The Life and Legacy of George Griffin
Mark Twain House and Museum
Hartford
May 14, 2024
The Mark Twain House and Museum hosted “The Life and Legacy of George Griffin,” about the family butler for Samuel Clemens for 17 years. The event was broken up into three parts: It began with a lecture by Twain scholar Kevin Mac Donnell, followed by a panel discussion between Mac Donnell, historian Dr. Camesha Scruggs of Central Connecticut State University, and Rev. Samuel Blanks of Griffin’s church, Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion in Hartford.
Griffin led a noteworthy life, born into slavery in Baltimore, Maryland in 1849. At some point he escaped, and became the body servant to General Charles Devens Jr., a commander in the Union army during the Civil War. After the war he spent 10 years studying butlery before being hired as the family butler for Mark Twain.
Twain was effusive in his praise for Griffin, describing him as “…handsome, well built, shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured, cheerful to gaiety, honest, religious, a cautious truth-speaker, devoted friend to the family, champion of its interests…” and several other superlatives. According to Mac Donnell, Griffin served as a major influence on Twain in creating the character of Jim, the escaped enslaved man who journeys with Huckleberry Finn on his adventures.
The lecture featured the reveal of the first picture of George Griffin, an exciting moment to witness.
One thing that stuck out to me was Mac Donnell’s statement that Jim is “the most significant Black character in American literature”. He said it several times, so I know he means it sincerely. But I’m not sure how I feel about that sentiment.
Yes, Jim demonstrates the humanity and suffering of African Americans in the antebellum South. He embodied the noble ideas of freedom and justice. But he was really a foil for Huckleberry Finn, a device for Finn to make his famous declaration that he’d rather go to hell than send Jim back into slavery. I have a hard time thinking that this Black character who sets up the moral arc for a White character is more important than the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Richard Wright in Black Boy, or Celie in The Color Purple. It’s tough to be lauded as anything other than second fiddle when that’s the tradition of treatment for your people.
The evening highlighted another one of the darker aspects of American history. Even when African Americans were able to speak for themselves, as George Griffin certainly could, there often was no one who cared enough to listen. Griffin was a literate free man, but none of the information we learned about him came from his mouth. It was all secondhand, from White people of his era.
From all accounts, Griffin sounds like an intelligent, caring and impressive man. Yet thanks to the cruelty of the race-based caste system that permeated the country in his day, he was relegated to a status of servitude — voluntary, but still servitude — after slavery was destroyed. What could Griffin have been if his opportunities weren’t curtailed the way they were? Instead of being a servant for a great writer, could he have been a great writer himself?
That thought was tempered by something that Professor Scruggs said during the Q&A session. She was asked about the value of domestic work, as her dissertation focused on the conditions African American maids faced in Texas in the 20th century. She described her work as an academic love letter to service work, and said that there is dignity in the work of making a house into a home. Anyone who has tried to maintain a home with a family bouncing around inside of it knows how true those words are.
So the issue is not exactly about greatness and achievement. It’s not that George Griffin could have done more and been more, because loving and being loved is so much on its own. The issue is whether that’s the life that Griffin would have chosen.
It’s true that people in all times and places, maybe even you and me, have had to give up on dreams and goals when the weight of reality begins to bear down. Griffin lived in a time when it was nearly impossible for an African American to do much other than get paid for the service they had just been released from as chattel. While conditions are nowhere near as deplorable for African Americans now, one only need look at the leadership class across various industries versus those who work in their employ to see that the caste system, while not as rigid, is still very much in place.
I learned alot about George Griffin, but I left the event feeling a bit hollow. At one point, Mac Donnell asked the crowd if they were willing to damn themselves to hell to do what was right, as Huckleberry Finn had been willing to do. The crowd answered in the affirmative, to which he replied, ”I just got a crowd full of white people to do some call and response.” They laughed, but I didn’t. I’m sure the gesture was genuine, but doing what’s right means more than opposing an obvious evil like slavery. It means actualizing a man like Griffin into the thing he wanted to be. If that was a butler, so be it. Yet there’s no way to know, because it seems like no one ever asked him.
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The Mark Twain House and Museum hosts Killing Grace: A Vietnam War Mystery with Peter Prichard on Thursday, May 16.
Jamil goes to get breakfast at another neighborhood staple.
