June 5 Sunday – Based on her letter to her sister, this is the day Grace Elizabeth King (1852-1932) met Sam Clemens. King was a budding short story writer from New Orleans, whose aristocratic family had been impoverished by the war. She was visiting the Charles Dudley Warners.

Robert Bush writes of King at this time:

“At the age of thirty-five in 1887, Grace King had published only four stories. She had started writing out of opposition to what she considered the biased writings of George W. Cable, whose championing of the Negro and criticism of the Creole had aroused resentment among his New Orleans contemporaries. Her own fiction contains no direct answers to Cable. Rather it portrays the ordinary Creoles and Negroes of the Reconstruction period, the people she herself had observed….Charles Dudley Warner, whom she had met in New Orleans in 1885, was the first to sponsor her and see that ‘Monsieur Motte,’ her first story, found a publisher” [31].

Based on her stance against George W. Cable, she was destined to make a hit with Sam. She also felt close to him as a transplanted Southerner. Sam had known the river as a pilot, Grace as a passenger; Coincidentally, Captain Horace Bixby, Sam’s river mentor, was a friend of the King family. She would become even closer to Livy. From her letter to her sister, Annie Ragan King of this date, and her first impressions of the great Mark Twain — Warner had escorted King to church to hear Dr. Edwin Parker.

Coming home we met Mark Twain — he walked along with us — and of course kept me giggling all the time. He talks just as he writes. He was animadverting on Sunday. “The most horrible, detestable abominable day” that was ever invented. All his life he had been trying to get rid of Sundays. He was so glad to get to Chicago that time on Sunday. Cable went round Psalm singing in three churches & he played billiards till midnight in a saloon winning his agent’s [Pond] money from him. He “pulls” his words just as Bixby says [Horace Bixby, Sam’s pilot teacher] and if you will drawl this ought ending to sample you will get the meaning exactly. His anecdotes are always a little risqué — talking of some conceited person he said that he felt like applying to him what Clapp said of Osgood the preacher “He was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity to apply for it.” …Tonight we take tea at the Clemens. Tuesday start for the Churches .. [Bush 32-3]. Note: This gives the date for the trip to Frederick E. Church’s mansion in Hudson, New York. (See June 7 entry.)

Notes given by Bush: “George Alfred Clapp (1856-1924, comedian and minstrel known as Lew Dockstader; Jacob Osgood (1777-1844), founder of the Osgoodite movement, an anti-clerical revivalist, pacifist, and faith healer.” A somewhat different account of the first meeting between the Clemenses and King may be found in Salsbury 242-3.

Also based on this letter, King was entertained at the Clemens’ residence this evening. In her notebook at the same time of the letter to her sister, is this observation of Sam, which likely happened this evening, though may have been the next.

I was just called off here to see “Mark Twain.” The Warners who are always in motion soon left me alone with him, and I propped myself back in a big chair with my feet on a stool and gave myself up to the pleasure of listening to him…. His talk drifted all around and talking about affairs in general & black and white affairs in particular, I asked him if he did not think Providence was a darkey. He laughed and said he had made a note of a reflection of his the other day. He pulled out his note book and read me “Could we endure a French savior?” He said he wondered about the question himself. We had had a Jew who had been satisfactory, but fancy a Frenchman saying “Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden” — & then he thought of an Irishman — wouldn’t do at all. And so all through the nations. — He is a powerful intellect without doubt — a genius in disguise of a humorist; in old times he would have been a righteous buffoon….[Bush 33 from Grace King’s Notebook].

Note: Sam’s notebook “French Christ” entry may be found at MTNJ 3: 292 with part of the above.