He even taught the cat tricks...

26 May 2025: I really love a piece like Kevin Mac Donnell's essay on George Griffin, who worked as a butler of sorts for Sam Clemens and his family for years and who a model for Jim in Huck Finn (along with two other men). It's a combination biography, literary criticism, and detective story. Mac Donnell tells readers the story of George's life--a truly astounding one, fit for a movie or a stand-alone book. Then he introduces and does a close reading of a recent discovery--the only known photo of this extraordinary man. 

Mac Donnell is such a good writer that he makes it work better that you expect it to--the whole thing: the biography, the historiography, the authentication and verification of that photo. It's a lot to do in a limited space. And then he just nails the ending, explaining why that photo matters.

“We have had a much longer time to think about Mr. Griffin than Huck had to think about Jim, but have we really seen Mr. Griffin before us all that time? If not, we can certainly see Mr. Griffin before us now. He meets our gazes, eye-to-eye, confident, human, knowing. Do we see his humanity? We Americans—all of us—have had a very long time to look into the faces of others who do not look like us—others—whose races, ages, sexes, ethnicities, heights, weights, disabilities, sexual identities, religions, and socioeconomic classes do not mirror our own. Surely, we see their humanity. But as we move forward, shall we, like Huck, be willing to go to hell for the sake of our common humanity?” (44).

[And yes: Griffin taught one of the Clemens' cats, Abner, how to ring the bell four times "like a servant" (19).]

Work Cited

Mac Donnell, Kevin. “George Griffin: Meeting Mark Twain’s Butler Face-to-Face.” Mark Twain Journal, vol. 62, no. 1, 2024, pp. 11–58.