Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Mark J. Twain

  “Why, the whole thing. There ain’t but one; how we set the runaway nigger free—me and Tom.”

  “Good land! Set the run—What is the child talking about! Dear, dear, out of his head again!”

  “No, I ain’t out of my HEAD; I know all what I’m talking about. We did set him free—me and Tom. We laid out to do it, and we done it. And we done it elegant, too.” He’d got a start, and she never checked him up, just set and stared and stared, and let him clip along, and I see it warn’t no use for me to put in. “Why, Aunty, it cost us a power of work—weeks of it—hours and hours, every night, whilst you was all asleep. And we had to steal candles, and the sheet, and the shirt, and your dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and case-knives, and the warming-pan, and the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things, and you can’t think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and inscriptions, and one thing or another, and you can’t think half the fun it was. And we had to make up the pictures of coffins and things, and nonnamous letters from the robbers, and get up and down the lightning-rod, and dig the hole into the cabin, and make the rope-ladder and send it in cooked up in a pie, and send in spoons and things to work with, in your apron pocket”———

  “Mercy sakes!”

  ———“and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and so on, for company for Jim; and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that you come near spiling the whole business, because the men come before we was out of the cabin, and we had to rush, and they heard us and let drive at us, and I got my share, and we dodged out of the path and let them go by, and when the dogs come they warn’t interested in us, but went for the most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the raft, and was all safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and wasn’t it bully, Aunty!”

  “Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days! So it was you, you little rapscallions, that’s been making all this trouble, and turned everybody’s wits clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I’ve as good a notion as ever I had in my life, to take it out o’ you this very minute. To think, here I’ve been, night after night, a—you just get well once, you young scamp, and I lay I’ll tan the Old Harryfp out o’ both o’ ye!”

  But Tom, he was so proud and joyful, he just couldn’t hold in, and his tongue just went it—she a-chipping in, and spitting fire all along, and both of them going it at once, like a cat-convention; and she says:

  “Well, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it now, for mind I tell you if I catch you meddling with him again——”

  “Meddling with who?” Tom says, dropping his smile and looking surprised.

  “With who? Why, the runaway nigger, of course. Who’d you reckon?”

  Tom looks at me very grave, and says:

  “Tom, didn’t you just tell me he was all right? Hasn’t he got away?”

  “Him?” says Aunt Sally; “the runaway nigger? ‘Deed he hasn’t. They’ve got him back, safe and sound, and he’s in that cabin again, on bread and water, and loaded down with chains, till he’s claimed or sold!”

  Tom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening and shutting like gills, and sings out to me:

  “They hain’t no right to shut him up! Shove!—and don’t you lose a minute. Turn him loose! he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!”

  “What does the child mean?”

  “I mean every word I say, Aunt Sally, and if somebody don’t go,I’ll go. I’ve knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him down the river, and said so; and she set him free in her will.”

  “Then what on earth did you want to set him free for, seeing he was already free?”

  “Well, that is a question, I must say; and just like women! Why, I wanted the adventure of it; and I’d a waded neck-deep in blood to—goodness alive, AUNT POLLY!”

  If she warn’t standing right there, just inside the door, looking as sweet and contented as an angel half-full of pie, I wish I may never!

  Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and cried over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it was getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me. And I peeped out, and in a little while Tom’s Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there looking across at Tom over her spectacles—kind of grinding him into the earth, you know. And then she says:

  “Yes, you better turn y‘r head away—I would if I was you, Tom.”

  “Oh, deary me!” says Aunt Sally; “is he changed so? Why, that ain’t Tom, it’s Sid; Tom‘s—Tom’s—why, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago.”

  “You mean where’s Huck Finn—that’s what you mean! I reckon I hain’t raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years, not to know him when I see him. That would be a pretty howdy-do. Come out from under that bed, Huck Finn.”

  So I done it. But not feeling brash.

  Aunt Sally she was one of the mixed-upest looking persons I ever see; except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in, and they told it all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn’t know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayer-meeting sermon that night that give him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest man in the world couldn’t a understood it. So Tom’s Aunt Polly, she told all about who I was, and what; and I had to up and tell how I was in such a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyer—she chipped in and says, “Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I’m used to it, now, and ‘tain’t no need to change”—that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer, I had to stand it—there warn’t no other way, and I knowed he wouldn’t mind, because it would be nuts for him, being a mystery, and he’d make an adventure out of it and be perfectly satisfied. And so it turned out, and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.

  And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting Jim free in her will; and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free! and I couldn’t ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a nigger free, with his bringing-up.

  Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and Sid had come, all right and safe, she says to herself:

  “Look at that, now! I might have expected it, letting him go off that way without anybody to watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur’s up to, this time; as long as I couldn’t seem to get any answer out of you about it.”

  “Why, I never heard nothing from you,” says Aunt Sally.

  “Well, I wonder! Why, I wrote to you twice, to ask you what you could mean by Sid being here.”

  “Well, I never got ‘em, Sis.”

  Aunt Polly, she turns around slow and severe, and says:

  “You, Tom!”

  “Well—what?” he says, kind of pettish.

  “Don’t you what me, you impudent thing—hand out them letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “Them letters. I be bound, if I have to take aholt of you I‘ll——”

  “They’re in the trunk. There, now. And they’re just the same as they was when I got them out of the office. I hain’t looked into them, I hain’t touched them. But I knowed they’d make trouble, and I thought if you warn’t in no hurry, I‘d———”

  “Well, you do need skinning, there ain’t no mistake about it. And I wrote another one to tell you I was coming; and I spose he——”

  “No, it come yesterday; I hain’t read it yet, but it’s all right, I’ve got that one.”

  I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn‘t, but I reckoned maybe it was just as safe to not to. So I never said nothing.

  CHAPTER THE LAST

  The first time I catched Tom, private, I asked him what was his idea, time of the evasion?�
��what it was he’d planned to do if the evasion worked all right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before? And he said, what he had planned in his head, from the start, if we got Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river, on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight procession and a brass band, and then he would be a hero, and so would we. But I reckened it was about as well the way it was.

  We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room; and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

  “Dah, now, Huck, what I tell you?—what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan‘? I tole you I got a hairy breas’, en what’s de sign un it; en I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin; en it’s come true; en heah she is! Dah, now! doan’ talk to me—signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis’ ’s well ‘at I ’uz gwineter be rich agin as I’s a stannin’ heah dis minute!”

  And then Tom he talked along, and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here, one of these nights, and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain’t got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn’t get none from home, because it’s likely pap’s been back before now, and got it all away from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.

  “No he hain‘t,” Tom says; “it’s all there, yet—six thousand dollars and more; and your pap hain’t ever been back since. Hadn’t when I come away, anyhow.”

  Jim says, kind of solemn:

  “He ain’t a comin’ back no mo‘, Huck.”

  I says:

  “Why, Jim?”

  “Nemmine why, Huck—but he ain’t comin’ back no mo‘.”

  But I kept at him; so at last he says:

  “Doan’ you ‘member de house dat was float’n down de river, en dey wuz a man in dah, kivered up, en I went in en unkivered him and didn’ let you come in? Well, den, you k’n git yo’ money when you wants it; kase dat wuz him.”

  Tom’s most well, now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

  THE END. YOURS TRULY, HUCK FINN.

  ENDNOTES

  Chapter 1

  1 (p. 5) sivilized: Civilized. Here and throughout the novel Twain, by means of willful misspelling, marks a character’s speech as a distinctive spoken dialect.

  2 (p. 7) niggers: Because of the casual use of this racial epithet throughout the novel, many readers have been put off by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Many have even believed the book should be banned, despite the fact—some would say because of the fact—that “nigger” is used by the novel’s favorite characters, including Jim, often with affection. The challenge for today’s reader is to confront the word in all its violence and contradictions, and to consider its meaning for various audiences—for nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century readers; for blacks, whites, and those of other races; for children and adults. Readers also should consider the fact that much of the novel is satirical—intended to spoof and upend the prevailing values, racial and otherwise, of the characters and communities it describes.

  Chapter 3

  3 (p. 14) Providence: God or godly care for all of creation. Huck takes note of two views of God: as forgiving protector (the widow’s view) or as terrible, swift judge (Miss Watson’s). A continuing theological meditation begins here. A variety of meanings, including “sheer luck,” are attached to this word throughout the book.

  4 (p. 16) a book called ‘Don Quixote“: Satirical chivalric romance by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). The reference is to the colorful imagination of the novel’s hero and his idealistic impulse to right incorrigible wrongs.

  Chapter 5

  5 (p. 23) mustn’t ... take a child away from its father. Twain points to the hypocrisy of this position—which ironically enforces upon Huck a cruel family situation—in light of the routine separation of black families in slavery, which the reader witnesses in chapter 27.

  Chapter 6

  6 (p. 27) would a thought he was Adam: Huck compares his father to the biblical first man perhaps in the sense of ”as old as Adam“—that is, Pap looks as though he has been around for all of human history. Or he may be referring to the Bible, Genesis 2:6-7, which describes God’s creation of Adam: ”A mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.“

  7 (p. 27) ”Call this a govment!“: Pap’s drunken ravings reflect positions taken by many American citizens of the nineteenth century. Certain of these issues—such as, in the next paragraph, the right of free blacks to vote—persisted deep into the twentieth century.

  Chapter 8

  8 (p. 42) ”she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans“: In the geography of slavery, New Orleans was an especially dreaded location. To be sold down the river to that city was to be sent with slave-dealers to the bottom of the South, at the farthest possible remove from family, then to be sold again, presumably to work in the fields.

  Chapter 14

  9 (p. 71) me reading the books: Huck is a reader not only of school lessons but of books for pleasure. He is a great reader, too, of situations, of faces, and of people’s motives and values.

  10 (p. 74) ”Den he cain’t git no situation. What he gwyne to do?“: Here Twain directly mirrors the tradition of minstrel humor—the onstage verbal play among white actors in blackface (makeup that makes a white person appear black) enacting exaggerated versions of black language and body English. And yet the humor is irresistible. The black literary critic Sterling A. Brown cites this line as an example of Twain’s realistic presentation of the authentic nineteenth-century Southern slave. Where does the black humor end and the white imitation begin?

  Chapter 15

  11 (p. 79) ”Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I? Now dat’s what I wants to know?“: Jim’s question echoes a central concern—some would say the central concern—of the novel: that of identity, particularly in relation to place and time.

  12 (p. 80) he must start in and ” ‘terpret“ it: Here Twain parodies the reader’s impulse to read too much into simple events. The twist is that Jim’s reading of events to come is not far wrong.

  Chapter 16

  13 (p. 81) so we took a smoke on it and waited: In some editions of Huckleberry Finn, which was first published in 1884, a section called the ”raft passage“ or the ”raftmen’s passage“ appears following this paragraph. That section was originally part of the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn, but Twain inserted it into chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. Because of concern about matching the length of Huckleberry Finn with that of the highly successful Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the section was cut from the first edition of Huckleberry Finn. The present edition uses that first edition as its primary model and so maintains the cut.

  14 (p. 82) ”give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell“: An ell is an obsolete measure of length—45 inches—used in nineteenth-century England. The old expression (”give a man an inch and he’ll take
an ell“) about a person taking advantage of a slight concession is racialized here to echo an American slave-owner’s watchword. These words also evoke their most famous literary use, including the slave’s own response to them, in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). As a slave, Douglass hears his master upbraid his wife for teaching young Douglass to read: ”If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.“ For Douglass, these words had the force of revelation: ”From that moment on,“ he wrote, ”I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.“

  15 (p. 87) here was the clear Ohio water.... So it was all up with Cairo: Having passed Cairo, Huck and Jim are heading south toward a more punishing slavery. The Ohio River was a route to freedom, with many Underground Railroad stops.

  Chapter 17

  16 (p. 93) ”Pilgrim’s Progress“: A religious allegory by John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678) was immensely popular in nineteenth-century America.

  17 (p. 93) Henry Clay’s Speeches: Henry Clay (1777-1852) was one of the most powerful American statesmen and orators of the nineteenth-century. He served as senator and then congressman from Kentucky, and as Speaker of the House and secretary of state, and he was a candidate for the presidency. A powerful slave-holder and apologist for slavery, he devised the ”Compromise of 1850,“ a political deal that ”saved the union“ with a more rigorous Fugitive Slave Act.

  18 (p. 94) ”Shall I Never See Thee More Alas“: Here and in the following pages, Twain satirizes the period’s preoccupation with death, including the death of pets. Though expressing feelings in a manner that is often ridiculously false and grotesque, the feud between the two families—and indeed the succession of scenes of violence and death—ofiers a context for the prevalence of these sad verses and songs.