| Home | With Neither Home Nor Redemption Twain's Search for Lasting Purity Part I: Hope Amid Disillusionment by David Dowdy Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a wonderful story, worth re-reading every decade of our lives. Should you do so, you’ll discover a curiosity—the book changes with each encounter. But there is one sentence that has never failed to capture my attention—the last one. You may remember it. Huck says, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Now consider Huck’s situation. He’s just learned that Jim has been legally freed from slavery by old Miss Watson. This freedom is Jim’s purpose all along, and at a crucial moment in the history of his conscience, Huck decided to help Jim escape even though it meant he’d have to “go to Hell.” But now, happy day, he won’t need to. Moreover, Huck has learned that his abusive father, one of the most heinous characters ever composed, is dead and will never again threaten or injure the boy. If this isn’t enough, Huck has been informed that his six thousand dollars, his share of the booty Tom and he found in a cave back in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is his, clear and free, waiting for him with interest whenever he chooses to make use of it. And now, Aunt Sally, whom he has come to know and have affection for, is offering to give him the one thing he’s never had, a home and family. And he turns it all down. Why? The search for home and family, the search for a world to belong to is what the whole story is about. We might say it is what any story is about ultimately. Here are several possible worlds. To which does Huck belong? Not in Tom Sawyer’s world. Tom lives by the book. Gang:
“Must we always kill the people?”
Tom: “Oh, certainly. It’s best. Some authorities think different, but mostly it’s considered best to kill them. Except some that you bring to the cave here and keep them till they’re ransomed.” Gang: “Ransomed? What’s that?” Tom: “I don’t know. But that’s what they do. I’ve seen it in books; and so of course that’s what we’ve got to do.” Gang: “But how can we do it if we don’t know what it is?” Tom: “Why blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?” The Widow Douglas’ world is also all about rules: “Don’t put your feet up there,
Huckleberry”; and “don’t scrunch up like that, Huckleberry—set up
straight”; and pretty soon she would say, “Don’t gap and stretch like
that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?” Then she told me all
about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad,
then, but I didn’t mean no harm.
Pap’s world isn’t any more pleasant. ...by-and-by pap got too handy
with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it. I was all over welts. He got
to going away so much, too, and locking me in. Once he locked me in and
was gone three days. It was dreadful lonesome. I judged he had got
drowned and I wasn’t ever going to get out any more. I was scared.
But Huck escapes and finds himself on Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi. It’s big, green, and provides him with everything he needs to live his own life. When it
was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty satisfied;
but by-an-by 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
driftlogs 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.
And so for thee days and nights....I was boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time. I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime; and green summer grapes, and green razberries, and the green blackberries was just beginning to show. It’s paradise for Huck, but as we know, paradise doesn’t last, at least in this world. Shortly thereafter, Huck discovers someone else is occupying the island. Turns out it’s Jim, but that’s awkward because Jim is obviously running away, and Huck knows that can’t be good. Trouble comes when Huck encounters a snake. Yes, even in this boys’ Garden of Eden there’s a snake. It bites Jim on the heel, and Jim hovers near death for several days. The real trouble is within Huck who can’t bring himself to be honest with his new friend and tell him the snake was in Jim’s bedroll due to his, Huck’s negligence. There’s a rift, brought about in part by social differences that decree white boys never humble themselves to black men. That will change over time, but a lot of water will spill over the dams before then. So Huck and Jim flee the island in search of a safer world, and for most of the remainder of the story, a raft becomes their home. ...we run between seven and eight
hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We
catched fish, and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off
sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river,
laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel
like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed, only a little
kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing,
and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, or
the next....Take it all around, we lived pretty high.
Sounds idyllic, but reality will intrude, whether or no, and wouldn’t you know it, here comes a riverboat bearing down on them. We could hear her pounding along,
but we didn’t see her good till she was close.... She was a big one,
and she was coming in a hurry, too,...all of a sudden she bulged out,
big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like
red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us.
There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a
pow-wow of cussing, and whistling of steam—and as Jim went overboard on
one side and I on the other, she come smashing straight through the
raft.
Even here, Huck is not safe. Nor is the shore any safer. He lands in front of the Grangerford homestead, the Grangerford fortress, and is taken into the bosom of this genteel and generous family. All’s well, for nearly a week. Then Huck sees the human race in a new light. It’s the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud. Within hours after hearing “some pretty ornery preaching all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness” at the country church both families attend, the two families break out fighting, and Huck literally takes to the trees for safety. It made me so sick I most fell
out of the tree. I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened!—it would
make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come
ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut
of them—lots of times I dream about them.
Thus the pattern of Huck’s journey down the Mississippi: moments of loveliness shot to pieces by intrusions, invasions, and inversions of everything he holds to be good, peaceful, and human. With this pattern established, he takes us to what will become the core episode of the adventure. It is at this point that Twain achieves his most lyrical prose. Two or three nights went by; I
reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth
and lovely....It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile
and a half wide...we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to
freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the
water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound,
anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only
sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see,
looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods
on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place
in the sky;...then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black
any more, but gray; ...it was so still, and sounds come so far;...and
you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods;...then the nice
breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and
fresh, and sweet to smell...
...It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our back and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. Of course, it doesn’t stay that way. In another paragraph or two, along come the king and the duke, two of the rottenest scoundrels ever invented in the mind of man. There is nothing redeeming about them, no low to which they will not stoop, no opportunity they will not exploit, no person they will show the least decency toward or pity for, and all to make a few more dollars. They commandeer Huck and Jim’s raft and dictate the way of life aboard the raft from then on. Huck is reduced to serving these men as a menial, and Jim is reduced to slavering like a mentally ill A-rab. In the course of their shenanigans, Huck will see mob violence and a mob cowed by a despicable bully, plain country folk bilked out of their life savings at a religious revival, the orneriest entertainment as the king cavorts naked on a stage, and he’ll be forced to help cheat the sweetest family of orphan girls out of their home and inheritance in a most audacious and mean-spirited con-game. And this is why Huck will not allow himself to be “sivilized” by Aunt Sally. Everything about the adult world disgusts him, as well it should. The best that can be said about adults in Huck’s life is they are ignoramuses or fools; those are the best. The worst are so degraded beyond recognition that they no longer resemble human beings. And yet, in Huck at least, this degradation does not elicit spite, outrage, or judgment. He is young, and hence, pure of heart. As he and Tom happen to see the duke and king finally ridden out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, Huck tells us: I see they had the king and the
duke astraddle of a rail—that is, I knowed it was the king and the duke, though
they was all over tar and feathers, and didn’t look like nothing in the
world that was human....Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was
sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever
feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful
thing to see. Human beings can
be awful cruel to one another.
Notice Huck’s pity for these criminals. As types of a class of men, they disgust us, and we feel a satisfaction as they hang upside down in feathers having meted out to them some of the harsh and crude treatment they have relentlessly meted out to others. But Huck, having come to know Jim, a runaway slave, as a person like himself, and naturally eschewing classes and categories, sees them as individuals and pities them. He has compassion, but he has no intention of joining such a world. So far he has not found a world to live in. Perhaps he’ll find it in the Territory. The discerning Catholic reader, of course, will be skeptical. Oh sure, we all wish Huck the best; he’s such a deserving boy. But we don’t need a degree in history to know that life in the Territory turned out to be not any different than life in the cities and states Huck is running away from. What Huck is really looking for won’t be found anywhere short of Heaven itself. As the writer of Hebrews reminds us: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (13:14). Huck is looking unknowingly for the Kingdom of God, and its entrance is as close as the nearest baptismal font. He has a snowball’s chance in Hell in finding it, however, given his creator’s (small c) adamant opposition to the Catholic Church. In a later novel, Twain would do battle with the Church. But that’s another story. David Dowdy writes from Western Massachusetts, where he teaches literature. |
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