“It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a n*****.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
– Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 32. Huck lies to Aunt Sally about an explosion on a steamship. Her reaction to a black man being killed reflects the fact that the society in which she lives does not consider the death of a black man important. Upstanding, church-going and caring she may be, but her reaction illustrates the hypocricy of societal mores at the time.