The first story that Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine was a true story he had copied from a former slave woman who was his sister-in-law’s cook. The woman’s name was Mary Ann Cord; and the Clemens family was sitting on the porch with her when Samuel asked, “Mary Ann, how is it that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble?. . . I’ve never heard you sigh and never seen your eye when there wasn’t a laugh in it.” Samuel wrote, “It was no more trouble for her to laugh than it was for a bird to sing.”

May Ann told Mr. Clemens that she and her husband and seven children had been slaves in Virginia when her mistress told her that they would all be sold at auction. When the time came she clung to Henry, her youngest child, but before he was sold he told her that he would escape and come back for her. He was eight years old.

Several years later, when the Union officers were occupying the house that her owners had deserted, groups of soldiers would sometimes come into her kitchen and disrupt her preparations. At one such time, Mary Ann clenched her fists onto her hips and said, “I wasn’t bown in da mash to be fooled by trash! I is one of the ole Blue Hen’s chickens, I is!” It was an expression that her mother had used when Mary Ann was a child, and one she had used with her own family before the separation. “Den I see dat young man looking up at de ceiling,like he forgot something. .. and as another man was going out, I heard him say, ‘Jim. . .deys something on my mind. . . I don’t sleep no mo this night.’”

The next morning , just as Mary Ann was pulling a tray of biscuits from the oven she looked down and the young man’s face was looking up at her. She stared and stared; then the pan fell to the floor as, “all of a sudden, I knowed!!” She grabbed his hand to find a scar that Henry had had, and pushed back his hair for another scar, and cried out, “De Lord God ob heaven be praised! I got my own back again!”

The poignancy of this story is powerful, and even more powerful is the character of Mary Ann Cord, who displayed the victory of spirit in the laughter and joy that was evident to Samuel Clemens. As Nehemiah said to the people who had returned from exile: Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength. (Nehemiah 8:10)

After the war Henry took his mother to Elmira, New York, where he was a successful barber, and she became the paid cook of Mark Twain’s sister-in-law.

From “A True Story Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It” by Mark Twain

Love in Him,

Prue