On this day, 150 years ago, Mary Ann Cord told the story of her early life, conditions of enslavement, separation from her children at a human auction in 1852, & miraculous reunion with her youngest son, Henry, to a rapt audience on the porch at Quarry Farm in Elmira.
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Among them was Mark Twain, who thereafter attempted to translate Cord's performance to print. His "True Story" was published in Nov. 1874. It was Twain's first entry in
@theatlantic.bsky.social, his first publication with "no humor," & the most the magazine had ever paid an author.
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To Twain, to his editor, W.D. Howells, & to literary historians, "A True Story" is about Cord's voice, about rendering her dialect precisely so that it produces pathos. But Twain's wife, Livy, recognizes the story is, to Cord, actually about her son, Henry Washington.
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Henry, who, at 6, while being ripped from Cord's arms, promised to escape enslavement & to find his mother again. And who, by age 19, had accomplished exactly that.
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Henry emancipated himself in 1858 & fled to Elmira, where he became an apprentice barber. When the Emancipation Proclamation made them eligible for military service, a group of Black Elmirans walked 400 miles to Boston to join the first Black regiment. This was Henry's chance.
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Henry "ransacked the whole South hunting for" his mother. He found her cooking for Gen. Burnside at his headquarters in New Bern, NC. They returned to Elmira together. Henry became Twain's barber, eventually opening his own shop. Mary Ann became cook at Quarry Farm.
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