Many years later as I studied the Revolutionary War, I was prepared, I think, for the curious ambiguities of our founding—how the war slogged on for eight bloody years, and how George Washington’s greatest gift was not his grasp of military strategy, but rather his ability, against all odds, simply to hold his army together. His soldiers’ suffering at Valley Forge and other places was made even worse by the stinginess of American farmers, who sometimes charged outrageous prices for the food a desperate army had to have. And even the Founding Fathers themselves were capable of individual pettiness and possessed their collective feet of clay. Among other things, most of them understood the contradiction between their professions of liberty and the existence of chattel slavery.
“I can not, I will not, justify it,” admitted Patrick Henry of Virginia. But neither he nor any of the others did much about it.
And yet I think I also knew as I came to the end of Johnny Tremain that I had read a carefully crafted account—an account that now had a heart and a face—of the founding of the greatest country in the world.
II
Whatever the subject, my parents were delighted by my new love of books, and since we were the last in the neighborhood to actually purchase our own TV, we began a tradition that lasted several years. The three of us—my mother, my father, and me, the only child—would gather together in our den at night and read to each other aloud, passing around the designated book, until finally one or more of us would get sleepy.
I think we may have begun with Old Yeller, or perhaps a novel by Zane Grey. But one of the readings I remember most clearly was Eneas Africanus, a vintage story from 1919 written by a Georgian, Harry Stillwell Edwards. It was a happy tale of slavery in which Eneas, an elderly slave, becomes separated from his master, and even after emancipation, searches eight years to find him. The book, which sold through forty Grosset & Dunlap editions, ends on a note of tender reunion:
In the red light of the bonfire an old negro suddenly appeared, reining up a splendid grey horse . . . His “Whoa, Chainlightnin!” resounded all over the place. Then he stood up and began to shout about Moses and the Hebrew children being led out of Egypt into the promised land. Major Tommey listened for a brief instant and rushed out. The newcomer met him with an equal rush and their loud greetings floated back to us clear as the notes of a plantation bell: “Eneas, you black rascal, where have you been?”
However startling the political incorrectness, we were a family in the 1950s who very much wanted to shore up the notion that nothing in particular was wrong with the South. The civil rights movement was beginning to stir just up the road from us in Montgomery, and Southern defensiveness—that massive, collective chip on the shoulder that had been around at least since the Civil War—took a lot of different forms. One of them, certainly, was a book on racial harmony and contentment, rooted in the gospel of white supremacy. As a boy of ten, I was deeply moved.
But then we came to Huckleberry Finn. It was another splendid story of adventure—another boy about the age of Johnny Tremain, caught in his own encounter with history. It was set, of course, in a wholly different time, as the America created so painfully by the founders drifted inexorably toward the Civil War. The driving force in the conflict was slavery, and in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we confronted the issue through the rough-hewn innocence of a runaway boy. But not right away. As literary scholars have told us through the years, when Mark Twain began work on his masterpiece, he set out modestly to write a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a best seller published in 1876.
In the early drafts of Huckleberry Finn, Jim, the slave, who provides the novel with its moral and literary strength, is only a minor character. And even in the final version, published in 1884 after Twain had worked on it for nearly ten years, the ethical tension takes shape slowly. In the opening pages, the book is driven by loneliness and fear, a ragamuffin boy on the margins of society, terrified of abuse at the hands of his father, and scorned by the people in his small river town for his superstitious understanding of the world. Even as a boy myself, skipping along on the surface of the story, I was touched by the beauty of Huck’s ruminations and the intimations of wisdom they contained.
I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company.
Even now, I remember reading that passage aloud, or maybe it was my mother or father who read it. Whatever, I was swept up gently into Huck’s place and time, able to hear what he heard, feel what he felt, and despite the sadness at the heart of the scene, there was also a serenity that came from the simple beauty of his words.
But it was soon disrupted by the character of Pap. Huck Finn’s drunken, violent father was, for me, an archetype of pure malice who resurrected old terrors from the world of fairy tales. Pap, however, was not a giant or a witch. There was nothing unbelievable about him when he appeared one evening in Huck’s room and threatened grave harm. Infuriated by people in the town who thought that Huck should have a better home, Pap took him to a cabin deep in the woods.
“It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around,” Huck recounted. “But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts.”
Then one night in a drunken rage Pap tried to kill him.
He chased me round and round the place, with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me and then I couldn’t come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck, but he laughed such a screechy laugh, and roared and cussed, and kept on chasing me up. Once when I turned short and dodged under his arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders, and I thought I was gone; but I slid out of the jacket quick as lightning, and saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me.
On my first encounter with the story, I read those words with a rush of pure fright, and the nerve-rattling tension only grew worse as Huck began to plan his escape. Locked in the cabin while his father went to town for supplies, he began to saw a hole through the logs, but would he make it in time? And after he made his dash to the river, would somebody see him in the canoe? For the next two hundred pages or more, one close scrape followed another, and I remember taking comfort in only one thing. I was glad that Huck had a little bit of company.
It began with an echo of Robinson Crusoe, Huck setting up camp on Jackson Island—a wooded, uninhabited patch of land just downriver from Hannibal, Missouri—then discovering suddenly that he was not alone. On a morning exploration he found a campfire, smoldering, only recently abandoned, and when he came back later, fearful and creeping through the dark, he saw that it was Jim, a runaway slave. “I bet I was glad to see him,” said Huck, for Jim had been the property of Miss Watson, a woman in Hannibal who had previously taken it upon herself to see that Huck became “civilized.” Jim and Huck had known each other and been friendly enough, and now for different reasons they were running away.
Jim, for his part, had overheard talk that he was about to be “sold down the river,” sent away to somewhere down in Louisiana, and his desperate flight to avoid that fate had awakened feelings even more elemental. He felt a powerful need to be free.
As the two traveled together on a raft, dodging bounty hunters and outlaws, they began to develop the kind of friend
ship that was, in the words of Toni Morrison, “so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.” I think it may have been that very thing that caught my fancy on the first of many readings—that and the palpable feeling of freedom as they floated the currents of the great Mississippi.
Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window—and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft.
And yet, again and again on the journey, despite the companionship of those moments, Huck is caught in his own private struggle—a conflict, as Mark Twain later put it, between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience.” He knew he was helping a runaway slave, a sin and a crime by the standard of the times, and in a masterstroke of cultural satire, Twain has him agonize about that, accepting slavery, at least in his mind, as part of the natural order of things. Huck worries about what he’s doing to Miss Watson, Jim’s former owner, and worries that God, being white Himself, will send him to hell. “I about made up my mind to pray . . .” he says. “But the words wouldn’t come . . . You can’t pray a lie—I found that out.”
Huck, in the end, is too caught up in his friendship with Jim, in the kindness and humanity that’s he’s learned to appreciate on the river, and thus he bows to his inevitable fate. “All right, then,” he finally decides, “I’ll go to hell . . .”
It is, of course, one of the iconic scenes in American literature, that kernel of greatness in Huckleberry Finn that has made it a classic of American letters. “It’s the best book we’ve had,” Ernest Hemingway once declared. “All American writing comes from that.” And yet the story has always been double-edged. Ralph Ellison, one of the great black writers of the twentieth century, said that when he first read the novel as a boy, he could identify easily enough with Huck, but not with Jim, despite their common racial heritage. Jim, in his uncomplicated innocence, was a little too close to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, or even worse, to Eneas Africanus, and thus it seemed to Ellison and others that Twain fell short on a fundamental task—“filling out the complex humanity” of a character who was indispensable to the story.
Robert O’Meally of Columbia University pushed a similar point even further. In an introduction to a 2003 edition of Huckleberry Finn, O’Meally recalled that as an African American student in the civil rights era, he first read the novel with great admiration. “Here was democracy without puffery,” he wrote, “e pluribus unum at its most radical level of two friends from different racial (but very similar cultural) backgrounds loving one another . . .”
But even in the rush of that first reading, O’Meally was troubled by the figure of Jim. It was easy enough, he thought, to admire Jim’s humanity, wisdom, and courage. But he urged readers to “resist the idea that Jim is thoroughly realistic, that black men of his time were typically this simplistic, docile, or full of minstrel-show-like patter.” In the end he wondered with Ralph Ellison if Twain had simply discounted black readers, if Huckleberry Finn at the time it was published—and perhaps even now—was primarily a dialogue among whites.
In my own re-reading of this most studied of American novels (I read it for a second time in college, and have read it four or five times since), I find that I’m conscious on every occasion of the debates that surround it. Sometimes I think they get in the way, detract from the beauty and the heart of a story that’s set inevitably in time. But I also came to believe through the years that these same debates underscored the power and the truth of the novel. At the very least, they made me want to know more about the author. And on that front a handful of modern scholars have excelled.
III
Time magazine, in a retrospective published in 2008, called “Mark Twain: Our Original Superstar.” In addition to his renown as a writer, Twain traveled the country in the latter half of the nineteenth century, delivering lectures to sold-out audiences. He could make them laugh simply by walking onto the stage, looking disheveled with his mop of curly hair, and delivering his own sarcastic commentary on the multiple hypocrisies of his time.
“We know his voice only from written descriptions of it,” wrote humorist Roy Blount Jr. “It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses . . . But he wasn’t the sort of funny man who laughs at his own jokes. In performance and in life, Twain’s facial expression—except, presumably when he was furious, which was often—was deadpan. After Twain’s death, the editor of the North American Review recalled that he had known him for thirty years and never seen him laugh.”
The definitive chronicle of Twain’s emergence as “the nation’s first rock star” is probably Ron Powers’s Mark Twain: A Life, a riveting, literary account, published in 2005. In the prologue of this fine work, Powers introduces his subject this way:
Mark Twain’s great achievement as the man who found a voice for his country has made him a challenge for his biographers. His words are quoted, yet he somehow lies hidden in plain sight—a giant on the historic landscape. He has been so thoroughly rearranged and reconstructed by a long succession of scholarly critics that the contours of an actual, textured human character have been obscured.
In his attempt to remedy this lack of understanding, Powers begins, as many biographers might, with Twain’s boyhood—with the days in antebellum Missouri when this most seminal of American authors was little Sammy Clemens, spending his early childhood years, not on the great Mississippi River but rather on a broad expanse of prairie. There, his hard-luck father, Marshall Clemens, who seemed to fail at everything he tried, owned a small farm with a handful of slaves. It was here, says Powers, that the future Mark Twain first developed those qualities that set him apart, his remarkable abilities to listen and to see.
The prairie in its loneliness and peace: that was what came back to him toward the end of his life . . . He thought not of the Mississippi River, which he encountered most fully later in life, but of “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests”—a swatch of great western carpet yet a decade from disfigurement by the grooves of the California gold rushers. There his prodigious noticing had begun. His way of seeing and hearing things that changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things.
With a gift that ultimately could not be explained, Twain transformed “commonplace language” into art, feeling its rhythms, its colorful riffs and improvisations, much as a great musician playing jazz. And nowhere did he find those rhythms more lovely than among the slaves he knew as a child.
One in particular captured his fancy. Uncle Dan’l was a dark-skinned man of middle age, the father of most of the Negro children on the farm, and in the words of Twain himself, a person “whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He was also a great storyteller, spinning his yarns for Sammy and his cousins, as well as the slave children gathered at his cabin. Uncle Dan’l’s speaking prowess, particularly his strategic use of the pause, later influenced Twain’s own style. More importantly, as Powers and other biographers have noted, this slave was also the model for Jim, and one of many in Sam’s early years who left their mark on his racial understanding.
“I have no race prejudices,” Twain later declared. “All I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me.” And he added with an irony that became his trademark, “He can’t be any worse.”
It always seemed to me as a reader that the fundamental truth of Twain’s self-assessment is reflected in the pages of Huckleberry Finn. But the issue, inevitably, is more complicated. As Powers, among others, is compelled to remind us,
there was another experience in Twain’s early years, another more disturbing influence he absorbed. When he was ten a minstrel show came to town, featuring an actor named Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who performed in blackface and created a character he called “Jim Crow”—a slave whose colorful buffoonery usually drew gales of laughter from the crowd. One of those who laughed was the future Mark Twain. As Ron Powers notes, Twain never got over the delight he took in the choreographed foolishness of “the real nigger show,” and without any question in Huckleberry Finn, the character of Jim bears the taint of that memory. And there is also this: in the course of the novel, Twain used the n-word 219 times, thinking no more of it than did the masses of his readers in those closing years of the nineteenth century.
Thus, the modern debate over Huckleberry Finn has taken two forms. One is epitomized by the thoughtful ruminations of Toni Morrison, African American winner of the Nobel Prize, who is troubled by the flaws in the character of Jim, that interplay of heroism and unreality that came from the imagination of Mark Twain. She sees the limitations of Twain’s understanding; he was, after all, a man who lived in another century, when the nation first struggled with the aftermath of slavery, and the notion of racial equality was new. But Morrison is also moved by the book, moved by the strength and goodness of Jim, the moral decency of Huck, and the searing satire that Twain offers up against the casual hypocrisies of his time.
But there is a second kind of argument over Huckleberry Finn, one that first appeared in the civil rights years, and continues to raise its head even now. It can be reduced essentially to political correctness. In this debate, we focus on the n-word, as we so often do in our racial discussions at large—as if by stamping it out, we could free ourselves from racism itself.
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