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Title: The Huck Finn Symposium
Author: Race Traitor
Date: 1993
Language: en
Topics: Race Traitor, literature
Source: Retrieved on December 21, 2017 from https://web.archive.org/web/20171221095518fw_/http://racetraitor.org/racetraitor2.html
Notes: Published in Race Traitor No. 2 — Summer 1993.

Race Traitor

The Huck Finn Symposium

Editors’ note.

“All modern American literature,” wrote Hemingway, “comes from one book

by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Yes, but what does Huckleberry

Finn come from? The answer is — the slave narrative.

In the decades before the Civil War, a number of former slaves wrote and

published their life stories, often with the help of the abolitionist

movement. Many were widely read and did a great deal to arouse northern

opinion against slavery. The most famous of the slave narratives at the

time (and still the best known) was by Frederick Douglass. Aside from

mobilizing opposition to slavery, the narratives also constituted a new

literary form. Indeed, one contemporary commentator, Theodore Parker,

described the slave narrative as America’s unique and original

contribution to world literature.

The slave narrative followed a more or less standard form: it began with

the horrors of life under slavery, described how the idea of freedom

germinated and took shape in the writer’s mind, recounted the escape

from slavery, and concluded with a statement of the writer’s hopes for a

new life. Huckleberry Finn follows the form, although its main

protagonist is not a slave. Huck has run away from Widow Douglas, Miss

Watson, his father, and the entire community of St. Petersburg (based on

Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain grew up). He meets Jim, a slave of Miss

Watson, who has also run off. The two set off together on a raft down

the Mississippi, intending to turn north at Cairo, up the Ohio River to

freedom.

The climax of the book — and perhaps the most intense moment in all of

American literature — takes place in the chapter, “You Can’t Pray a

Lie,” when Huck learns that Jim has been betrayed by two confidence men

and is being held as a runaway. Huck’s slight exposure to school and

church has taught him that the proper course would be to write to Miss

Watson, informing her of Jim’s whereabouts. He starts to do so, but his

mind turns to their trip down the river: “Somehow I couldn’t seem to

strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.”

... and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a

close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling,

because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.

I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ — and tore it up. It was awful

thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said;

and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out

of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my

line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I

would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could

think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was

in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

In a certain sense, the entire project of Race Traitor is to examine,

from every possible angle, the moment when Huck Finn (and all the modern

Huck Finns) decide to break with what Huck calls “sivilization” and take

the steps that will lead to Jim’s (and their own) freedom.

Last year a literary scholar, analyzing speech patterns, concluded that

Twain modeled Huck Finn’s speech on that of a I0-year-old black boy he

had met at a hotel in New York. (New York Times, July 7, 1992.) We

cannot judge the validity of her claim; Twain insisted, in the

Explanatory Note, that he was personally familiar with the various

dialects used in the book and that he was careful to distinguish among

them. When a great writer tells what he is trying to do, it is a good

idea to pay attention. But even if it turns out that the scholar is

right, in a larger sense the specific model for Huck’s speech is beside

the point; for who could believe that the language and world view of

anybody, black or white, growing up in “St. Petersburg” could fail to be

influenced by the presence of slavery and the slave?

Just as America’s most beloved literary work has roots in the classic

story of the slave’s quest for freedom, so will the future of this

country depend on the willingness of Americans to identify their quest

for self-realization with the destruction of the evil system of white

race supremacy, the modem counterpart of slavery.

The following essays were written by students in a class at Harvard.

They show that, more than one hundred years after the book was written,

the story of Huck and Jim speaks directly to the heart of the modem

reader. We refuse to despair for a country that can still cherish such

characters.

---

The Law According to Huck

by Joanna Weiss

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a story about breaking the law,

but not about breaking all laws. By faking his own death, leaving his

hometown, and rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave

named Jim, Mark Twain’s title character proves he isn’t afraid to reject

a rule or two. Throughout the book, Huck openly defies the authority of

church, state, and his elders — and suffers few pangs of guilt about his

disobedience. But over the course of his journey, despite his

misbehavior, Huck holds fast to one set of guidelines. The rules Huck

refuses to break are not voiced by his parents or guardians, not written

in the record books or the Bible. They are the laws of the natural

world, dictated by superstitions and obeyed through mystic rituals.

Life in a small riverside town is full of rules — government rules that

force Huck Finn to go to school and church, cultural rules that force

him to sleep in a bed and wear clean clothes, Biblical rules that

command him to love his neighbor. The guidelines set by these different

institutions often overlap, and always send clear messages. In the Bible

readings his guardian frequently prescribes, Huck must hear “Thou shalt

not steal” ad nauseum. And nineteenth-century Missouri law books contain

ample restrictions against theft and robbery. Huck knows that the

penalties for transgression range from a night in jail to an eternity in

hell. But neither clear-cut prohibitions nor the threat of punishment

deters him from taking things that aren’t his.

Huck uses his father’s wisdom as justification for his robberies of farm

fields and markets, for his theft of boats and other large items: “Pap

always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t

want him yourself you can easily find some- body that does, and a good

deed ain’t never forgot” or “Pap always said it wasn’t no harm to borrow

things, if you was meaning to pay them back, sometime.” Huck recognizes

the flimsiness of Pap’s character. He remembers the counter-arguments

his Christian guardian offers to Pap’s assertions. He nonetheless

prefers to follow his father’s advice, when it suits him.

“Thou shalt not lie” is another rule Huck frequently ignores. A master

of deception, Huck invents believable stories at the drop of a hat and

uses clever tricks to cover his frequent slip-ups. When he forgets the

fake name he assumed as a guest of the Grangerfords, Huck issues a

challenge to young Buck Grangerford: “I bet you can’t spell my name.”

Buck’s reply, “G-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n,” furnishes him with the information

he needs.

Huck needs the food he pilfers; he swipes boats only when his life is in

danger. Necessity provides a rationale for most of his lies, as well.

Even his most self-indulgent stories wind up serving a valuable purpose.

From his trip to St. Petersburg disguised as a girl, he returns to

Jackson’s Island with information that ultimately saves Jim’s life.

Huck rarely shows remorse for making up stories, but he feels terrible

after he plays a trick on Jim. Huck pretends that a terrible storm,

which had separated the two travelers, never took place, and insists

that Jim must have dreamed the entire episode. When Jim discovers the

truth and expresses disappointment in his young friend, Huck swallows

his pride and apologizes:

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble

myself to a nigger — but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it

afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t

done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.

By assisting in Jim’s escape, Huck violates strict fugitive slave laws,

laws that can result in harsh penalties for whites. By treating Jim as a

friend and an equal, Huck shows that he rejects the common

interpretation of the Bible, that blacks are inferior to whites. Huck

doesn’t come to this conclusion easily. It is difficult for anyone to

reject ideas that seem universally held, to abandon notions that are

rarely questioned.

Children learn the basic laws of human behavior not through books, but

through consistent contact with other people. Huckleberry Finn’s

education began with his birth in St. Petersburg, Missouri. St.

Petersburg, so far as we know, operates quietly and peacefully under a

slaveholding system. But the burden of this system must fall somewhere,

and here it falls on identity. Skin color instantly determines the

identity of every resident. Before any other judgements can be made,

each individual is classified as “white” or “black.” And that simple

label determines his or her place in the town’s social structure.

Because Jim is black, his identity is defined chiefly by slavery. Huck

first refers to Jim as “Miss Watson’s big nigger.” Miss Watson is Huck’s

guardian’s sister; Jim is her property. Throughout his journey, Huck has

trouble dismissing that concept. On the raft the two companions share an

equal standing. Nonetheless, Huck often reverts to the belief that Jim

belongs to somebody. When he wrestles with moral qualms about helping

Jim escape, Huck describes his conscience’s haunting message:

What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her nigger go

off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that

poor woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried

to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried

to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.

Huck’s conscience is correct; Miss Watson has taught him much of what he

knows. While she inculcated some of her lessons through lectures, her

behavior sent a far more influential message. Huck learned about the

relationship between blacks and whites every day of his life, through

the interactions he saw and experienced. He witnessed poor treatment of

blacks at the hands of many of the people he was taught to admire. At

night, he recalls, Miss Watson “fetched the niggers in.” His language

reveals the thirteen-year-old’s view of the master-slave relationship;

to Miss Watson, Huck observed, blacks were animals or objects. Even Pap,

an unsavory character but the only parent Huck ever knew, railed

extensively on the freedoms that blacks had obtained up north:

“There was a free nigger there, from Ohio ... they said he was a

p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed

everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he

was at home.... I says I’ll never vote again.”

Every encounter he witnessed between Jim and Miss Watson, every tirade

on “niggers” he heard from Pap, reinforced Huck’s notion that Jim was

his inferior. Huck certainly saw other sides of Jim — he watched the

black man’s interactions with his fellow slaves, and recognized his

skill with the spiritual realm. But in the world Huck knew best, the

world of St. Petersburg, nearly everyone behaved according to

traditional guidelines. And for Huck, these rules, far more than the

Biblical quotes and the fugitive slave law he knew about in the

abstract, helped to codify the “law” that blacks were slaves.

It is much easier for Huck to break this law once he leaves the society

that taught and enforced it. On a raft in the river, as Huck distances

himself more and more from St. Petersburg, he begins to separate himself

from all of the rules that governed the first thirteen years of his

life. But the separation is not easy, and he finds himself torn between

allegiance to his new friend and allegiance to the rules he recently

escaped.

Jim, with an unflagging idealism and an astute sense of logic, dismisses

the laws Huck can’t easily forget. Jim rejects the notion that

superficial differences should cause men to act differently. Trying to

explain why the French don’t speak like Americans, Huck insists that

because cats and cows don’t speak English, there is no reason a

Frenchman should. But Jim immediately recognizes the fallacy in Huck’s

argument.

“Is a cat a man, Huck?”

“No.”

“Well, den, dey ain’t no sense in a cat talkin’ like a man. Is a cow a

man? — er is a cow a cat?”

“No, she ain’t neither of them.”

“Well, den, she ain’ got no business to talk like either one er the

yuther of ‘em. Is a Frenchman a man?”

“Yes. ”

“Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan’ he talk like a man? You answer me

dat!”

Huck is frustrated by this exchange, but Jim’s logic here is simple and

perfect. He demonstrates his belief that a human is a human, and needs

no artificial source of separation from others like him. French or

American, Kentuckian or Missourian, black or white, all humans are part

of the same species. Just as all cats share the same language regardless

of their color or size, Jim insists, humans should share the same

language — and by extension the same rights — regardless of nationality

or race. Huck slowly grows to understand this view.

Huck breaks many rules over the course of his passage down the

Mississippi. But thoughout his journey, he constantly and steadfastly

adheres to one value system — a set of codes mandated neither by the

Bible nor by the law books. Nature dictates to Huck an elaborate set of

customs, whose intricacies he takes great pains to learn and whose

advice he takes great pains to follow.

Through his travels with Jim, Huck discovers an extensive list of

guidelines, ranging from the proper time to fold a tablecloth to the

best way to dispose of a dead man’s bee hive. Jim also introduces Huck

to an inventory of signs and signals. Some dictate the day’s weather.

Others predict the future: Jim says he knows he will someday be wealthy

because he has hairy arms and a hairy chest. Many announce impending bad

luck. (“What you want to know when good luck’s a comin’ for? want to

keep it off?” Jim asks.) Regardless of their origins, Huck associates

these rules and omens with Jim’s wisdom, and with nature’s preeminence.

He finds that nearly all of the mystic prophecies hold.

When he breaks one of these “laws,” Huck notes, he faces near-immediate

retribution. Jim scolds his young friend for inviting bad luck by

touching a snake skin. Huck is doubtful, but regrets his actions several

days later, when a rattlesnake bites Jim. The boy is certain the two

events are connected.

Superstitions played an important role in nineteenth-century slave

culture. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass writes about his

experience as a slave in Maryland. He recalls one encounter in the woods

with another slave, Sandy Jenkins. Seeing that Douglass is distraught,

Sandy tell his friend the secret of “a certain root, which, if I would

take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would

render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me.”

Although he is skeptical at first, Douglass soon grows to believe

Sandy’s story. He gains confidence from the root’s supposed powers — so

much confidence that he defies Mr. Covey, an oppressive slave driver.

Like Huck and Jim, Douglass challenges the rules that govern his world,

Later in his life, Douglass escaped from slavery.

Huckleberry Finn challenges rules right and left. He turns Bible lessons

topsy-turvy and makes a mockery of the legal system. And after a long

inner struggle, he finally rejects slavery, the fundamental precept that

shapes his former society. Although he is unwilling to touch a snake and

cringes at the thought of burning a spider, Huck Finn chooses to

renounce much of what he has learned from “sivilization” in St.

Petersburg, Missouri. By leading Huck on this course, Mark Twain

suggests that the laws of the rattlesnake, the spider, and the cosmos

have a power and a permanence that human laws lack.

---

Huck Finn and the Authority of Conscience

by Megan Fritschel

Whether he was an impertinent humorist, a renegade boy adventurer, or a

nameless genteel voice in his numerous short stories, Samuel Clemens

fought an inner struggle for identity. Clemens was a nineteenth-century

upright journalist and man of letters who was freed of societal

constraints by his pseudonym, Mark Twain. It was as if he stepped out of

his body of proper manners and society dinners and obtained a license

for bawdiness and vernacular humor by stepping into Twain’s shoes and

taking up his pen. As Justin Kaplan describes, “in February of 1863,

when for the first time he signed ‘Mark Twain’ to a travel letter for

the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise”, [he] thereby committed

himself to the identity and obligations of a humorist.” This urge to

adopt another identity, to reject society (to a certain extent) and

revert to a more natural state is acted upon by both Twain and his

classic creation, Huckleberry Finn. From the start of the “mostly true

book,” Huck “lits out” of the Mississippi Valley after various attempts

by the Widow Douglas to “sivilize” him. Huck feels more comfortable in

his rags, sleeping in the woods, than crammed into the suffocating stiff

shirts of society. Going naked is even better. This physical struggle

between civilization and a more barbaric state is a manifestation, a

continuance on a tangible level, of Huck’s inner battle, that of his

heart and his conscience.

Much has been made of the dichotomy of The River and The Shore, the one

a grand representation of spiritual freedom and the other a symbol of

bondage. Henry Nash Smith sees these two physical elements as primarily

antagonistic in their relationship:

Huck is drawn ashore repeatedly, and repeatedly returns to the raft, but

this apparent movement is merely an oscillation between two modes of

experience, and the episodes are restatements, with variations, of the

same theme: the raft versus the town, the River versus the Shore.

But is this relationship quite so antagonistic? It would seem that the

Shore is indeed a representative of social tyranny and the raft a symbol

of egalitarianism. Huck and Jim, as they escape from The Shore and

embark upon the raft traveling down river, become good friends, equal in

their respect and love for one another, equal in their desire to “light

out”’ and equal in social status. On The Shore, “Admission [is) 25

cents; children and servants, 10 cents.” On The River, water becomes a

leveling force: the differences between black and white fade and become

confused in the equalizing fog which settles down upon the waves. But

does the raft truly put Huck and Jim upon equal ground (as it were)? The

sleeping arrangements in the wigwam betray a certain hierarchy:

My bed was a straw tick — better than Jim’s, which was cornshuck;

there’s always cobs around in a shuck tick, and they poke into you and

hurt.

Huck never explains this curious difference, and whether it is

intentional remains unknown. And just as Huck and Tom “slipped Jim’s hat

off of his head and hung it on a limb right over him” on The Shore, Huck

tricks Jim upon the raft: “... I could a got down on my knees en kiss’

yo’ foots I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ bout wuz how you

could make a fool uv old Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash...” As in

the dark of the night on the Shore, as in the blinding fog upon the

River, Huck takes advantage of Jim, treating him as more of an

exasperating gullible child than a friend. Although one person is just

himself, two people do constitute a certain kind of society where

struggles for interpersonal power will commence, and it is upon the raft

that monarchy later invades, with the entrance of the King and the Duke.

The child and the black man once again become slaves to an aristocracy,

a fraud though it is, and the superficiality of social rank swallows

both Huck and Jim: “So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this

and that and t’other for him, and standing up till he told us we might

set down.”

Huck cannot seem to rid himself of the Shore; he returns to it again and

again, and his trip with Jim upon the raft is not one of “freedom,

security, happiness, and harmony,” but one intruded upon by society —

not necessarily the physical society of houses and schools but the

“vulgarity and malice and fraud and greed and violence” which are both

the source and the product of the social consciousness. For it is also

upon the raft that we first glimpse flashes of Huck’s internal struggle

with the question of freedom and slavery. His heart belongs to the

River, is wild and rebellious and full of intense feeling, while his

conscience is corrupt with the oppressive force of moral codes:

1 was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on

to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do

the right thing and clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner

and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie.

Huck must force himself to verbalize his motivations only when

conversing with others. He can barely choke out the words authority

would like to hear, while his silent debates with himself involve

feelings and knowledge, not mere words, and take on a kind of eloquence

in their presentation. In their content, to our Twentieth Century ears,

these conversations Huck has with his “deep down inside” have an air of

irony. Or rather, a strong, wild gust of it. Huck’s problem is that he

has not been thoroughly “sivilized.” He has learned, from school, from

church, from the Widow Douglas, that slavery is a “right thing and a

clean thing.” Within the realm of his conscience, Jim his friend becomes

“that nigger,” But Huck’s rebellious heart stops short and cocks an

eyebrow, suspicious of his “learning”: “... what’s the use you learning

to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to

do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck.” He is indeed

stuck. His situation is that of the raft tied to the dock yet pulled by

the current; he is in between worlds and in between urges. When Tom

Sawyer agrees to help Jim out of slavery, Huck is confused at this

decision, one that he has already made himself:

... yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling,

than to stoop to this business, and make himself a shame, and his family

a shame, before everybody. I couldn’t understand it, no way at all.

Even as this dilemma of feeling and action and moral rightness is

externalized for Huck to observe, he still does not comprehend the

nature of the struggle. His corrupt conscience, the result of moral and

religious education, comes to represent the society he cannot fully

escape.

Huck recognizes the fallacy of his religious education, not in an

ideological analysis, but in a rational assessment: “there ain’t nothing

in it” because “if a body can get anything they pray for, why don’t

Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork?” Although he does fly to

the woods and reason this problem out of his mind, he finds no answers,

and so returns to society and accepts Miss Watson’s authority:

I went out in the wood and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I

couldn’t see no adventure about it ... So at last I reckoned I wouldn’t

worry about it any more, but just let it go.

Even as Huck makes his big decision to help Jim to freedom, his resolute

“All right then, I’ll go to hell” still rings of religious retribution

in the afterlife; he has decided for his heart, but this seeming triumph

holds a steadfast belief in his decision’s moral degeneracy. It is in

this reverence for authority that Huck creates an internal enemy and

blocks for himself the path of his heart. Tom Sawyer is another

embodiment of this authority, and Huck’s willing subservience, his

relief at getting the responsibility for his actions off of his own

hands, almost gets them both killed and Jim sent back into slavery:

... I knowed mighty well that whenever he got his plan ready, it

wouldn’t have none of them objections to it.

And it didn’t. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was

worth fifteen of mine, for style, and would make Jim just as free a man

as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides.

Huck rejects his own autonomy at this point, yielding to the power of

authoritative society rather than his own rationality, and this urge

proves the most dangerous one of all. Huck’s true autonomy results in

his loneliness, a feeling that is intensely disagreeable to him, and

although he has a stroke of luck in finding Jim on the island, he

hastily creates his own society upon the raft. He embraces religion and

societal authority because they externalize his actions and his guilty

responses, and relieve him of the responsibility of being alone.

Twain’s German contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, defined conscience as

“the proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility,

the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over

fate... [which has] penetrated to the profoundest depths and become

instinct, the dominating instinct.” Huck has given up this

responsibility to those he recognizes as authority figures: religion,

Southern attitudes, and Tom Sawyer’s imagination. His power over himself

has ceased to become instinct and it is because of this adoration for

societal clout that his corrupt conscience battles so unceasingly with

his deepest instinct of true moral good. It is doubtful that Huck could

have ever truly escaped “sivilization,” and it is more doubtful that he

would have even wanted to.

It seems to us, thumbing through the well-worn pages of a paperback

Huckleberry Finn, that Huck’s dilemma is ironic and almost humorous. But

even in the post-Civil War era of the 1880s, when Mark Twain scratched

out his “story for boys,” Southern society was teaching its children to

revere the right to property and to read the Bible. Slavery, though made

illegal in the aftermath of the Civil War, was still an institution in

the Southern mind, and its peculiarity could only be seen and wondered

at, Huck Finn’s physical surroundings symbolize the great unvoiced

struggle within him; he wavers in between The River of supposed

spiritual freedom and The Shore of repressive civilization, and

compromises by tugging the land up onto the raft. These two worlds are

no longer antagonistic “modes of experience,” but are mingled together

within Huck’s sensibilities, fuzzed at the edges. His good heart strives

to save Jim while his reverence for all he has been taught almost

destroys his only true friend. In subverting the societal concept of

morality, Huck finds happiness but also the overarching guilt stemming

from that moral sense that has become, within him, spiritually

transcendent. He becomes a slave, subservient to the corrupt conscience

of the Nineteenth-Century American South. As he grapples with internal

and external influences, we are never really sure of his true identity —

Huck Finn, Sarah Williams, George Peters, Tom Sawyer — and we have the

sneaking suspicion that that is just the way Mark Twain — Samuel Clemens

— would have wanted it.