Chapter 2 of TATS (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) begins with a description of a cheerful, dreamy, Saturday morning. Twain juxtaposes that pleasant atmosphere with Tom and his bucket of whitewash; Tom is in deep melancholy. He faces 30 yards of 9 feet tall fence. (Not unlike a writer's blank page, or screen, waiting to be filled with words).
After a couple swipes with the whitewash, Tom sits down, discouraged (Writer's block?). Soon Jim comes along on his way to fill the water bucket. Tom, after a series of bribes, culminating with a look at his sore big toe, convinces Jim to let him take the bucket for water while Jim works on the whitewash. Aunt Polly, armed with a slipper, sends Jim on his way for the water. Tom is back to whitewashing.
Tom thinks of his friends and the activities that he had planned. He grows sadder as he contemplates how they will make sport of him. Examining his boyish wealth of toys, marbles, and trash, he realizes that he doesn't have enough goods to bribe his friends into even a half-hour of work for him. Just as Tom is about to fall deeper into melancholy, inspiration strikes.
Tom takes up the work with vigor. Ben Rodgers appears, pretending to be a steamboat, the Big Missouri. Ben makes quite an elaborate show of maneuvering the steamboat, acting not only as captain, but as the boat itself, both calling out orders and executing them, voicing the bells, and using his hands to simulate the great paddle wheels of the craft. Tom pretends to be oblivious to Ben's artful display; he is engrossed in his work.
Ben leads into a taunt, asking Tom he if wishes he couldn't go swimming like him instead of having to do that work. Now we see Tom begin to display his preeminence.
“What do you call work?”
“Why, ain’t that work?”
Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:
“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
Now Ben sees the matter in an entirely different light. He wants to paint, just a little. Tom acts as if he wants to let Ben give it a try, but does not; Aunt Polly is awful particular. He increases Ben's desire to take up the whitewashing by professing that there isn't one boy in a thousand, or two thousand, who can do it properly. Tom refuses to allow Ben to trade his apple core for a turn at whitewashing. At last, reluctantly, Tom surrenders his brush to Ben in return for Ben's entire apple.
Other boys came to jeer, but stayed to whitewash, giving some of their treasure to Tom in exchange. I found the most interesting bit of treasure to be a dead rat which included the string by which to swing it. Other treasures included a kitten with only one eye, a dog collar but no dog, a knife handle, and four pieces of orange-peel. While he was able to idle away his time collecting treasure, the fence received 3 coats of whitewash. The only thing that prevented him from bankrupting the youth of the town was the fact that he ran out of whitewash.
Twain shares Tom's new-found wisdom:
He 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. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
We watched Tom in chapter 1 interact with Polly, Sid, and the over dressed boy. We saw him spare with his wits against Polly, and with his fists against the boy in the earlier chapter. Here, we see the classic Tom Sawyer. Here, we see why he is the boy of boys. He will be the leader of any group of boys of which he is a part; he is a master at manipulation.
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