Playing Con Games in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

This chapter focuses on confidence games played in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). These con games expose the weakness in the legal construction of people as property. In each novel, white characters conflate enslaved people with animals, but this conflation allows black characters to hide their agency. Blinded by racism, white characters become the dupes of con games in which black characters outwardly perform the identity of property while covertly taking on the agency of people. Despite legal resolutions that seem to restore order in Melville’s and Twain’s texts, lingering haunting reveals that the racial categories destroy everyone. Williams offers a twentieth-century answer to this destruction by imagining people formerly enslaved escaping to the West, thereby crafting the only con game that works.