Soon after leaving Hannibal for New York in 1853, Sam Clemens wrote home to his mother: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”'As the youth who would be Mark Twain wrote these words, Christy's Minstrels were at the peak of their extraordinary eight-year run (1846-54) at New York City's Mechanics' Hall, and many other blackface troupes battled them for public attention. Meanwhile, the new phenomenon of the “Tom show” - dramatic blackface productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published the year before - was emerging to (briefly) displace and reorient the minstrel tradition; by 1854 there were several such shows running in New York alone. Probably the prominence of blackface in New York only clinched Clemens's love of minstrelsy, which extended back to his Hannibal childhood.

Blackface minstrelsy - "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show," Twain calls it in the autobiography he dictated in his last years – had burst upon the unwitting town in the early 1840s as a "glad and stunning surprise." Usually involving a small band of white men armed with banjo, fiddle, tambourine, and bone castanets and arrayed in blackface makeup and ludicrous dress, the minstrel show, from the 1830s to the early years of the twentieth century, offered white travesties and imitations of black humor, dance, speech, and music. It most often opened with assorted songs, breakdowns, and gags, followed by an "olio" portion of novelty acts such as malapropistic "stump speeches7' or parodic "lectures," and concluded with a burlesque skit set in the South. In his Autobiography Twain averred: "If I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera" (AU 64). This quite unguarded attraction to "blacking up" perhaps made it inevitable that in a letter to his mother Twain would reach for the blackface mask to finesse his response to racial difference in the northern city. For the rest of his life, Twain's imaginative encounters with race would be unavoidably bound up with blackface minstrelsy.