Blankenship family. The father, Woodson (b. 1799?), a laborer from South Carolina, was one of Hannibal’s drunkards. The 1850 census lists him and his wife, Mahala (b. 1813?), with eight children, all born in Missouri: Benson, 21; Tom, 19; Martha, 18 or 19; Nancy, 16; Sarah, 14; Elizabeth, 12; Mary, 6; and Catherine, 3. In “Villagers” (96) and “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (131), Clemens recalls the unproven charge that the Blankenship girls were prostitutes (Marion Census 1850, 308, 309; AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174).
Benson (Bence, or Ben) Blankenship (b. 1829?) is called “the boys’ friend & loafer” in Clemens’s 1897 notebook (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24). In 1847 he helped a runaway slave hiding on Sny Island (across the river from Hannibal, near the Illinois shore) by carrying provisions to him for several weeks, spurning a fifty-dollar reward for his capture—a source for an incident in chapters 8 through 11 of Huckleberry Finn (MTB, 1:63–64; Wecter 1952, 148). He is mentioned in “Villagers” (96).
Tom Blankenship (b. 1831?) was the model for Huckleberry Finn, who first appears in chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer. When Clemens’s sister, Pamela, heard that chapter read aloud, she exclaimed, “Why, that’s Tom Blankenship!” (MTBus, 265). Clemens himself remarked in 1906:
In “Huckleberry Finn” I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy’s. (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:174–75)
And in a letter of the same date to a former Hannibal acquaintance, Clemens commented: “You may remember that Tom was a good boy, notwithstanding his circumstances. To my mind he was a better boy than Henry Beebe & John Reagan put together, those swells of the ancient days” (8 Mar 1906 to Alexander C. Toncray, NN-B). In April 1861 Blankenship was given a thirty-day sentence for stealing turkeys, and in June 1861 he was reported “at his old business” again, having allegedly stolen some onions from a Hannibal garden (Hannibal Messenger, 21 Apr and 4 June 1861, reprinted in Lorch 1940, 352). One of his sisters, when asked in 1899 if he had been [begin page 303] the model for Huck, said: “Yes, I reckon it was him. Sam and our boys run together considerable them days, and I reckon it was Tom or Ben, one; it don’t matter which, for both of ’em’s dead” (Fielder, 10). In 1889 William Benton Coontz sent Clemens a clipping from the Hannibal Journal which reported that Tom had died years earlier of cholera (Smith 1889). Nevertheless, Clemens claimed to have heard in 1902 (presumably in the spring of that year, during his last visit to Hannibal) that Tom “was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana, and was a good citizen and greatly respected” (AD, 8 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:175). Blankenship appears as Huck in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), “Tom Sawyer, Detective” (1896), and, in the present volume, in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians” (33–81), “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134–213), “Schoolhouse Hill” (214, 227), and “Huck Finn” (260–61).
