Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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So as Said-trained readers we receive Jim through this absurd stereotyped suit—receive his humanity, his fatherly sense of responsibility for Huck, his courage, family care, and industriousness, and wisdom—just as we find it. But it is also useful 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. As we resist, we might fruitfully consider the historical backdrop of the minstrel stage, and the motives for white authors like Twain in creating such true-false black images at the moral center of their work.
Another problem, unrelated to realistic portraiture as such, also weighed down my rereading of Huckleberry Finn. I refer to the book’s final chapters, in which Tom Sawyer reappears and invents a score of schemes that delay and imperil the freeing of Jim. In the key instance of Huckleberry Finn’s “hypercanonization,” Hemingway wrote these famous sweeping words about the novel: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ... It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Hemingway’s other key sentences, hidden in the ellipsis above, are usually not quoted: “If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim [there it is again: Hemingway’s phrase, not Twain‘s] is stolen from the boys. That is the real end.”k While I strongly agree with those who upbraid Hemingway for recommending that the reader stop before Jim is free—and thus missing the moral center of the work—I agree with Hemingway that the novel gets infuriatingly dull once not Huck but Tom is steering the way toward freedom. And yet here too it is useful to consider the satirical commentary that might be said to go with Tom’s outrageous interferences. Could Tom’s delays and his self-serving play with Jim when he knew the man had been freed already comprise Twain’s stinging comment on the process of freeing blacks from slavery—a clumsy process that some would say is still haltingly in process? And might Tom’s absurd, by-the-book reliance on purported precedents comprise a telling commentary on the U.S. legal system not only during slavery but in Twain’s own time, when the gains of Reconstruction were undermined by compromises, and when the rights of black citizens were abridged, in the Supreme Court decision called Plessy v. Ferguson, such that constitutional sanction was given to virtually all forms of racial segregation.l The book slows down, then, to suggest the miserable slowness of the process of gaining black freedom in America—stuck in a mire of what might be termed Tom Sawyerism. We can’t stop reading until the novel’s end, but these last chapters are an agony!
What’s left to recommend in this novel full of problems? Having resisted so much in the book, what do we gain when we read it with an attitude of receptivity? To offer an answer, I’m going to risk another piece of autobiographical reflection. For the past ten years, in my own scholarship and teaching, I have been exploring the impact of blues-idiom music on American life and literature. This new intellectual work grew out of my interest in black arts movement writers of the 1960s and 1970s, whose poetry and prose were often blues- and jazz-inflected, and in writers like Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, and Langston Hughes, whose blues/jazz writing of the 1940s and 1950s (and in the case of Hughes, also of the 1920s and 1930s) had shown the way. Was it possible to think of Huckleberry Finn as a blues novel in the tradition of Ellison’s Invisible Man? (Ellison always named Twain as a key influence, despite the problems he saw in the great novel.) Was it conceivable that a novel written more than a hundred years before Toni Morrison’s Jazz was nonetheless also infused with the spirit of the musical form called the blues, and that this musical connection helped to define why, at least for me, Twain’s book has continued to have such resonance so long after its creation?m
Sitting in my English Department office at Columbia University with blues-master Robert Johnson on the CD player, I continued rereading Huckleberry Finn, and the bluesiness of Huck’s tale sounded through the book’s pages. Listening to Johnson, and then to Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (yes, to the instrumental blues as well as to the lyrics of blues singers), I heard a story ringing true to the one in Huckleberry Finn: a journey toward freedom against insurmountable odds undertaken for the sake of yearning for an often impossible love, with the readiness to improvise as the sole means of supporting the hope of that love. After all, Huck’s efforts to free Jim do comprise a profound expression of love—an assertion of the principle that for the American promise to be realized, everyone must learn not only to go it alone, to solo, but also to make music together with others, to swing. This, at this profoundest level, is what Huckleberry Finn learns to do. Huck knows how to solo; and like a true bluesman, he learns to swing.
How shall we define the blues as a musical form? Crystallizing in New Orleans and in other cities along the Mississippi River at just about the same time Twain’s novel was being composed, the blues typically is a first-person musical narrative or meditation on a life of trial and trouble, delivered in a comic mode. Its stark descriptions of catastrophe are leavened by the music’s design as a good-time dance music, rolling and tumbling with the sounds of flirtation and courtship, of the fine-framed “easy rider.” Even when the music seems especially made for private reflection (“I’m settin’ in the house, with everything on my mind”), its dreams of escape rarely offer mere sentimental flights but instead involve the agonies of confrontation and of real-world trips toward realms where freedom—that impossibly illusive but nonetheless inspiring dream (“how long, how long, has that evening train been gone?”)—is pursued with a full heart and a cool head. Rather than softening or turning from life’s pains, blues music probes the “jagged grain” of a troublesome existence. Typically concerned with a woman yearning for her man or a man yearning for his woman (“I’m in love with a woman but she’s not in love with me”), the blues is a music of romantic longing and, in a larger frame, of desire for connectedness and completion, for spiritual as well as physical communication and love in a world of fracture and disarray. As an improvised form, the blues admits life’s dire discouragements and limits to the point of death, but nonetheless celebrates human continuity: mankind’s good-humored resiliency and capacity, in spite of everything, to endure and even to prevail.n
In the first chapters of Huckleberry Finn, Jim sets the stage for the book’s blueness by explaining to Huck that most of the mysterious natural signs of things to come point to bad luck and trouble—that, in other words, the two of them live in a world infested with the blues. Huck complains that “it looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked him if there warn’t any good-luck signs. He says: ‘Mighty few—an’ dey ain’ no use to a body. What you want to know when good luck’s a-comin’ for? want to keep it off?’ ” (p. 44). One good luck sign, Jim’s hairy body and chest, which indicated he would be rich “bymeby,” prompt another of Jim’s bluesy reflections: “I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wurth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’ ” (p. 46). And yet of course (as Sterling Brown observed) Jim does want more: He continues on the bad-luck-haunted road toward freedom for himself and for his family.
The more I read, the more I came to feel that this book is full of the blues. Huck Finn is a lonesome, unhappy boy whose reflections on his surroundings are often sublimely sad and lonely. Before taking off on the water with Jim, Huck feels trapped in the house with his night-thoughts of loneliness and death:
Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. 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 a sound that a gh
ost makes when it wants to tell about 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 (p. 7).
Early one morning, before he meets up with Jim, Huck is alone on Jackson’s Island, lounging on the grass. Again the scene is rather melancholy. The sad boy is killing time. “I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them” (p. 36). That night “it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain’t no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can’t stay so, you soon get over it” (p. 38).
Only with Jim on hand as Huck’s friend and partner-in-escape does nature begin to shine. Shared with Jim, even a sudden summer storm on the river strikes the boy as marvelous:
It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—fst! it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
“Jim, this is nice,” I says. “I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread” (p. 47).
Sometimes what Jim and Huck share on the raft is loneliness. Huck’s poetic descriptions of their shared sense of the river’s soft blue lonely quality stay in the reader’s mind. “We would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along,” he says, “and by-and-by lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat, coughing along up stream.” And soon “there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness” (p. 109).
At the other end of the novel, in the bright, sunny back country where the Phelps family lives, Huck, alone again, is seized by desolation:
It was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny—the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all (p. 198).
Approaching the Phelps’s home, Huck “heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world” (p. 199). Considering ways to thwart the villainy of the king and the duke, Huck “slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue” (p. 164).
Through the course of the novel, Huck has much to feel blue about. His mother is dead, and his father is a drunken back-country vagabond who beats Huck, imprisons him, and tries to steal his money. The women who take him in, Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson (“a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on”) offer Huckleberry a genteel home whose rules of tidiness and decorum are so tight-fitting that he cannot wait to get out the window. Up the river, comfortably housed church-going families are pathologically locked into a pattern of killing one another, children included, for reasons some (all?) of them cannot remember. Ruthless “humbugs and frauds,” in Huck’s phrase, swarm the land: The king and the duke use what they know of human greed and sentimentality to separate the townsfolk from their money; they force Huck (until he tricks the tricksters) to participate in their elaborate ruses. Bullies and cowardly lynch mobs produce another plague on communities along the river. And, poisoning everything, the region’s economy depends on the enslavement of African Americans and on the vigilance of white people in owning them, and then in capturing and returning runaways, should they break free. Pap Finn so resents a well-dressed free black citizen and voter, with his “gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane,” that he can’t cannot see why “this nigger” is not “put up at auction and sold” (pp. 27-28).
Not that Huckleberry is an abstract thinker—the poetry of his language is in its gritty specificity and its rhythm—or even advanced enough to oppose slavery as an institution. But he has learned that Jim is a man and a friend and a wise, guiding father-figure, one of Albert Murray’s brown-skin shade-tree uncles,o and that he, Huck, will do what it takes to help Jim escape slavery. Though the scene in which Huck decides that he will go to hell, if that’s what assisting Jim means, is more comic than tragic—for Huck already has made clear his preference for the exciting bad place over the dull good place trumpeted by Miss Watsonp—Huck has decided to take whatever risks may be associated with helping Jim. In this sense Huck is a “blues-hero,” an improviser in a world of trouble who optimistically faces a deadly project without a script. Remember that the blues is not just a confrontation with a world gone wrong; to that gone-wrongness, the blues answers that the instrumentalist-hero (and the community of blues people identifying with the artist’s expression) have just enough resiliency and power to keep on keeping on, whatever the changes in fortune.
Getting Jim free is not a simple business. One might say that Huck and Jim’s trip toward freedom is haunted by the blues. Along with the various efforts to recapture and sell Jim back down the river (including those of the duke and the king), consider chapter 15, in which Jim and Huck are separated by a swift current, and then seek each other through a thick wall of fog. As night falls, Huck paddles in a canoe after Jim and the raft, but the boy’s hands tremble as he hears what seem to be Jim’s answering whoops:
I whooped and listened. Away down there, somewheres, I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come, I see I warn’t heading for it but heading away to the right of it. And the next time, I was heading away to the left of it—and not gaining on it much, either, for I was flying around, this way and that and ‘tother, but it was going straight ahead all the time (p. 76).
Confused by the swirling current and blinded by the fog, Huck hears calls in front of him and calls behind him, and finds himself in the territory of the blues. “I couldn’t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don’t look natural nor sound natural in a fog” (p. 77). Huck keeps still and quiet, listening and waiting. “If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once—you’ll see” (p. 77). The hard truth is that in the storm and fog they have passed Cairo, the port leading to the North. They have been pulled south again and will have many more difficult scenarios to endure—in the hands of the king and the duke and then with the Phelps family—before they can light out for freer spaces. These travelers, like the great singer/guitarist Robert Johnson, have “got to keep moverin‘, the blues fallin’ down like rain, blues fallin’ down like rain.”
This impulse to move on, even without a satisfactory destination or solution in sight, echoes a trainload of rambling blues. In the first chapter, Miss Watson needles Huckleberry about the way he sits and stands. She warns him about hell, “and I said I wished I was there.... All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change.” As for making it to heaven, Miss Watson’s goal: “I couldn’t see no advantage
in going where she was going,” Huck says, “so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn’t do no good” (pp. 6-7). Once he decides to run away both from the widow (and her sister) and from Pap Finn, his plan is sketchy, but it is enough to go on.
And in his bid to make his getaway, Huck is nothing if not a brilliant improviser, in the blues mode.q He invents a scenario that convinces the town that he has been killed. With things on the raft “getting slow and dull,” Huck decides to go ashore and investigate the talk among the villagers along the river. To hide himself, our restless improviser dresses as a girl and tells a woman whose house he visits that he is Sarah Williams from Hookerville, “all tired out” from walking all the way. Would he like something to eat? “No‘m, I ain’t hungry,” declares Huck, cooking up a story. “I was so hungry I had to stop two mile below here at a farm; so I ain’t hungry no more. It’s what makes me so late. My mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore” (p. 53).
As the woman’s belief in his act as a girl falters, Huck makes use of her suspicion that he actually is a boy-apprentice on the run from a cruel workplace master, which would explain the desperate disguise and secrecy. Warming up to this new role as runaway apprentice, Huck supplies impromptu details: