, “to unleash freedom from the history of property that secured it.”[4]
The plot of PW is set in motion when Percy Driscoll’s slave Roxy substitutes her son, Valet de Chambre (hereafter “Tom”), for her master’s son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll (hereafter “Chambers”). But Roxy’s substitution begins to unravel upon Tom’s return after two years at Yale, when we find him in an illicit economic circuit: he repeatedly gambles himself into debt and then steals from his fellow townsfolk to pay off that debt. Tom’s thefts are inextricable from his gambling; they are the textual manifestation of Tom’s compulsive habit—his actual acts of gambling take place outside the narrative purview of the text. To gamble in PW is thus to steal, but if gambling is theft, then Tom’s gambling is a sign of more than his fiscal turpitude. It becomes a sign of his blackness, for theft in Dawson’s Landing is a racialtrait.
On the fourth of September something happened in Percy Driscoll’s household that “profoundly impressed” his slave Roxy, leading directly to her substitution of the babies (65). After missing a “small sum” of money, Percy Driscoll determines that he has “a thief in his house” and quickly decides that “necessarily, the thief must be one of his Negroes” (66). Gathering his slaves, Percy declares the consequences of this crime: “You have all been warned before. It has done no good. This time I will teach you a lesson. I will sell the thief. Which of you is the guilty one?” (66). Percy’s solution to the thefts in his home is to counter theft with exchange (the sale of the slave). Percy’s lesson illustrates the proper form of property transfer while at the same time driving home to the slaves their own status as property. The implication of this double message is that, not owning themselves, Percy’s slaves are necessarily excluded from property ownership and thus are unaware of or unfaithful to its protocols.
Percy Driscoll’s lesson in property is quickly followed by a demand for confession: “‘I give you one minute’ … ‘If at the end of that time you have not confessed, I will not only sell all four of you, but—I will sell you DOWN THE RIVER!’” (68). He wants the thief to mark herself as such, to acknowledge her guilt. Percy Driscoll’s disciplinary philosophy demands not merely that his slaves obey certain rules, but rather that they internalize those rules, that they become self-disciplining. Percy’s lesson to his slaves, moreover, is revealed to be a lesson in freedom. Percy sells three of the four slaves he calls together for an interrogation that day. Only Roxy, who has not stolen from Percy, is not sold and, crucially, is in fact freed by Percy at his death. Percy’s gesture suggests that Roxy is rewarded with freedom for her innocence. Percy Driscoll thus renders self-possession—literally possessing oneself through freedom—inextricable from an ability to form an appropriate relationship to property.
While the slaves have indeed taken money from Percy, a slave stole, the text tells us, “perfectly sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty—he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him” (67-8). This sympathy expressed for the slaves does not, however, carry over to Tom Driscoll. While Percy Driscoll’s slaves may be justified because they are enslaved, Tom has no such justification. Tom’s thefts thus become a sign, not of enslavement, but of blackness. In making thieving a racial trait rather than a product of circumstance, PW opens up onto debates about race at the end of the nineteenth century, embodied by Plessy, for Plessy is a property claim, one the Court denied by, in essence, calling Homer Plessy a thief.
The case was the product of Homer Plessy’s deliberate attempt to put a Louisiana law requiring intra-state railroads to segregate passengers by race to a constitutional test. Homer Plessy boarded a Louisiana train, sat in the whites-only car, and announced that he was black. The railroad conductor instructed him to move to the blacks-only car; Plessy refused, and thus the lawsuit was born. The law criminalized disobeying the conductor’s orderto sit in a particular car, not the act of sitting in the wrong car. Plessy’s attorney, Albion Tourgée, contended that, because race had neither a standard scientific nor legal definition in Louisiana, the conductor had ordered Plessy into a racially segregated cars based on nothing more than his opinion about Plessy’s race. How then, asked Tourgée, could it be constitutional for the State to “declare a man guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine and imprisonment, because he may differ with the officer of a railroad as to ‘the race to which he belongs?’”[5]
The conductor’s insistence that Plessy leave the whites-only car impinged on his property rights, which should have been protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process:
the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property; and that the provisions of the act in question … enables [the conductor] to deprive him … of this property—this reputation which has actual pecuniary value—“without due process.”[6]
Tourgée argued that the reputation of whiteness, because it had pecuniary value, was a form of property. Therefore, to take away someone’s reputation of whiteness was to steal from him, making railroad segregation akin to highway robbery. The Court countered by declaring Plessy’s property claim invalid:
It is claimed by [Plessy] that … the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action, or of inheritance, is property. Conceding this to be so … we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.[7]
In rejecting Tourgée’s argument, the Supreme Court did not hold that a reputation of whiteness was not property—the Court “conced[ed] this to be so”—it found, rather, that Plessy was “not lawfully entitled” to the property in question and thus could not be deprived of something he did not legally own.
Many legal and literary scholars, including Sundquist, have argued that the ground for Plessy was prepared by the 1873 Slaughter-House case, regularly seen as the beginning of a long process of weakening the Fourteenth Amendment.[8] The majority opinion in Slaughter-House limited the scope of the amendment by articulating state and federal citizenship as entirely separate. Plessy relied on this severing of state and federal citizenship to uphold intra-state railroad segregation. (The Court had previously found inter-state railroad segregation unconstitutional; inter-state commerce was one of the few things that fell under federal jurisdiction.[9]) But Plessy was in fact out of stepwith the interpretation of the amendment that then dominated the court, for the amendment had not been weakened so much as strengthened, specifically as a protection of property rights. I return to Slaughter-House, therefore, to open up a different reading of the relationship between Plessy and the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Slaughter-House case involved a Louisiana law giving one company a monopoly on slaughter-houses in New Orleans. Butchers were required to use this centralized slaughter-house and were charged fees to do so. The butchers sued under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, arguing that the law established a monopoly and thereby deprived them of both their property and their liberty. According to the butchers, the monopoly resulted in a form of “involuntary servitude” forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment. This servitude was not just literal enslavement, they argued, but the inability to use one’s own property, whether that property be tangible (like a slaughter-house) or intangible (like the right to practice one’s profession). They argued a nearly identical claim about the way the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment: “the right to labor, the right to one’s self physically and intellectually, and to the product of one’s own faculties, is past doubt property, and property of a sacred kind.”[10] For the butchers, the definitions of liberty and property collapse into one another: liberty is the freedom to do what one will with property; property is meaningless without the liberty to do with it as one pleases.
The majority of the Court, however, refused to acknowledge or protect the intangible property of the butchers’ right to practice their profession by separating state and federal citizenship: states had the right to regulate businesses for the “comfort, health, and prosperity of the State,” and such exercise of the state’s police powers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.[11] The Court in Slaughter-House saw both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as applying narrowly and specifically to the newly freed slaves they had been passed to protect.[12] The Amendments were not, the majority asserted, cause for a discussion of property and property rights, and they certainly gave no cause, as the butchers thought they did, to articulate liberty through property rights.
The three justices in the minority, however, believed, like the butchers, that property and liberty were inextricable and indeed by the 1880s it was the minority justices’ articulation of property and liberty in and through one another that had come to dominate the Court’s thinking.[13] Lower courts and the Supreme Court itself had begun to cite Bradley’s minority opinion—not the majority decision—as precedent. Beginning in the 1880s, the Court thus repeatedly interarticulated property and liberty, and by the time of Plessy this interarticulation was quite clearly the Court’s dominant interpretation of the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.[14] For example, ten months after Plessy, in the case of Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), a unanimous court held that:
The liberty mentioned in [the Fourteenth] Amendment means not only the right of the citizen to be free from physical restraint of his person, but the term is deemed to embrace the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned.[15]
If the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed liberty, it did so only by also guaranteeing an expansive definition of property, and property was defined in Allgeyer in precisely the intangible terms the butchers had argued for: the freedom to enjoy one’s own faculties, the freedom to practice one’s profession.[16] Further, Allgeyer was an opinion self-consciously against Slaughter-House, with Justice Bradley’s dissent from Slaughter-House cited as precedent. When Plessy is put in a genealogy only with Slaughter-House, it cannot help but seem the inevitable culmination of a long tradition of eroding the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment. But a broader history of the Court’s decisions from the 1870s until the end of the century reveals that the Fourteenth Amendment’s power was regularly buttressed and expanded by the Court through the gradual interarticulation of the categories of liberty and property. By 1896, Slaughter-House no longer obtained and Plessy was argued under, not a weak Fourteenth Amendment, but a strong one. Tourgée’s argument that racial segregation was a violation of property rights should have landed on sympathetic ears; the Court’s deafness to Plessy’s claim suggests that racial distinctions caused the Court to contradict its own broad definition of property.
And yet the Court’s decision that Plessy was not “lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man” hints that this decision was made through a defense of property rights, not a willful disregard for them. We are thus left with the task of accounting for exactly how the Court was able to dismiss Plessy’s property claim despite its history of protecting property expansively. In finding that if “a colored man” is assigned to a black-only coach, “he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man,” the Court in effect held that even if Plessy could earn the reputation of being a white man, he would not be entitled to that reputation because he was not actually a white man. The reputation of whiteness was collapsed into “whiteness,” but whiteness itself amounted to reputation—the reputation that, because one’s parents were reputedly white, and their parents were reputedly white, and so on, one was oneself white. The Court’s rejection of the category of reputation produced the fictionthat whiteness was a tangible property upon which the intangible property of reputation rested, but this was undoubtedly a fiction, as the Court’s refusal to define whiteness evidenced.
The Court contradicted its expansive protections of property in refusing to recognize Plessy’s reputation, for indeed reputation, “as an aspect of identity earned through effort,” could be and often was considered property.[17] But with the property status of reputation dismissed, the Court forcefully reasserted property rights in its vigorous protection of whiteness(however ill-defined) as a property. The Court transformed Plessy’s claim to have been deprived of property into evidence that Plessy was himself trying to claim property to which he was not “lawfully entitled.” The Court both contradicted and relied on its own expansive protections of property in the Plessy decision, and managed this contradiction and reliance through biological definitions of race. To see in Plessy only or primarily the triumph of biological definitions of race is therefore to miss the way in which biological definitions of race were mobilized to articulate and defend racialized property.