SOURCE: Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. “Whah Is de Glory?: The (Un)Reconstructed South.” In The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn, pp. 115-35. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

[In the following essay, Chadwick-Joshua discusses what the character of Jim reveals about post-Reconstruction America and the persistence of racial stereotypes.]

All the experiences of the central section have prepared Huck for the final conflict, his decision to free Jim from being made a slave “again all his life … amongst strangers … for forty dirty dollars” (269). With that resolution, Huck casts off his old cultural beliefs and embraces new ones that feel right. Having watched Huck grow, we know that this decision is not predicated on whether freeing is convenient or comfortable. But the bitter satire of the human condition in the final section of the novel impels many readers to ask if its hero is a racist. The new perspective we have on Huck and Jim leads to the answer.

When Huck meets up with Tom Sawyer, the young man who in Huck's eyes personifies intelligence and knowledge, Huck resumes his secondary, supporting role. Huck's deference to Tom in the effort to extricate Jim occurs only after he has tried, as a true friend, to warn Tom not to damn his soul as he, Huck, has done.

A scene that has caused great concern and discussion initiates us into the closure of the novel: Huck's explaining to Aunt Sally why he was delayed in arriving at the Phelps Farm and why he arrives in the manner that he does. Aunt Sally herself supplies the format for Huck to construct his deception when she says, “What's kep' you?—boat get aground?” (279).¹ Huck realizes the need for a convincing story and that he must now come up with a new idea:

“It warn't the grounding—that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No'm. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

(280)

No one better represents the opposition to this section than Bernard Bell: “[T]he author and his protagonist are kindred spirits in their ambivalence about the humanity and equality of blacks. In response, for example, to the tarring and feathering of the Duke and King, the comic confidence men, Huck is moved to sympathy for them in Chapter 33. … Yet, earlier when Aunt Sally Phelps asked if anybody was hurt on the boat …, Huck's insensitivity to the humanity of blacks … is as ironically racist as hers. … Twain, like Huck, was a racist; yet both found themselves fighting nobly, though futilely, against the customs and laws of white supremacy” (135). I agree that Huck's compassion emerges when he sees the duke and king tarred and feathered, and what we subsequently hear are Huck's true feelings without the constrictive disguise that he has donned in order to effect the rescue of Jim. We are inside his mind, listening to his thoughts, thoughts no one but the reader knows. But Bell's argument of insensitivity is perverse. The ironic racism is deceptive coloring for Huck. No reasonable reader misses this. For the reader, it is an utter condemnation through satire of bigotry. Huck is manipulative, and the satire is derived from his knowledge of what would work most effectively to mislead someone who believes in slavery—now his cosmic enemies in the battle between heaven and hell. Twain's double emphasis on the line, by having Aunt Sally repeat part of it, is an obvious authorial indicator of Twain's intention of highlighting the moment.

The Aunt Sally scene is quite different, however, in that we have access to Huck's thoughts only when he is determining what he must do and say in order to disarm and persuade Aunt Sally that he is who he says he is. When he speaks, he says not what is inside his mind but what she expects him to say, and the verisimilitude of the fiction retains its continuity and cohesion. What else could we expect from a work of realism? We have been inside his mind and soul in Chapter 31. We know that he has committed his all to what he believes is the morally, spiritually, and ethically right action, and, make no mistake, Huck does consciously decide to take action. Here too his decision is costly, for with it he faces the possibility of incarceration, branding, various amputations, most certain social ostracizing, and even death. Having seen Huck answer the ultimate question of the price of freedom, it is difficult to imagine wanting a euphemism now. What we get is what we do want: a visionary joke, a larger irony than any that has gone before in this comedy.

In Chapter 16 when Jim spoke of securing “an Ab'litionist to go and steal [his wife and children out of bondage]” (124), Huck's reaction was shock and dismay. He saw such talk as lowering Jim. Compare that scene with this one in Chapter 33, and we find that Huck Finn himself is the “ab'litionist,” who will secure Jim's freedom at the price of his very soul. His solicitude for Tom might delude an unwary reader into doubting Huck's sincerity; it should not. The racial slur “nigger” again in no way diminishes what Twain is accomplishing here, for we must ask why Huck is relying once more on this term. What we find on close examination is that, like Jim, Huck is donning the appropriate mask to suit the situation, which requires using the expected language.

Twain reveals in this final section of the novel the true nature of the (un)reconstructed South as represented by Tom Sawyer. Although Huck Finn is no longer the same Huck we met at the novel's beginning, Tom is the same Tom. We know that Tom is still the same mythic, Romantic's Romantic, in love with perceived adventure rather than with the unorchestrated events of the real world. The real world is the one in which Jim has always existed and in which Huck and Jim both exist after they embark on the river. Unlike them, Tom has remained in stasis throughout the narrative, offstage except when, by proxy, his ideas bring Huck and Jim into danger. Twain attacks Tom's mental attitude early and late from the direct frontal criticism of Scott in Life on the Mississippi to covert sallies in virtually every other work in the canon. Twain's books never favor the tutors in chivalry and suspense. Twain reveals this predisposition to the reader again when Huck tells Tom his plan to free Jim. About to respond, Tom stops in midsentence, almost revealing that Jim is already free. A special perversity is represented by the fact that he lies through this blatant omission to his best friend, Huck, a friend who admires and respects Tom's mind and humanity. Could the rest of the action he controls be any less perverse?

The reading audience sometimes fails to observe that it is not Huck who initiates and plays the game of let's free the free nigger; it is Tom Sawyer. Should the reader, particularly the African American, condemn Huck for not taking the lead in this elaborate and dangerous plan and for yielding control to Tom? It is not Huck who deduces Jim's location in the hut by the ash-hopper; it is Tom. Although both see food being taken to the hut, only Tom connects the contents of the dinner to Jim. Twain the ironist is at work. The key element for Tom is the stereotypical watermelon. Huck assumes that the slave is feeding a dog, but Tom reminds him that dogs do not eat watermelon. Huck says, “So it was—I noticed it. Well, it does beat all, that I never thought about a dog not eating watermelon. It shows how a body can see and don't see at the same time” (293). Huck expresses later in Chapter 34 that he knows Tom to be extremely intelligent: “What a head for a boy to have! If I had Tom Sawyer's head, I wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan [of escape for Jim], but only just to be doing something; I knowed very well where the right plan was going to come from” (294). The dominant figure and the dominant culture dominate.

Reprising three moments in the action where Tom was absent, Huck concludes that he will rely on this seemingly masterful ally and leader. Yet it will be an uneasy alliance. Huck has always felt that because of Tom's great propensity for reading, he possesses the expertise to execute important undertakings. Logic dictates to Huck that he yield to the person with the greatest chance for success. The ultimate irony here is Huck's self-perception of intellectual weakness. Huck may not notice such minute details as the watermelon, but he can and does keenly observe human nature. What Huck has learned on the river, as well as in his life with Pap and the widow and Miss Watson, has produced in him a capacity of understanding which is far richer in insight than Tom's. His wisdom derives from his bond with Jim.

In the last chapters, Huck's and Jim's wisdom for expression will struggle against great odds, as Twain intends. Huck utters substantive social comments as his sight and insight improve because of Jim's influence over the course of their adventures. His yielding to Tom is not a capitulation or a conscious burlesquing of a serious matter at Jim's expense. Instead it is an attempt to keep to the oath he makes earlier. One of the most saddening portions of this section is rarely mentioned by critics—Huck's firm faith in Tom's sincerity:

Well, one thing was dead sure; and that was, that Tom Sawyer was in earnest and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable, and well brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and 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. … I knowed I ought to just jump up and tell him so; and so be his true friend, and let him quit the whole thing right where he was, and save himself.

(295)

In this important section Twain exposes the distorted underpinnings of a society whose implacable truths have been contradicted throughout the novel. Tom Sawyer—the (un)reconstructed South—relies on and perverts every concept on which the South presumably structured its mythic persona: pride, rightness, filial loyalty, honesty, and salvation. In comparison with Jim's defining moment with Huck on true friendship, Twain creates for the audience a stark, undeniable contrast. Huck's emphasis here recalls the essence of his and Jim's real relationship as developed in the “trash” incident, Jim's calling after Huck, and Huck's own great reprise. True friendship has been successfully redefined by Twain as lying across racial boundaries—the only real solution to the Jim dilemma. Tom's way is now a travesty, by design.

Some critics, such as Henry Nash Smith in “A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience,” cite Huck's decision to accept Tom Sawyer's aid as a weakness both in Huck's character and in the novel's structure. Others complain that Huck in this passage begins to reveal signs of relenting in his efforts and sincerity. Their mistake is in hating the action without being able to see that Twain distances it from the actor. Huck must be shown dealing with the last vestige of what he deems to be sacrosanct and above reproach. He has abandoned unreflecting support of slavery because of his experiences with Jim. He has already made an overwhelming decision for himself. But Huck is a boy, not a social theorist: we could not expect him to allow his best friend to place his soul in jeopardy without any demur. Nor has he the cynicism of an adult capable of penetrating Tom's mystifying behavior, so he accepts his “help” without recognizing, as we the readers do, the element of insincerity on which it is based. Twain fully expresses this point through Huck's extended statement of surprise. This passage also shows us how Huck really views himself. Critics such as Smith have concluded that Huck, because of his low self-esteem, has very little to lose. Is that assertion accurate? Is not one's soul the ultimate loss, no matter how poor, how uneducated, how classless? It would appear that Twain is speaking directly to the audience here, as well, through the honest words and concerns of an adolescent who is trying to figure out what it all means when beliefs are turned inside out not once but, now, twice. Smith has missed the point. And so, Huck, the true and sincere friend, must at least try to save his companion, Tom, from the “sure” fate of eternal damnation. Tom, of course, knowing that no such fate awaits him, plays the intelligent hero who dares to risk all to help his friends. So begins the great travesty of freeing the free slave. Tom's role is monstrous and insincere, truly an “evasion”; Huck, now more a son of Jim than of Pap, is true to his and Jim's humanity outside the law. Such fidelity was easy as melodramatic events propelled the story; it is very complex in the burlesque framework now established.

Jim, of course, assumes a primary role in this escapade. Critics from Marx, Booth, and Bell to Peaches Henry have indicted the closing chapters as tremendously weak. Henry, for example, claims that any strides Jim may have reached by the final section of the novel, still leave him a “stereotypical, superstitious ‘darky’ that Twain's white audience would have expected and in which they would have delighted” (33). Continuing with this misperception, she describes Jim as one who “darkens the closing chapters of the novel.” She goes on to note, “Regardless of Twain's motivation or intent, Jim does deflate and climb back into the minstrel costume. His self-respect and manly pursuit of freedom bow subserviently before the childish pranks of an adolescent white boy” (38).

But previous chapters have shown us that Twain relies on parody and burlesque along with Jim's masterful language manipulation to convey mental attitudes toward freedom, equity, voice, and family. Each character must maintain the character that society has caused him to represent even though it may be different from what he has become. Tom Sawyer must metonymically represent the slave-holding South, that of the forced (un)reconstructed South. That is verisimilitude. Huck Finn must maintain the attitude of the reconstructing southerner. That is Twain's vision. Jim must maintain his mask for self-preservation and his linguistic manipulation as protection. That is verisimilitude. Anything else would have transformed Jim's dialogue and actions into those of an unrecognizable Romantic hero. While that is Jim's tragedy, it is also why blacks as well as whites can feel the novel's greatness.

Signs of Twain's intent are manifold. When Jim assesses his situation and sees that Huck is acting in concert with Tom Sawyer, he shifts his language. Terms of subserviency—”Mars Tom,” “Misto Tom,” and “sah”—are suddenly prominent. Has Jim forgotten or lost his taste for freedom and family? Is this not the same man who steadily eyed Huck and called him “trash”? Is this not the man who advised Huck that their “royalty” on the raft were nothing but rogues? Opponents constantly ask where his voice is now and assert that Jim reassumes his previous slave invisibility and silence.

When Tom's inventions exceed pragmatics, as Jim understands the situation, he refuses to engage in that part of the evasion—the severing of limbs, placing of spiders in the cabin, placing of rattlesnakes, and planting flowers and watering them with tears. Of this section Harold Beaver, in his essay “Run, Nigger, Run,” articulates most succinctly the general problem:

Jim is merely a good nigger: good humored, simple (with the king and duke), improvident (with his financial investments), kind-hearted (to Huck), displaying a contented African patience with a physical endurance that might have proved fatal to anyone except an African. The stress throughout is not on his trances or voodoo potency so much as on his ability to: preserve an equilibrium between true Negro optimism, as a Southerner would have put it, and African fatalism. So much Huck could observe. The inherent shrewdness was not so conspicuous. For Jim rarely speaks out.

(188)

Jim's “good humor” involves insisting that he “doan' skasely ever cry” (331), a comment as misleading as Huck's earlier comment that he didn't take any stock in dead people. His simplicity with the duke and king involved his testing them and rejecting them. His improvidence, in fact, with “stock” was a poignant fact of his life and of all investments, as any reader of the Wall Street Journal today can attest. To degrade Jim's character by labeling it “true negro optimism, as a Southerner would have put it,” is to take a stance which is ambivalent in itself, although probably not intended to be perversely racist or critically unaware. Jim's “African fatalism,” possibly in reference to the “luck” sentiments as expressed in passing Cairo, is totally uncharacteristic of him at any time in the novel. Finally, Jim speaks out not “rarely” but many times, in fact, both to Huck and to Tom.

While otherwise offering valuable analysis, when Beaver uses the word “merely,” it is clear that he has badly missed the heroism in Jim's behavior. Jim speaks out as the situation warrants. He is not so foolish as to have his say at the expense of compromising the situation. He never forgets, though, that he is still in the South, he has been captured as a runaway, and he is without his passport and stalwart friend, Huck. Only an inept melodramatist would have given his character a formal set-speech on racism and recapture; it seems spurious to suggest or imply such an alternative as a critical point.

Jim initially does argue with Tom as he had with Huck, one of the best of these attempts being the glory scene in Chapter 38. Tom, the orchestrator of the great escape, admonishes Jim:

“Jim, don't act so foolish. A prisoner's got to have some kind of a dumb pet, and if a rattlesnake hain't ever been tried, why, there's more glory to be gained in your being the first to ever try it than any other way you could ever think of to save your life.”

“Why, Mars Tom, I doan' want no sich glory. Snake take 'n bite Jim's chin off, den whah is de glory? No, sah, I doan' want no sich doin's. …”

“Mars Tom, I's willin' to tackle mos' anything 'at ain't onreasonable, but ef you en Huck fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I's gwyne to leave, dat's shore.”

(328-29)

No voice? Jim says what he must, when he must. But he also realizes that the equation has changed with Tom Sawyer in it. Tom, a representative of the (un)reconstructed South, barely sees or hears Jim as a real person. Jim can afford to say only so much in front him. This much is clear at the end of the chapter when Huck explains that Tom has heard too much of Jim's voice:

Jim said he would “jis' 's soon have tobacker in his coffee”; and found so much fault with it, and with the work and bother of raising the mullen, and jews-harping the rats, and petting and flattering up the snakes and spiders and things, on top of all the other work he had to do on pens, and inscriptions, and journals, and things, which made it more trouble and worry and responsibility to be a prisoner than anything he ever undertook, that Tom most lost all patience with him; and said he was just loadened down with more gaudier chances than a prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for himself, and yet he didn't know enough to appreciate them, and they was just about wasted on him. So Jim he was sorry, and said he wouldn't behave so no more.

(331-32)

Jim readjusts his mask so that it fits more closely, apologizes, and promises to behave more appropriately in the future. In comedy we must now endure the undoing of the truths Huck and Jim developed in isolation. With Tom in the picture, Huck and Jim have again become social beings.

Twain never allows the reader or Huck to forget the danger of the situation, even though the “evasion” is indeed a burlesque. Having given us a visceral sense of lynching in the Sherburn episode, Twain presents a second and third lynch mob. Because of the note Tom leaves detailing a plot to steal Jim from the Phelps farm, a lynching party is formed as a “posse.” Tom thought this response would provide ample decoy for them so that they could escape without notice. Tom's note of warning inverts Huck's moral reasoning in respect to Jim, and the outcome is grotesque. Tom writes that although he has been part of the plot to steal Jim, he has now found “religgion and wish[es] to quit it and lead a honest life again, and will betray the helish design” (338). As Tom plans, the men and dogs gather, sixteen men and twenty-two dogs. Whereas the mob that sought Colonel Sherburn fascinated and frightened Huck, here he is no mere observer. The spectacle this time makes him so ill that he has to sit. Tom, Huck, and Jim escape with the mob literally at their heels, and Tom is shot in the leg.

Many opponents of the novel have difficulty with how the characters respond. After realizing that their escape has been a resounding success and that Jim is a free man, Huck says: “Now, old Jim, you're a free man again, and I bet you won't ever be a slave no more” (344). Jim, although he has complained about the apparent trials and tribulations of this escape, also realizes that Tom has delivered on his promise. Their faith in Tom was properly placed, degrading though it was. In this respect, Tom accomplishes more than the region he represents accomplished as an integrated “new South.”

But Twain pushes us into a second reversal so rapidly that we race past this point. Tom has been injured, and Jim and Huck's rejoicing quickly ends. The pair turn their immediate attention and concern to Tom. How characteristic of these two, as we have come to know them! Opponents have asserted that it is not incumbent upon Jim to sacrifice here the very thing for which he has been questing since the narrative's beginning. Some critics, particularly African American parents, cite this scene as especially racist because Twain describes Jim as relinquishing his freedom for a white boy who really does not have his best interest at heart to begin with. After all, Tom knows the truth of Jim's manumission. To this reading audience Jim becomes an Uncle Tom, and Twain seems to show his true racist colors.

But we must believe all that has happened in the novel up to this point. We have been exhilarated with Jim's evolution in previous chapters. We believed Huck's ultimate sacrifice. These characters represent a vision with which we have begun to identify because we have seen intimately their loyalty, their faith, their honesty, their naivete, their fortitude, and their self-reliance. How could Jim have done anything but what he did? It is exactly what we expect of him as the man, the free man, the husband, and the father we know him to be. It is not Twain who empowers Jim; rather, it is Jim the fully rounded character who empowers himself to risk sacrificing his freedom for what he feels to be right. Huck and he discuss the situation:

But me and Jim was consulting—and thinking. And we'd thought a minute, I says:

“Say it, Jim.”

So he says:

“Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him dat 'uz bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, ‘Go on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?’ Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You bet he wouldn't! Well, den, is Jim gwyne to say it? No sah—I doan' budge a step out'n dis place, 'dout a doctor; not if it's forty year!”

(345)

Can readers miss the number forty, recalling the forty dirty dollars that brought Jim back to captivity? Twain's choice of words like “consulting” and, recalling and reversing Tom's earlier “studying,” “thinking” remind us that Jim acts in contrast to Tom's incorrectly formed sense of humanity. As with the verbal battles in the novel's first third, Jim prepares for Huck an argument with the deduction that Huck, knowing Jim, anticipates. Note, however, that Jim does not say that he will not continue to seek his freedom. He simply says that he will not leave Tom alone without help. It might even be argued that hostile critics miss the fact that Jim, as Twain's spokesman, is so powerful because he is not a racist or an absolutist. Recognizing a heroic standard of behavior, he adheres to it, whether white or black. This important distinction is often overlooked. Jim truly comes to parity with the other characters through this last great heroic logomachy, and Tom Sawyer will respond in kind, in awakening from his delirium, to cry that Jim is as “free as any cretur that walks this earth” (360).

While Jim is called an Uncle Tom for his decision in this scene, Huck's reaction has Twain opponents calling him racist: “I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say—so it was all right, now, and I told Tom I was a-going for a doctor. … Jim was to hide in the woods when he see the doctor coming, till he was gone again” (345-46). Twain highlights the irony of the moment by reinforcing our false assumption that whites are the setters of morals. Is Huck's racism emerging in his saying that Jim is white inside? Yes, Huck still has much to learn about race. But the travesty of moral color is a direct response to those Americans who persist even now to see one race as morally degraded.

As a point of comparison, we might explore another brand of racism. William Lloyd Garrison once advised Frederick Douglass that he needed to speak more like a southern slave and less like a white man or an educated northern colored person (Douglass). Douglass, of course, ignored the advice and continued to speak as he chose. Like many other African Americans, I have vivid memories of my family being accused by other African Americans of trying to be white or thinking we were white because of how we spoke, behaved, and thought. Was Garrison a racist? Were the African American children and adults who berated other African Americans racists? Some believe that people of color cannot be racist. I disagree with that as much as I disagree with Twain opponents who assert that Huck's calling Jim “white” shows his racism. As I mentioned earlier, a student many years ago asked me whether Huck at the novel's conclusion is a racist. I told that student then, and I reassert now, that Huck can never look at another individual of African American descent without being affected by his experience of Jim as well as the other African Americans he encounters in this novel. Is he a racist? No. Can we presume that a long course of development will have to take place before his voice no longer shows its southern origin? Sadly, yes. Twain is a realist.

Of all that happens in the novel, the scene in Chapter 42 is perhaps the most troubling because it is so very realistic. After experiencing the traumas of the “great escape,” Tom's being shot, and the recapture, Jim must yet endure southern vilification and brutality: “They cussed Jim considerable, though, and give him a cuff or two, side the head, once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on him, and chained him again … and chained his hands, too, and both legs, and said he warn't to have nothing but bread and water to eat” (356). Jim's humanity and his presence reveal themselves once again, this time through the doctor. The doctor must admit to the mob that despite the fact that Jim is a runaway slave he came out of hiding when the doctor needed help in removing the bullet from Tom's leg. It is at this point that the audience bears witness to Jim's ultimate decision. He knows that the doctor will not let him go, but he chooses to do what he feels is morally right anyway.

Although some critics have seen this scene, and others before it, as attenuating Jim's character, verbal irony in the doctor's speech to the mob diminishes not Jim as much as those around him, for it is they, including the doctor, a man who professes to live by the Hippocratic oath, who lack humanity. En masse, they represent the destructive and hypocritical Southern mindset that Jim and Huck have encountered in their symposium down the river. The mob's response after hearing from the doctor about Jim's unquestionable humanity adds that parodic satiric spice that pervades this novel. Again, it is Huck on whom nothing is lost, not even the unfairness of their treatment of Jim:

Then the others softened up a little, too, and I was mighty thankful to that old doctor for doing Jim that good turn; and I was glad it was according to my judgment of him, too; because I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.

Then they come out and locked him up. I hoped they was going to say he could have one or two of the chains took off, because they was rotten heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water, but they didn't think of it, and I reckoned it warn't best for me to mix in, but I judged I'd get the doctor's yarn to Aunt Sally, somehow or other, as soon as I'd got through the breakers that was laying just ahead of me.

(358)

Is Jim supposed to be visible, voiced, and independent before these men? No. If he were, the metaphor Twain has so carefully constructed throughout this narrative would have failed. In fact, Jim's moment of heroism should be obvious to any reader. As Jim is being cussed and cuffed, he “never said nothing, and he never let on to know me.” As his loyalty to Tom is absolute, so is his loyalty to Huck. Twain emphasizes his resolutions with three negatives bunched together for impact. In the fact of the power of the posse, Jim is steadfast. By relying on unlikely heroes—an adolescent, throw-away boy and an unlettered slave—Twain weaves into this narrative a metaphor compelling the reader to revisit the pain and trauma of this period in America's history and, like Huck, to be transformed. The responses, actions, and interactions of the main characters provide important emblems for readers, regardless of age, ethnicity, class, or epoch. Jim's exceptional humanity, his sacrifice, and his influence on Huck and the reader, as well as his lack of affect on the mob and the Phelpses are the subtle points of metaphor Twain renders. That Huck remains true to his oath and determines how he can use the doctor's yarn to influence Aunt Sally on Jim's behalf completes Twain's message about the failure and yet the untapped potential of the post-Reconstruction period. This section—this allegedly failed section—painfully and carefully depicts the thorny path that African Americans had yet to tread during Twain's own day. Reconstruction had not worked as well for the southern ex-slave as many had anticipated. A slave today, a freedman tonight: what does one do? The “Jim dilemma” which Twain presents to the reader renders one scenario through the visibility and voice of Jim. As we experience Jim, with Huck, with other slaves, as well as with proponents of slavery, we see exactly what the slave as well as the freedman confronted on a daily basis. From a modern perspective Adventures of Huckleberry Finn creates the environment conducive for the reader to observe and learn these historic and contemporary truths from a comfortable distance rather than from an “in your face” point of view.

That Huck cannot understand why Tom goes to so much trouble to “set a free nigger free” has continued to confound his critics. But when we look at the purpose of the kind of satire Twain has chosen to use, could there have been an effective alternative ending? It seems necessary for Twain to have rendered Tom Sawyer's and the Phelpses' mental attitudes, and to do so through parody and satire, through verbal and situational irony, in order to reveal “the relation of the text to the compromising and conditionalizing context of its utterance” (Morson and Emerson 78). It is this parodic style that “historicizes and … exposes the conditions that engendered claims of unconditionality” (78). According to Northrop Frye, this kind of satire “[a]t its most concentrated … presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. The intellectual structure built up from this story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of the narrative” (310). Twain is writing about a character still set within a world that has not gone beyond racism.

Frye continues that the style sometimes results in the reader's mistaken belief that the writer's style and structure are careless. The unfamiliar style and structure require that readers revise their methods of reading a narrative. They may also have to revise their expectations and preconceived notions about the characters. The relationship between the reader, particularly the African American reader, and the novel has been the focus of this discussion, and we have focused as well on the relationship between readers and the African American presences in the novel. Rather than appreciating the masterful linguistic manipulation and strategic arguments with which Twain has endowed the characters, many African American critics of the novel hear and see only “nigger.” John Wallace recommends his revised version of the novel, from which such words have been deleted, over the original: “It no longer depicts blacks as inhuman, dishonest, or unintelligent, and it contains a glossary of Twainisms. Most adolescents will enjoy laughing at Jim and Huck in this adaptation” (24). And they will also have a naive, watered-down, and delusive vision of their own and their nation's heritage.

An approach such as Wallace's brings to the front a serious problem facing African Americans today. It is one of (non)recognition and (un)acknowledgement. Today's reading audience itself assumes a mask that precludes any necessity for acknowledging slavery and Jim and the other slaves depicted in the novel. As we have seen, this mask so obscures the vision that readers overlook even the free professor from the North. Let us discard the mask. Let us instead recognize that blacks and whites together must overcome such a problematic hindrance to substantive identification and communication. Shelley Fisher Fishkin takes the position that Jim does gain his voice and never compromises it. If, as opponents assert, the sound of Jim's voice is diminished, it is not because the character fades but because the hope and promise of Reconstruction failed. If we, at the end of the novel feel frustrated with Jim's situation, our feeling is appropriate to the education we have undergone at Twain's hands as to Jim's real integrity of character and moral purpose.

For Twain's painful rendering of the South's inhumanity before and after the Civil War, he relies on parodic satire to convey ambivalence so as to not completely alienate his reader. Morrison says that for the writer “in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting, and definitive” (Playing in the Dark 13; italics added). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn accomplishes such an unhobbling by refusing to allow the reader to escape the truth of a horrific period in American history. As Morrison observes, “The agency for Huck's struggle is the nigger Jim, and it is absolutely necessary … that the term nigger be inextricable from Huck's deliberations about who and what he himself is—or, more precisely, is not. The major controversies about the greatness or near greatness of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an American (or even ‘world’) novel exist as controversies because they forego a close examination of the interdependence of slavery and freedom, of Huck's growth and Jim's serviceability within it, and even Mark Twain's inability to continue to explore the journey into free territory” (55). To have avoided using “nigger,” “hell,” and “poor white trash” would have been a denial, a lie, that would have undermined the novel's power to move readers to frustration at Jim's physical situation.

Twain never meant for this novel to be painless. He uses humor as Jonathan Swift does. He never meant, as Wallace proposes, for readers to only laugh at Jim and Huck. In her essay “What Does ‘Nigger’ Mean?” novelist Gloria Naylor queries the meaning and impact of using “nigger.” She concludes that even if the word were erased totally from the mouths of white society, as in Wallace's adaptation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, no one can be naive enough to believe that it would disappear from white minds. And, I add, it also would not disappear from African American minds—nor should it. Without the memory of what a word once meant and what it can continue to mean, we as a society are doomed only to repeat earlier mistakes about ourselves, each other, and serious issues involving us all.

Are we beyond needing correctives, as some of the novel's opponents suggest? I think of the literature book I read in high school, which wrote of slavery, “[L]et your imagination re-create the scenes that gave rise to the spirituals: [Negro] men and women picking cotton in the fields; men loading heavy bales on barges, with one rich voice singing out the varying lines and the whole company joining in the refrain” (Fadiman 670-72).² This picturesque image appeared in the 1958 edition of Adventures in American Literature, but it was used in my classroom in the 1970s. No mention of “nigger,” “hell,” “poor white trash,” lynch mobs, dogs, or chains here, yet it strikes me as far more racist than Twain's use of these words to render the trauma, the brutality, the yearning for freedom, and the rationalizations that upheld slavery. I was fortunate in having parents and some discerning teachers who supplemented standard texts like my literature book with other books to read and open discussions about the issues they raised. Without the gift of that, I would have a very different impression of both my people and Euro-Americans. In their wisdom and out of their own courage, they dared me to look, to question, and then finally to write. Among the books they gave me was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Notes

1. Parenthetical page references to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford UP), 1996.

2. This prefatory note introduced the “only” voice of the African American, that expressed in spirituals: “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” “Deep River,” “Let My People Go.” The study questions that followed this section focused only on religious songs that create mood and deep religious faith, not on physical situation or political and economic conditions.

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