I’ve heard that version plenty of times.

Puddn’head is certainly an interesting little book. I’d have to read Huck and Tom again for comparison, which I literally haven’t in over 30 years, but I’d rank Puddn’head up there with those. If not for the controversial nature of the plot (which offended a lot of people in the 19th and 21st century equally for different reasons) it would be more celebrated. As usual with Twain there are some rough edges that could be trimmed even in a novella. The Italian twins could easily be cut out entirely but if you read Twain’s afterward he admits that the twins were leftover from a previous version of the story and he decided to go ahead and keep them around. He wrote it near the end of his career in 1894 when the Darwinian nature vs. nurture debates were at their height. I admit that the dialect of Roxy the black mammy is really cringey but it does seem pretty authentic to the way black slaves really did talk back then.

Trivia: apparently the murder trial used the first example of fingerprints in fiction, before they were ever used in real police work. He refers to them as fingermarks.