A True Story,Mark Twain

 Introduction :- 

"A True Story" is a short story by the American author Mark Twain, who is best known for works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. First published in November 1874 in The Atlantic Monthly, "A True Story" is appended with the following subtitle: "Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It." The story concerns a sixty-year-old African-American woman whose entire family is taken away from her at a slave auction, and who later works as a cook for a regiment of soldiers in the Union Army around the time of the American Civil War.

About the Writer :-

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature".

His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the "Great American Novel". 

Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

Narrator of the Story :-

The narrator of Twain's story is a man referred to as "Misto C-----." 

As a story within a story, “A True Story” exemplifies the frame-story technique in which the first narrator (Misto C——) provides the “frame” within which the second narrator (Aunt Rachel) tells the main story. By alternating the voices of his two narrators here, Twain tells two different stories simultaneously. While Aunt Rachel relates the dramatic story of her family, the frame-narrator’s occasional remarks quietly reveal the shifting relationship between Aunt Rachel and himself.

About the Story :-

In 1874, Twain assured the sober Atlantic Monthly that his short story “A True Story” was not humorous, although in fact it has his characteristic sparkle and hearty tone. Having been encouraged by the contemporary appeal for local colour, Twain quickly developed a narrator with a heavy dialect and a favourite folk- saying that allows a now-grown son to recognize his mother after a separation of thirteen years. While she, in turn, finds scars confirming their relationship on his wrist and head, this conventional plot gains resonance from Rachel’s report of how her husband and seven children had once been separated at a slave auction in Richmond. Contemporaries praised “A True Story” for its naturalness, testimony that Twain was creating more lifelike blacks than any other author by allowing them greater dignity, and Rachel is quick to insist that slave families cared for one another just as deeply as any white families. Her stirringly recounted memories challenged the legend of the Old South even before that legend reached its widest vogue, and her spirit matched her “mighty” body so graphically that “A True Story” must get credit for much more craftsmanship than is admitted by its subtitle, “Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.”

Summary of the Story :-

At the beginning of the story, the narrator sits on a hilltop porch with his Aunt Rachel, whom in his mind is an unequivocally cheerful woman who must have never had a bad day in her life--why else, the narrator wonders, would she be so cheerful all the time? Even when her family and friends chafe and criticise her, she just laughs and laughs. But when the narrator asks his aunt a particular question, her attitude immediately turns grave for perhaps the first time in the narrator's life, to his knowledge. The narrator's question is: "Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble?" Aunt Rachel is surprised by the notion that anyone would think she's "never had any trouble." She asks the narrator, "“Misto C——, is you in ’arnest?” before relating to him a story where she indeed had quite a bit of trouble.

Rachel starts by telling a little about her life as a slave. Despite the terrible reality of being forced into servitude and treated as property, Aunt Rachel says she had as loving a husband as anyone on earth, along with seven children she loved to no end. She smiles when remembering her mother, who would suffer no back-talk from her children or grandchildren. Rachel's mother would often respond to any back-talk by saying, “I wan’t bawn in de mash to be fool’ by trash! I’s one o’ de ole Blue Hen’s Chickens, I is!” In time, Rachel herself inherited the habit of responding to back talk in the same manner. 

The story takes a severely tragic turn, however. Rachel describes the day that the mistress who owned her family, having lost all her money and gone broke, was forced to sell Rachel, her husband, and her seven children at auction. Each time they took away her husband or one of her children, Rachel would cry out and get beaten. Near the end of the auction, Rachel's entire family had been sold with the exception of her youngest child, Henry. She refuses to part with Henry, she exclaims to the auction participants, holding him close to her body while all around her people threaten violence and worse. With Henry's face close to hers, he whispers that he will escape and find her. Sadly this doesn't stop him from being taken away from her that day. As she cries out, a man tells her to stop her "blubbering" before hitting her in the mouth.

Sometime after the tragic dissolution of her family, Aunt Rachel becomes a cook for a regiment in the Union Army stationed in New Bern, North Carolina. One night, the regiment is joined by an all-black platoon. And who should be in that platoon but her long-lost son, Henry. At seeing his face, she trembles and praises the Lord.

But at the end of the story, she tells the narrator: ”Oh, no, Misto C----, I hain't had no trouble. An' no joy!" This conclusion doesn't offer any easy answers. Perhaps the woman means to say that she is cheerful all the time regardless of her past, which contains moments of happiness like her reunion with Henry, but is also marked by unspeakable trauma and loss. Maybe she means to say that a joyful life isn't necessary to be a cheerful person--after all, Rachel's life has been anything but joyful, and what's the use in dwelling on the tragedy?

Conclusion :-

Whatever the case, however, "A True Story" contains a chilling contrast between the light tone of much of the narration and the horrifying tragedy at the heart of its heroine's tale of woe.