With an “all-hands” workday coming up again on Saturday, I was thinking about one of the most delightful descriptions of a “work day” in all of literature — namely, the fence-painting episode in chapter two of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You might remember the story. Tom (typically) is being punished by his Aunt Polly. Instead of his usual sunny Saturday entertainments, Tom will be a one-man “work detail” to whitewash “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.” It will take him…forever!
Sighing, [Tom] dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged.
First, Tom tries to swap jobs with Jim who had been sent off to fetch water from the town pump — easily an hour-long chore that would be far more diverting. But Jim won’t do it. "Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would."
Eventually, Tom offers to sweeten the deal by showing Jim his sore toe. It almost works, but Aunt Polly intervenes — Jim rushes off to the pump and Tom is back to work, “and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye.”
Not one to be easily mastered, Tom thinks perhaps he can trade some of his “worldly wealth” (bits of toys, marbles, and trash) to the other boys for their help with the whitewashing. But no…
At last Tom is gripped with “nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration.”
He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers hove in sight presently… He was eating an apple, and giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals, followed by a deep-toned ding-dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was personating a steamboat.… He was boat and captain and engine-bells combined…
Ben observes, “You're up a stump, ain't you!" But Tom is absorbed in his painting, surveying his work “with the eye of an artist.” Tom shrewdly declines the offer of his friend to go swimming. It’s not everyday a boy gets a chance to whitewash a fence, Tom observes. “Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to note the effect — added a touch here and there — criticized the effect again — Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed.”
Presently Ben asks if he can whitewash a little. But Tom refuses. “You see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence… I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done."
“Oh come, now — lemme just try. Only just a little — I'd let you, if you was me, Tom." Ben is hooked! He offers Tom the core of his apple for the opportunity, and Tom agrees.
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while [Ben] worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.… By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with — and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog-collar — but no dog — the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.
In the end the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! “If [Tom] hadn't run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.”
Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.… Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
You see how much fun — and how profitable! — it can be to work play together? Come out and join the fun on Saturday at 8:30 AM. Lot’s to do, lot’s to enjoy!
