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What Huck Finn

means to me

by John MacBeath Watkins

Jamie Lutton has written a wonderfulpost on her struggle with The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, and because my experience of the book has been very different, I'd

like to take some time to talk about the book.

I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seven times between the ages of ten

and twelve. The book spoke to me in a way no other book I'd read by then did, and this

was a time in my life when I was reading about a book a day (mostly science fiction, but

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also the plays of Shaw and a wide variety of other stuff.)

I was reading about a boy my own age who went out into the world and made his

way, dodging the authorities and dealing with rascals like the con men who insisted that

they were a duke and the lost dauphin, befriended a runaway slave, saw a family

destroyed by a feud, and in the end went against his moral teachings for the sake of

friendship.

The great moral lesson of the book is this last. After Jim is recaptured, Huck

concludes that he will go to hell if he helps Jim escape from slavery. He's determined to

do it anyway. Huck understands that the problem is not the question of whether to be

"good," the problem is that the "good" people are engaged in a monstrous system that

treats his friend as an object to be bought and sold regardless of his wishes.

Although I was born in Louisiana, my family moved to France shortly thereafter,

then to Maine, where I read the book. My parents grew up in Oregon, where there were

not enough black people to train the young to hate them. I had not had enough contact

with blacks to have learned the moral landscape of racism. To me, the world Huck

roamed through was as alien as the distant planets Robert Heinlein wrote about.

But Twain made it real to me. This was a book only a Southerner could have

written, in which the slave owners weren't the bad people, they were church-going

property owners who were the mainstay of their communities. A recent edition of the

book replaces the word "nigger" with the word "slave," thus changing the moral

landscape Huck navigates from a racist South to one in which the evil of slavery has

nothing to do with race.

Slavery had existed since the dawn of civilization. Aristotle mentioned that the

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management of slaves was always difficult because the slaves tended to think themselves

as good as their master (he didn't mention the possibility that they were right.) In most

parts of the world, slave and master were the same race and often lived in close contact.

It was never a good deal to be a slave, but it was a social status that could befall people

who looked like you.

American civilization was not a comfortable place for slavery. Our Declaration

of Independence drew heavily on the ideas of John Locke, who claimed that we each own

our lives, and that is the basis for all property. Society is, according to Locke, a compact

to protect property including our lives. Locke was aware of slavery, and was complicit in

it as a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, which bought slaves in Africa and

shipped them to the New World. He even wrote a justification for slavery, which did not

in fact apply to the sort of slavery the Company took part in, or as it was practiced by the

English in America.

There was a tension between slavery and liberal democracy from the start; if "all

men are created equal" why should some be slaves? One way to reconcile this was

through racism. People could tell themselves that their slaves were less than human, that

they lacked the capacity to enjoy freedom.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn humanizes Jim while at the same time

showing how racism dehumanized him to make his treatment bearable to whites. It takes

place in a world where Jim's feelings don't matter, where the word "nigger" is thrown

around casually by the "good" people. Those good people were willing to send Jim back

into slavery because they thought it proper.

George Orwell once wrote that "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a

http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nosehttp://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose

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constant struggle." Most of the characters in this book are happy to believe that all men

are equal, born owning their lives, and that Jim, as a slave, belongs to a group of people

for whom this is not true. The human mind has, as Orwell noted, the ability to believe

two contradictory things at the same time. Huck Finn, however, was so changed by his

experiences on the river that he became able to see what was in front of his nose -- that

the social order that he belonged to was engaged in an every-day atrocity so widely

accepted and ingrained in the good people of the South that no one he knew questioned

it. The book enables us to understand why people acted that way, and why they were

wrong. The slave owner is not, in this book, a cruel person like Simon Legree, but

instead the good people, the churchgoers, the property owners, people who play by the

rules. Twain managed to at once humanize slaves and slaveholders, and to show that

sometimes playing by the rules is immoral.

Huck, through knowing Jim, came to understand what an atrocity it was that Jim

should be a slave. He was ready to commit a crime that would consign him to the eternal

fires of Hell rather than stand by and let this happen to Jim. This is what makes Huck

Finn the most heroic figure in American fiction.