Performances

Gladys Coggswell and Jim Waddell at the Museum Gallery

"A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It"

Gladys Coggswell performs as "Aunt Rachel," a former slave whose real name was Mary Ann Cord.  Mary Ann was a household servant in the home of Theodore and Susan Crane.  (Susan was the sister-in-law of Olivia Clemens, Sam Clemens's wife.)  For more than twenty summers, Sam, Livy, and their children visited the Cranes at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York.  One summer evening, Mary Ann joined the family and others on the expansive front porch at Quarry Farm as she often did.  Sam asked her a question that prompted her recollection of her life as a slave and the sorrow of being torn apart from her husband and children on the auction block.  Twain wrote her story and published it in the Atlantic Monthly in 1874.  It begins...

It was summer time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the farm-house, on the summit of the hill, and "Aunt Rachel" was sitting respectfully below our level, on the steps, - for she was our servant, and colored.  She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old, but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated.  She was a cheerful, hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is for a bird to sing.  She was under fire, now, as usual when the day was done.  That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was enjoying it.  She would let off peal after peal of laughter, and then sit with her face in her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she could no longer get breath enough to expres.  At such a moment as this a thought occurred to me, and I said:

"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you've lived sixty years and never had any trouble?"

She stopped quaking.  She paused, and there was a moment of silence.  She turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile in her voice: -

"Misto C -, is you in 'arnest?"

Join Gladys Coggswell, award-winning author and storyteller, as she answers Mr. Clemens's question and tells "Aunt Rachel's" story of tragedy and triumph at the Mark Twain Museum Gallery this summer:

Wednesdays through Saturday at:
10:00
10:30
1:00
1:30

Mark Twain's Retreat: Personal Recollections of the Civil War

Jim Waddell performs as Mark Twain beginning Thursday, May 3 through October 21, (Thursdays through Sundays at 4:00 p.m.)
Civil War Missouri was a powder keg of conflicting sentiments. From May through October, Jim Waddell stages a presentation in the Museum Gallery to give visitors an overview of this period of national transition - from Twain's perspective. (Approx. 40 min.)