Almost twenty years later, when Twain’s nephew, the journalist Samuel E. Moffett, was writing a biographical piece about Mark Twain that would be published in 1903, he submitted a draft to the family for its approval. In a recently discovered letter, Clara wrote on behalf of her mother (then quite ill) asking her cousin to clear up any lingering notion of similarities between author and narrator. “There has been so much said in the papers lately of my father’s being himself the original of Huckleberry Finn,” she wrote, “that my mother has worried at the thought that many might really believe him to be one of the poor whites of the South.” She then asked for some small changes (marking the place where they ought to appear), explaining “that his family was of good origin in reduced circumstances, & again on the second turned-down page mention that his parents on both sides had been slave holders.” (Moffett complied, but on the issue of slave ownership he softened that fact by substituting “forefathers” for “parents.”)3 Twain himself had always pointed to Tom Blankenship, the son of one of Hannibal’s town drunks, as the model for Huck, but in light of Livy and Clara’s nervous request and indeed the family’s general preference for such works as The Prince and the Pauper and even his life of Joan of Arc, published in the 1890s, we might wonder if indeed he wasn’t basing this character, certainly in terms of Huck’s humorous distinctions between illusion and reality, partly on himself.
Regardless of that possibility, Clara’s request gives us a new context for Sam Clemens’s return to the South in Huckleberry Finn. Whitman might dream in the grass about democracy for all, but it would have to be dreaming, nevertheless. His narrator might take in a fugitive slave as the speaker does in section 10 of “Song of Myself,” but the flesh-and-blood writer behind the narrator maintained that, even though he was against slavery, it had to be upheld until Congress officially banned it. Whitman even lost the friendship of one of his closest literary allies over the issue. After the war, Sam Clemens wrote the same kind of romance about antebellum America, this one featuring a white boy and a runaway slave making their journey down the middle of America. Progressive on the issue of race in his own time, if not in ours, Twain consequently allows Huck to come up to later standards only when adrift from a society in which certain human beings are treated like livestock. In spite of his time on the raft, during which he becomes personally close to Jim, Huck remains to the end a victim of his environment, impulsively telling Aunt Sally once he’s ashore that nobody but a “nigger” (i.e., a slave and a nonhuman) was killed in a reported steamboat explosion.
Yet Clara and her mother were wrong on one significant count. The narrator of Huckleberry Finn is none other than Mark Twain on the lecturer’s platform, nonchalantly lounging about the stage the way Huck lounges through life, trying to distinguish illusion from reality. Huck can’t, for example, see the advantages of Miss Watson’s heaven over the obvious pleasures of hell. “Then she told me all about the bad place,” we learn in the opening chapter, “and I said I wished I was there. . . . She was going to live so as to go to the good place, . . . so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it.” Later, in a 1901 speech, Twain spoke of a dying man who couldn’t make up his mind as to which place to go—“both have their advantages, ‘heaven for climate, hell for company!’ ” In short, almost at the same time Clara asked her cousin to help squelch the idea that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were one and the same, Twain was publicly reinforcing that identification. This book, his greatest achievement, did in fact come largely from real life, and by conscious design. “If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation,” he wrote in 1887, “you will go astray. . . . But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions.”4
While Twain was writing his book, he read and jotted marginalia in William Still’s encyclopedic The Underground Rail Road, which is a compilation of black narratives of experiences on the Underground Railroad. Known as the “Father of the Underground Railroad,” Still, whose parents were emancipated slaves, published his book in 1873. The stories he gathered, in which fleeing blacks were constantly in danger of being betrayed (as Frederick Douglass, Jervis Langdon’s friend, had been in his first attempt to flee his Maryland masters), are full of suspense. Certain signals were used to assure the next passengers on the Underground Railroad that the way was safe. On the flyleaf of his copy, Twain wrote about a slave in Richmond, the mother of a three-year-old daughter. Her brother, an escaped slave living in Elmira in 1844, “cut two duplicate hearts out of pink paper, & wrote on one, ‘When you see this again, you will know.’ ” The escaping mother and her child “saw & recognized the duplicate heart,” Twain wrote, and subsequently succeeded in reaching her brother in Elmira.5
One of the most overlooked aspects of Huckleberry Finn is the danger that threatens Jim throughout their travels. If Twain had forgotten the deadly perils of the runaway slave in the South, Still’s book must have reminded him of the facts. Jim’s danger seldom shows up during the main part of the novel, when Huck and Jim travel at night or when their purpose of getting Jim to freedom is upstaged by the various episodes along the river in which Jim cannot be a central player. But it looms large at the beginning of the novel and it is underscored at the end when Tom is shot while pretending to be an abolitionist. Even though Jim sacrifices his own freedom to care for the wounded Tom, the farmers who corner Jim are ready to hang him. They don’t, merely because he is somebody else’s property, not because of any recognition of Jim’s humanity. To them Jim is never—as Huck says about Jim—“white inside.” In fact, in their utter contempt for any slave, they “cussed Jim considerable,” Huck tells us in his noncommittal voice, “and give him a cuff or two, side the head.” (To “cuff” a slave, who was often addressed as “Cuffy,” was to hit him or her with the back or cuff of the hand.) Finally, Huck tells us, when the whole story of Jim’s sacrifice is told by the doctor who treats Tom, “they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and a reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn’t cuss him no more.”
These and other events like them in the late chapters are why it is important to finish the novel and not stop when the river adventures are over, the point beyond which Hemingway said “the rest is just cheating.” The story not only has to end somewhere, but those final chapters—after Tom’s annoying insistence on the details of how Jim’s escape should properly be carried out—round out the story and bring it to a realistic close. Aesthetically, if anything ought to be skipped in reading Huckleberry Finn, it is the raft scene left out of the original edition because it had been included in chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi as a way for Twain to satisfy readers hounding him for a sequel to Tom Sawyer. While it is a fine example of humor of the Old Southwest, a tradition that Twain culminates, it is otherwise something of a digression from the plot of Huckleberry Finn.
As critics of the novel over the past century have noted, its plot is episodic in its forty-three short chapters (not counting the outsized raft scene). It begins in Hannibal, or St. Petersburg; in these opening chapters, Twain was, as noted, writing his “sequel” to Tom Sawyer, in which Huck is named on the title page as “Tom Sawyer’s Comrade.” Tom is in control of things until chapter 4, when Huck steps into his own story by discovering his father’s footprint in the snow, identified by a cross in the left heel to ward off the devil. The ominous footprint tells Huck that his father, the town drunk, is lurking nearby. When Pap appears in the next chapter, Huck’s story can be said to have begun in earnest. He leaves Tom Sawyer’s world of romance and its harmless consequences—indeed, Clemens’s childhood memory of Hannibal—for the ugly reality of river life in the Mississippi Valley that Sam Clemens had absorbed as a river pilot before the Civil War.
As the story unfolds, it is not only Jim who becomes a fugiti
ve but Huck as well—not just from his father, who had imprisoned him in a deserted cabin on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, but now also from society itself because he is in the company of a fugitive slave. Additionally, as a member of the underclass—the very society of poor whites that Clara and her mother wanted to make sure was not confused with their own family roots—Huck fears that he will be accused of lesser crimes than abolitionism, such as helping the Duke and the King cheat the Wilks girls. On his journey with Jim, Huck is also constantly trying to find out who he is. When he gets to Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas’s farm, he discovers that he has to pretend to be Tom Sawyer instead of Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, he becomes Tom in the shenanigans orchestrated by the real Tom, who is passing under the pseudonym of his brother Sid. But this is simply the culmination of a series of false identities beginning with Huck’s disguise as Sarah Mary Williams in the river cabin of Mrs. Judith Loftus, the backwoods wife who detects his male identity and, being too clever by half, dismisses him as a runaway apprentice. He is then thought to be dead before he comes back to life as George Jackson at the Grangerfords. Next, he is the valet to the bogus English relatives of the Wilks family.
Mark Twain himself was operating under a false identity—certainly as far as his Victorian-minded family was concerned. They preferred his pseudo-Virginia identity wrapped up in the trinomials of John Marshall Clemens and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the first given in honor of a lawyer who eventually became chief justice of the Supreme Court, and the second the surname of a vaguely remembered friend of his father’s.6 Neither name had any prior family connections. But then names are often meaningless in the American universe of new beginnings. Twain’s fascination with royal titles, indeed his ironic and satirical use of them, comes right out of the American grain. His use of the Duke and the King in the novel was of a piece with the opening shot of his frontal attack on British nobility in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In that novel, as we shall see, the source of the vitriol that flowed from his journals as he wrote the book is now British instead of French. And what had merely buffeted the British sensibilities in The Prince and the Pauper turns lethal in A Connecticut Yankee. Matthew Arnold, who criticized Grant’s grammar in his Memoirs in 1887, helped bring the acid to the surface in Twain’s reconsideration of the British and their condescending view of American culture (and corresponding dismissal of its humor). In the spring of 1888 Twain planned but never executed a formal response to Arnold’s widely read attack on American culture.7
Readers have often wondered why Jim can’t simply cross the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois. Twain knew along with his original audience that fugitive slaves were not “free” or safe in border states, that slave catchers would illegally apprehend them and bring them back into slave territory. Anyway, Jim’s momentum is caught up with Huck’s on Jackson’s Island. He has a raft, and a raft goes in only the direction the river flows; hence, they ironically flee south in search of freedom. Going up the Ohio River by steamboat from Cairo wouldn’t have been any safer. Moreover, Twain’s steamboat piloting experience didn’t include the Ohio River; the part of the Mississippi with all its bends and other impediments that was seared in his memory lay between St. Louis and New Orleans. Clearly, Twain, when he began imagining Huck’s journey, didn’t know any more than his main character did just where the river would take them—only that it had to be south.
He had picked up ideas for the book while visiting the river in 1882. All those river shacks, feuds, and frauds that made up its life got absorbed into this panorama of southern life before the war. And there were frauds off the river, as well, who contributed to the characters in the novel. The King, for instance, was modeled in part after Charles C. Duncan, the skipper of the Quaker City who had so infuriated Twain not only during The Innocents Abroad cruise but also in the late seventies. Then there had been several exchanges between the two in newspapers. Mainly, Duncan raised the author’s ire when he remembered publicly in lectures the day when Twain and Edward House had come from Pfaff’s in a slightly intoxicated state so Twain could apply for a berth on the Quaker City cruise.
Jim himself is modeled on blacks Twain knew personally, not only Uncle Daniel from the Quarles farm but also his Hartford butler, George Griffin. As a southerner, Twain was more familiar with black people than were most whites in the North, but he also viewed them from the viewpoint of a benign southerner, judging them to be a gentle but ignorant people whose activities and antics charmed as well as amused. Jim is the perfect butt of Tom’s romantic elaborations. His willingness to endure them irritates many readers today. And indeed it may be unrealistic, but this was the way many whites in the country were trying to remember blacks during and after Reconstruction, when Huckleberry Finn was being written and published. Whites were more and more afraid of what would become of future generations of blacks who had not grown up as slaves, and it is not unreasonable to assume that Twain sensed some of these feelings. The fear, of course, led to the country’s shameful period of black lynchings between 1880 and 1920. In 1901 he talked with Frank Bliss, Elisha’s son who succeeded his father at the American Publishing Company, about the possibility of a book to be called the History of Lynching in America. “Yesterday,” he told him, “I wrote an acid article on the subject (‘The United States of Lyncherdom’) for the North American Review.” Neither the book nor the article was ever published in Twain’s lifetime because, as the North American Review editors warned him, it would cost him his southern readership. Yet it tempted him for a time. “The lynching-book still haunts me,” he told Bliss. Twain had earlier—in the Buffalo Express of August 26, 1869—complained of lynching, but he did so in an unsigned editorial.8
Naturally, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is hardly perfect in terms of its depiction of race relations according to the post–civil rights movement standards of our own time. (As one critic has recently observed, Huck may simply recognize “that he likes Jim better than he does Miss Watson.”)9 The novel fares much better in its ironic, certainly subtle indictment of slavery. It was the book for its time in America’s racial history as much as Stowe’s masterpiece was for its era. While Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared before the war and at the beginning of the rise of abolitionism in the North, we ought not to forget that Huckleberry Finn appeared at the height of American racism and black oppression at the end of Reconstruction, when the Ku Klux Klan was formed in the South and the thousands of black lynchings soon began. Its ultimate achievement is to show just how hypocritical whites, including kindhearted ones like Huck, can be when it comes to blacks. Indeed, Twain demonstrates how black racism in the United States ran even deeper than the institution of slavery itself. Mark Twain ultimately reveals the reader—not only in America’s antebellum period but today—to be in most cases prepared to go to the extremes Huck does in attaining Jim’s freedom only when slavery is no longer either a fact or even a temptation. In other words, the white reader gets a free ride in the sense that he or she can come down on the side of justice without running the risk of breaking the law—because the law, if not the consequence, of slavery had disappeared by the time of the publication of Huckleberry Finn in 1885.
Even to Huck most of the time, Jim is largely a burden that he all too easily forgets about during their periods of separation. The indifference that so many whites felt toward blacks becomes clearer in Pudd’nhead Wilson, but it is obvious enough in Huckleberry Finn. And its dramatic demonstration there is what makes the book such a scathing indictment of slavery—if not altogether the racism then engrained in the white mind. Slavery, as noted, is more roundly condemned—more directly attacked—in Stowe’s great novel, but there the owners of slaves, or at least some of them, are pitied for their plight. Moreover, slavery itself, before Eliza’s need to flee the household, has almost the benign appearance of John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn; or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), a series of Irvingesque sketches intended to paint slavery and southern life in ge
neral as a warmhearted institution in which blacks like Uncle Tom are truly the bosses of their own domains. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who aside from a brief period in Kentucky had never visited the South, mainly mastered the arguments against slavery. Mark Twain knew the South firsthand. He also understood human nature—on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line—with regard to race relations in America in the wake of slavery.
We find none of Stowe’s noble depictions of slaves in Huckleberry Finn, only superstitious slaves whose presence outside of their usefulness is hardly noticed by whites. Even Huck, in spite of his brief transformation on the river, reverts to referring to slaves as things. “When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday-school book,” he tells Tom in chapter 36 as they begin the antics to free Jim, “I ain’t no ways particular how it’s done so it’s done.” The story can be read as a novel of adolescence in which the protagonist wakes up as a potential criminal in a corrupt society. With this book, Mark Twain himself woke up. He would never again believe in the possibility of an innocent or carefree Huck Finn. External forces, to be sure, were drawing him out of his Howellsian cocoon of realism with its romantic way of viewing a Darwinian world. His incredibly complex financial state was beginning to turn into the nightmare it would become by the end of the decade.
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