Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Clearly, if in this scene we change the racial designation to “Negro” or “negro” (the more common nineteenth-century usage), we would lose the violence of the word “nigger”; but it is also true that with the emendation we would sacrifice the deepest, most slashing irony that Twain turns against the word and the world of prejudice underlying it.

The second problem I want to raise also involves race—the portrayal of Jim. Here a whole book-length essay could follow. But for this space my central complaint is that in this realistic novel, Jim is just not real enough, not true enough either to historical type or to human dimensions that transcend historical type. I’ll start by observing that the greatest critic of his era on this question of African-American portraiture, Sterling A. Brown, disagrees with me on this point, and in fact has strongly commended Twain’s portrait of Jim. Like Huck and Tom, writes Brown, Jim is “drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Running away from old Miss Watson who... ‘pecks on’ him all the time, treats him ’pooty rough’ and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi.”
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Brown finds Jim’s humor rich, not the stuff of minstrel buffoonery alone: “His talk enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s ‘Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’ ” (p. 46).

But as Brown observes, “he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and save money so he could buy his wife, and they would both work to buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them.” In Brown’s evaluation, “Jim is the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchmen should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, ‘cain’t git no situation.’” Here is parental tenderness and shame as Jim ”tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever.” Says Jim: ”Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb—en I’d been a-treatin’ her so!“
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Likewise, in his first writings about
Huckleberry Finn,
the novelist Ralph Ellison strongly defends Twain’s presentation of Jim (whom incredibly even he, Ellison, sometimes calls “Nigger Jim”) as “not only a slave but a human being, a man who in some ways was to be envied.” Echoing Brown, Ellison praises Jim’s portraiture, particularly its inclusion of faults that humanize: “Twain, though guilty of the sentimentality common to humorists, does not idealize the slave. Jim is drawn in all his ignorance and superstition, with his good traits and his bad. He, like all men, is ambiguous, limited in circumstance but not in possibility.” For Ellison, what’s most significant is Jim’s role as Twain’s shining “symbol of humanity, and in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town.”
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Yet Ellison, writing in the 1950s, more than ten years after his first defense of Jim, also began to find fault with Jim’s portrayal. On second thought, the figure was so close, he said, to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy—that form of American theater best known for its feature of white men wearing burned cork on their faces to imitate, typically in grotesque exaggerations, black American forms of song and dance—that black readers keep their distance from Huckleberry’s black friend. Recalling his reading the book as a boy, Ellison says, “[I] could imagine myself as Huck Finn (I so nicknamed my brother), but not, though I racially identified with him, as Nigger Jim [sic; recall again that this was never Mark Twain’s phrase], who struck me as a white man’s inadequate portrait of a slave.”
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Elsewhere, Ellison said that Twain evidently did not calculate blacks among the readers of his novel: “It was a dialogue between... a white American novelist of good heart, of democratic vision, one dedicated to values... and white readers, primarily,” he said. And Twain’s failure as an artist, in this view, is that he relied too much on the barroom joke and minstrel show for images of blacks rather than seeking true images, not only from lived experience but from prior forms of literature, depicting blacks and other figures from beneath the social hierarchy. To this degree, Twain was “not quite as literary a man as he was required to be,” wrote Ellison, “because he could have gone to Walter Scott, to the Russians, to any number of places, and found touch-stones for filling out the complex humanity of that man who appeared in his book out of his own imagination, and who was known as Jim.”
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In her eloquent commentary on
Huckleberry Finn,
the novelist Toni Morrison finds the solution to Huck’s loneliness and despair to be not the godlike river—with its own terrible unpredictability—but the companionship of Jim. Floating on their raft, free from the troubles of the shore, Huck and Jim talk quietly, and their communion together is “so free of lies it produces an aura of restfulness and peace unavailable anywhere else in the novel.”
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But given the real distance between blacks and whites in America, Morrison says, so extreme today and infinitely more so a hundred-plus years ago, this wonderful friendship is doomed, and as savvy southerners, Jim and Huck know in advance that it is doomed. Morrison says that this inevitable split between the two friends, the novel’s underlying tragedy, helps explain why Twain presented Jim in such exaggeratedly outsized stereotyped terms—lest Huck or the reader get too close to him. “Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim,” writes Morrison. “Predictable and common as the gross stereotyping of blacks was in nineteenth-century literature, here, nevertheless, Jim’s portrait seems unaccountably excessive and glaring in its contradictions—like an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within.”

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.”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.