When my mom taught first grade in the 1950’s and 60’s, one of the books in the room’s library was Little Black Sambo[sup]*[/sup]. When she was approached once by the PTA censors and asked to remove it because the darker-skinned kids would be offended, she said, “Offended? It’s their favorite story! How can they relate to lily-white Dick and Jane?”
Eh? There’s an entire chapter devoted to a god, but not the Christian one. Did you mean some other chapter?
Yeah–as I said earlier, I may just flat-out be misremembering. I think maybe there was something in the chapter about the wayfarer rat that seemed remarkably Christian, but a brief skimming of that chapter led to nothing. Please feel free to dismiss my memory on this subject :).
ETA: Sorry, I was looking at an older version of the thread, I see that above was addressed.
Bolding mine.
Depends upon what you mean by “real”. Twain had contact with Indians – “Injun Joe” is based on a real-life counterpart. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people Twain knew were not exemplars of their tribes. Twain had more contact with larger groups when we went out west, but that’s all before he wrote anything quoted.