Whitewashing a Fence Never Looked So Good

A Boy, a Fence, and Entirely Too Much Free Time

Here’s the setup, in case somehow you skipped it in school like half of America apparently does now: Tom Sawyer is a boy in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, living with his Aunt Polly, skipping school, running wild with his friends, and getting into the kind of trouble that in a modern book would get a truancy officer called. He falls in love with a girl named Becky Thatcher. He runs off to an island with his friend Huckleberry Finn and a kid named Joe Harper to play pirate and let the town think they’ve drowned, then shows up at his own funeral, which is honestly one of the great petty-revenge moves in literature. And then, almost as an afterthought about two-thirds in, the book pivots into an actual murder plot involving a man named Injun Joe, a stolen treasure, and a cave that turns into a legitimately tense survival sequence.

That tonal whiplash is the whole book in miniature. It starts as episodic small-town comedy and ends as something closer to a thriller. Twain wasn’t building toward that from page one. He got there by accident, and you can feel it.

The Fence Is a Masterpiece. The Rest Is a Grab Bag.

Look, I need to talk about the fence scene because it is, genuinely, one of the smartest pieces of comic writing in American literature. Tom gets punished with whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence on a Saturday while every kid in town is free. Instead of complaining, he acts like the work is the greatest privilege imaginable, and one by one the other boys start paying him, in marbles and apples and a dead rat on a string, for the honor of doing his chore. It’s a perfect, tiny economics lesson disguised as a prank, and it works because Twain understood exactly how a con works on a kid’s brain. That scene alone justifies the book’s reputation.

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of what comes after doesn’t hold together nearly as well. The middle stretch, church on Sunday, school antics, the whole Model Boy subplot with Willie Mufferson, reads like Twain padding a serialized magazine piece rather than building a novel. I’ll admit it: there were stretches where I was skimming, waiting for something to happen. That’s not a popular thing to say about a canonical classic, but it’s true, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend every chapter sings.

Then Injun Joe shows up in the graveyard, and the book changes gears completely. The scene where Tom and Huck watch a murder happen and pin it on an innocent man is genuinely dark, and the way Twain lets two children carry that secret, terrified, for chapters, gives the book real stakes it didn’t earn in the first hundred pages. The cave sequence near the end, where Tom and Becky get lost with a single candle and dwindling food, is legitimately gripping, and it’s the section I remember most vividly, more than any of the “boyhood mischief” stuff the book is marketed on.

I have to be honest about the other thing too. Injun Joe as a character is a product of his era in a way that hasn’t aged well, and the casual racial language throughout the book, not just around him, is going to stop a lot of modern readers cold. I’m not going to pretend that’s a minor asterisk. It’s baked into the book, and depending on what you’re looking for from a classic, that might be a dealbreaker rather than a footnote.

One tangent: I’ve gone back and forth on whether Tom is actually likable or just a kid who gets away with everything because he’s the protagonist. He manipulates Aunt Polly, he lets Muff Potter sit in jail longer than necessary before doing the right thing, he treats Becky’s feelings like a game half the time. I don’t think Twain wanted us to fully admire him. I think he wanted us to recognize him, and that’s a different, better thing.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

About Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot turned printer turned journalist turned the guy who basically taught America how to be funny on the page. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the real-life town St. Petersburg is based on, and he spent his career being simultaneously the most beloved humorist in the country and one of its sharpest, angriest critics, on slavery, on religion, on American hypocrisy generally. He went broke more than once from bad investments, toured the world giving lectures to pay off debts, and somehow still found time to write some of the most quoted lines in the English language. He was, by every account, funnier in person than most people are on their best day on paper, which is saying something given what he left behind on paper.

If You Liked the Mischief More Than the Murder, Read These Next

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the direct sequel, darker and better plotted, and the book most scholars actually consider the masterpiece.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, for another restless boy narrator picking apart the adult world’s hypocrisy, just a century later and with more angst.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, if the graveyard trial subplot got you, this is a whole novel built around that same tension between childhood and injustice.
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, for the same small-town mischief energy with a heroine instead of a hero.

You can find copies of the book here: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Is Tom Sawyer actually a good kid, or does the book just let him off the hook because he’s charming?
2. The fence-painting scene is often read as a lesson about psychology and value. Does that read hold up, or is it just a fun prank?
3. How do you sit with the book’s outdated racial attitudes: as a product of its time to be studied, or a flaw that undercuts the whole thing?
4. Why do you think Twain shifted so hard from comic episodes to a genuine crime plot in the second half?
5. Does Huck Finn feel like a fully realized character here, or mostly a setup for his own book?