Pudd’nhead Wilson: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

When Wilson arrives in town, he rents an office and advertises his law practice. However, he gets no clients because the townspeople have deemed him a “pudd’nhead.” Instead, he takes on work as a land surveyor and accountant. He also fills his time with hobbies the townspeople find eccentric, including fingerprinting. He carries a box with glass plates around town and asks everyone he encounters to leave their fingerprints on the plates, which he then labels with the date and the person’s name. This unusual practice only confirms everyone’s belief that he is a “pudd’nhead.”

One day soon after his arrival, Wilson encounters Roxy on the street in front of his house, pushing the infants Tom and Chambers in a wagon. Wilson notes that Roxy, an enslaved woman Percy Driscoll owns, looks like a White woman; she is 1/16th Black, and that small percentage is not evident in her skin tone or features. Roxy’s son, Chambers, is “thirty-one parts white” and nearly indistinguishable from Tom. Both babies, Wilson notes, have blond hair and blue eyes. Indeed, the only way to tell them apart is through their clothing. Chambers wears a rough linen shirt, while Tom wears a soft ruffled outfit and a coral necklace.

Wilson, after inquiring into the babies’ age and complimenting their looks, asks Roxy how she can tell the two boys apart when they aren’t dressed. She laughs, responding that she can see their differences but guesses that her master, Percy Driscoll, can’t. Wilson takes both Roxy’s and the babies’ fingerprints. Two months later, when the boys are seven months old, Wilson encounters the trio again and takes their fingerprints a second time because he likes having multiple sets of the same prints.

Soon after Wilson takes the babies’ fingerprints a second time, Percy Driscoll suspects that one of his enslaved people has been stealing money from him. He calls Roxy and three other enslaved people before him and demands to know who the thief is. When no one volunteers any information, he threatens to sell all of them “down the river”—a euphemism for being sold into hard labor in the deep South—unless one of them admits to the crime. Roxy’s fellow servants fall to their knees and each claim to be the thief lest they meet this horrible fate. Percy sells the enslaved people, but he keeps his word and doesn’t sell them down the river, behavior ironically characterized as noble and generous.