HUCKLEBERRY FINN FOR OUR TIME
45
Tom represents, as the critics never tire of
telling us, the conformist society; in the
carefully contrived delays of the liberation,
he suggests the worst hypocrisies of gradualism. But he also represents (and this Mark
Twain could know only intuitively and prophetically) the young civil-rights organizers,
many of whom (let us be candid and skeptical, since we also observe some of them as
Activists in campus folly and eccentric
Communist apology) are motivated quite as
much by hatred of society, boredom with
routine, and love of adventure as by love of
justice, abstract or concrete. Whatever their
motivation, however, we cannot doubt the
courage of some of them, who are dead.
Tom Sawyer in the last ten chapters may be
a horrible person, but he risks his life; the
bullet in his leg is a real bullet.
Of course, it would be hazardous to press
this point, and if we did, we should be hard
put to it to find a 1967 counterpart for
Huck. Is Huck another kind of liberal, who
wants to play on both sides? If Tom is the
gradualist-as indeed he is, though we may
also see him as a civil-rights romantic-is it
not Huck's real failure that, though he wants
Jim free, he is persuaded to go along with
Tom? It is deeply true to Mark Twain to see
the end of the novel as desperately pessimistic: Southern society is cruel and wrong and
evil; the gradualist is dishonest and cruel;
the crazy romantic delays liberation, for fun;
the decent good-natured man (or the liberal,
if you insist) feels with the Negro but acts
with the gradualist and the romantic; and
the Negro, the liberand, collaborates in his
continued enslavement.
That the sequel to the "rescue" is violently sarcastic is recognized by everybody.
Since Jim has given up his liberty for Tom,
the doctor praises him highly: "I liked the
nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollarsand kind treatment, too." But Huck says the
real reason they didn't hang Jim is that,
"The people that's always the most anxious
for to hang a nigger that hain't done just
right is always the very ones that ain't the
most anxious to pay for him when they've
got their satisfaction out of him."
Beyond this grim comment, however, is
the effect of slavery and rescue on Jim as a
person. Tom's plan has been to take Jim all
the way down the river and then "pay him
for his lost time" and give him a steamboat
ride back home. (How much does the white
race owe the black for three hundred years
of slavery?) "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." The forty dollars echoes the price
the Duke and Dauphin sold Jim for-"forty
dirty dollars"-marked up from thirty
pieces of silver.
Mark Twain has one more trick left-or
perhaps one more miracle. In the "Explanatory" note at the head of the novel, the only
place where he speaks in propria persona
and not through Huck, he uses the word
Negro. Everywhere else, including the
speeches of the Negroes, the word is nigger.
I cannot believe that Mark Twain would
make such a to-do in the introductory note
merely to call attention to his not infallible
skill with dialects. He wishes to show us the
word he would use if he, rather than the
slave society, were speaking.
Similarly, his disclaimer of plot in the
burlesque "Notice" is a clear indication that
there is a real plot he is proud of. Now, the
elegantly articulated structure of the novel
has often been analysed: the river as symbol
and unifier, the horseplay at the beginning
and the horseplay at the end, the echoing of
phrases and images, Huck's "finding a new
name" after his immersion in the river, and
so on. It is the plot, however, that I wish to
emphasize, especially as it shows the effect
of slavery on Jim.
The final twist of the plot is Jim's revelation of his knowledge all along that Huck's
Pap was dead. In fact, he prevented Huck
from knowing in the first place, in "the
house of death": "Come in, Huck, but doan'
look at his face-it's too gashly." We are
properly indignant at Tom Sawyer's concealing Jim's manumission, in order to have adventures in freeing the free. Jim's motive is
equally clear: Huck is really free (free of his
father, and thus no longer in danger, he can
go back home, or wherever he pleases); but
Jim needs Huck for his flight to freedom.
Thus slavery has corrupted and rendered
