>> Huckleberry Finn. It has scope, characterization and a central moral issue that defines America's dream of itself: whether it is better to be "good" and law-abiding or do to what is right, regardless of consequence. <<

That is an excellent theme to define the American question. Good one, Alex!

But isn't Huck Finn racist?

Rob "Opening another can of worms" Schmidt

>> Not a chance. <<

That's not what I heard from my friend Beth the English major. There's always a chance. Or, I should say, the topic engendered a lively debate in her class when it came up, with people on both sides.

Twain's portrayal of Jim, looked at through omniscient eyes, not those of the characters...there's nothing racist about that? You'd conclude that Twain believed blacks were fully equal to whites in all mental and emotional dimensions from Huck Finn? I wouldn't.

1) Twain exclusively uses the word "nigger" to characterize Jim. Many scholars believe this was as negative a term in Twain's time as it is now. That Twain didn't use other terms extant at the time, when he easily could have, is problematical.

2) Although the entire book is written in dialect, Jim's dialect is clearly inferior to Huck's. Jim uses the constructions associated with the stereotypical Uncle Tom—the "yassir, massa" types. This is again problematical since Huck and Jim come from and live in the same environs. In fact, scholars say Twain modeled the dialect on black speech patterns. If so, shouldn't Jim speak the same way as Huck? Why are his speech patterns noticeably inferior?

3) Jim professes several superstitious beliefs not shared by the white characters. Some claim this is a natural outgrowth of his position as a slave; anthropologists say powerless people tend to invent supernatural forces to give their lives hope and meaning. Others believe this reflects a pejorative attitude towards Jim.

4) Huck Finn portrays Jim as the mental equivalent of a child or simpleton, not as an adult. One good example is Jim's belief that the man walking around calling himself a king is a king. Jim appears to have no idea what a king is, other than someone who declares himself a king.

In short, Huck Finn shows the Negro as meek, obliging, and subservient. Nowhere is there evidence of the intense pain, hatred, or despair felt by many slaves—the kind that made some of them kill themselves or kill their masters. Jim moans for his family once or twice and that's about it.

Huck Finn gives readers a distorted view of America: where the whites are generally kind and will help a black man if he deserves it. Where a black man can find justice if he acts as a "good" Negro should. What would have happened had Jim destroyed property or (horrors!) hurt a white person in his quest for freedom? Would Huck or the others have been as understanding? Would Jim have come out of it alive?

Now imagine you're a black student told to read this book. "They" tell you it's the Great American Novel, it's read in high schools across the country, and give you no other input. What are you supposed to think: that this was the way it was? That "nigger" was a commonplace term and that blacks were best served by grinning and bearing it? That the powers that be support this view by making Huck Finn the standard of American literature without qualification?

Even if Huck Finn represented the way it was (which it doesn't), it doesn't send the black student a very healthy message. Beth suggests that in any literary presentation of Huck Finn, the points I've made above should be aired and discussed fully. The experience should be enhanced by additional reading—for instance, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass or fiction by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, etc.—that gives a better idea of slavery's evil. Huck Finn alone is a whitewashing of reality.

By the way, some scholars question whether Huck Finn should be considered great literature. They note that Twain wrote it installments for a boys' magazine and didn't even intend it to be a novel. Moreover, he made no distinction between it and Tom Sawyer—he considered both to be boys' adventures.

Further, the scholars note problems with the text, such as the tacked-on ending. At the end, Huck is more or less the same as at the beginning. He hasn't come to some life-transforming revelation about how all men are the same, though the reader may have. It's not as if Huck's become an abolitionist who denounces the institution of slavery.

Rather, his thoughts are directed toward squaring things with the adults. Jim is an afterthought, if anything. He hasn't taken on a new status as Huck's partner or confidante. He remains the object of Huck's adventures, not a person equal to Huck (like Tom Sawyer).

I completely agree with you that many black people survived by using a distorted dialect. If Jim were a living person, it's quite likely he would have talked this way. However, Jim is a character in a book written by a white person. I'm not prepared to say that Mark Twain was a racist, or that this is a racist book, but I think it is interesting to consider the difference in dialect between Huck and Jim. Why did Twain choose to deliberately emphasize this difference by phonetically spelling each word Jim says to the point where it is almost unintelligible? This is an authorial decision.

For example, Jim says, "I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I foun' a good place." Whereas Huck says, "There was a place right about the middle of the island I'd found when I was exploring." The contrast in their speech reinforces the notion that even an uneducated boy is easier to understand than even the most admirable black man. Given that most people associate standard English with intelligence (unfair as that may be), does this book not promote racist stereotypes among its readers?

Many people are even more concerned with Twain's use of barely intelligible dialect for Jim given recent research indicating that Huck's dialect was modeled after a black boy Twain knew. If it is the case that Twain knew African Americans who spoke the way Huck did, why did he choose to write Jim's voice in such a distorted way? The above does not prove any malice on Twain's part, but it is worth considering, especially given the fact that Huck Finn is the most widely assigned piece of required reading in American high schools today.

Given the racial divisiveness in this country, which seems to be especially pronounced among our youth, is this the best book we could offer our students? And if it is offered, should it not be accompanied by some discussion of the effect the exaggerated portrayal of Jim as a "poor" speaker might have, or have had, on African- and European-American relations? My hope is not to dishonor what is, at moments, a truly great piece of fiction, but to encourage others to consider its implications in a racially divided society, in the hope that these discussions may lead to reconciliation.

I have several concerns with this book. One is the use of the word "nigger." Twain had other terms available to him, but he chose this and only this. This makes many African-American students and readers uncomfortable. Should we just ignore their sensitivity and continue to praise this book on its literary merit alone? Does literature exist in a vacuum?

A second concern is the portrayal of Jim as an example of what an African-American male should be. He is continually referred to as a role model, and is probably the most beloved African-American male character in all of American fiction. Yet Jim is, as Toni Morrison says, "unassertive, irrational, dependent, inarticulate...." Shouldn't we examine our consciences on this one?

Third, I find it difficult to defend this book as a great work. There are moments, such as Huck's internal dialogue before apologizing to Jim, which are so superbly drawn and so quintessentially American that we have to acknowledge the greatness of Twain's writing. But as a novel it is structurally unsound and falls apart at the end. Given its divisive language, its stereotypical characterization and its literary weaknesses, why is this book required reading in more U.S. classrooms than any other book? Are we, indeed, less enlightened than we'd like to think? And if that is the case, isn't it time to re-examine this work?

[T]his book was clearly intended as an attack on racism, especially as manifested in the institution of slavery. However, Mark Twain, like his characters, was a product of his times. Is it not possible that the author was more limited in his ability to present a truly admirable African-American character, especially considering he was being paid by a popular magazine whose intended audience was young boys?

Doesn't it seem possible that we, as educated readers in the 1990s, might be more mindful of pejorative stereotyping where it occurs in any 19th century text? If this is true, then isn't it worth considering the effect the continued praise of HF as the Great American Novel might have on twentieth century race relations?

A great many African-American literary critics, schoolteachers and classroom students have tried to let us know that this book hurts them. Toni Morrison believes that Jim is represented as a deferential other who feels nothing but love for his oppressors. "[He] permits his persecutors to torment and humiliate him, and responds...with boundless love." Is this an accurate and helpful portrayal of relations between black and white people in this country? What does this say about us that this book is the one most often required in high school curricula? Does this not bear some looking into?

Two things strike us in this novel: the apparently limitless store of love and compassion the black man has for his white friend and white masters; and his assumption that the whites are indeed what they say they are, superior and adult.

Jim permits his prosecutors to torment him, humiliate him, and responds to the torment and humiliation with boundless love. The humiliation that Huck and Tom subject Jim to is baroque, endless, foolish, mind-softening—and it comes after we have experienced Jim as an adult, a caring father and a sensitive man. If Jim had been a white ex-convict befriended by Huck, the ending could not have been imagined or written: because it would not have been possible for two children to play so painfully with the life of a white man (regardless of his class, education, or fugitiveness) once he had been revealed to us as a moral adult.

[What people don't stress about the ending] is that there is no way, given the confines of the novel, for Huck to mature into a moral human being in America without Jim. To let Jim go free, to let him enter the mouth of the Ohio River and pass into free territory, would be to abandon the whole premise of the book. Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed.

Who among us knows how it feels to be an African-American high school student in a culturally diverse classroom where passages containing the word "nigger" are read out loud without comment? I don't. But I've been told it's painful. As educated twentieth-century readers, is it not worth taking these feelings into account, given that this book is read in more U.S. high school classrooms than any other book?

We've dealt with this pernicious subject several times before and each time have managed to beat back the barbarian.

You surely are aware that academic standards have fallen greatly in the past few years? In my day in college, this might well have been a sophomore. Now, I fear, it is very likely that we face a Master's candidate.

Sophomore isn't always a grade level, rather a state of being, as in Sophomoric (or even Sophomoronic) <G>.

Persistence is an admirable quality, Robert. But it's no substitute either for logic or clarity—and using it to exhaust an opponent's patience rather than to defeat his premises is a rather dishonorable dodge, in intellectual terms.

[S]ince I started this discussion (spinning it off from Alex Krislov's thread, that is), I've been in it the longest, by definition. I've answered every challenge put to me, but none of you have "seen the light." By your "logic," therefore, it would be more correct to say you're trying to exhaust my patience than the other way around.

By the way, to spare you any further embarrassing condescension, I've read Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee, and The Prince and the Pauper, plus several short stories. How about you—and everyone else in this thread?

Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Leonard, Tenney, and Davis, eds. Duke University Press, 1993. [Sorry if my bibliographic format isn't up to MLA standards.]

I'm ordering my copy, and I commend it to everyone who's interested in this ongoing debate. In fact, I'd say it's virtually required if you expect to challenge the weight of critical opinion on Huck Finn. But as a public service, I'll quote some passages from this book. I trust you'll find it as edifying as I did.

Before I begin, let me summarize a few key points:

1) Anyone who says this debate ended in the '70s (hi, Walter!) doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. The publication date of this book is 1993, as is that of another book on the subject: Was Huck Black? by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. That's two years before this debate, not 20, and nothing in the authors' tone suggests the issue is resolved.

2) Anyone who thinks I made up my arguments out of whole cloth, that they have no academic support (hi, Diana and Margaret!), doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. Every essayist in this book (except where noted) is a professor or associate professor of English or a related subject at a regular college or university.

3) Every one of my original hypotheses receives substantial support from several authors (once again, all professors of English or the like). Namely, that "nigger" was a racist term not in common usage in Twain's time...that Jim's superstitions are noticeably worse than Huck's...that Jim's dialect isn't a faithful rendering of black speech...and that Jim acts like an addle-brained idiot. My corollary, that these and other examples together make Jim a racist stereotype, also receives substantial support, as does Beth's contention that the book's ending is fundamentally flawed. And my conclusion, that teaching Huck in high school requires inordinate sensitivity to its racial issues, also receives substantial support.

In short, every argument I've made over the last few months, both large and small, receives support in this critical review.

Even when Twain was writing his book, "nigger" was universally recognized as an insulting, demeaning word. According to Stuart Berg Flexner, "Negro" was generally pronounced "nigger" until about 1825, at which time abolitionists began objecting to that term. (12) They preferred "colored person" or "person of color." Hence W.E.B. Du Bois reports that some black abolitionists of the early 1830s declared themselves united "as men,...not as slaves; as 'people of color,' not as 'Negroes,'" (13) Writing a generation later in "Army Life in a Black Regiment" (1869), Thomas Wentworth Higginson deplored the common use of "nigger" among freedmen, which he regarded as evidence of low self-esteem. (14) The objections to "nigger," then, are not a consequence of the modern sensibility but had been common for a half century before "Huckleberry Finn" was published.

As for the frequent use of the word "nigger" in "Huckleberry Finn," it goes without saying that the word was at the time of Twain's writing, and remains today, a slap in the face for black Americans. It is inevitable that black children in a classroom with whites should feel uncomfortable with the word and a book in which it appears so often, and that black parents should wish to protect their children from what the word represents. In the classroom, "nigger" is embarrassing and divisive at any grade level.

One obvious feature of southwestern humor infecting "Huckleberry Finn" with objectionable racial overtones is "eye dialect," which pretends to represent nonstandardness by variant (in some cases, merely phonetic) spellings, though the pronunciations represented may actually be at least regionally acceptable. The speech of Jim and other black characters in the novel is marked by extreme forms of eye dialect, while that of the white characters usually is not; the result exaggerates the ignorance and/or deviance of black speakers as compared to white.

That Twain's slave Jim does not speak the exaggerated farcical dialect of the blackface minstrels has misled critics into describing his speech as "realistic" black dialect. It is, in fact, romanticized folk speech, purified of any forceful hostility that might, coming from a black speaker, have seemed threatening to a white readership even in the postwar North.

So do you presume that blacks and whites of 19th Century America ran in the same social groups and would thus have shared the same language/dialect and the same superstitious beliefs?

Are we to presume that, in the setting of the novel, blacks and whites had equal access to language education?

The dialect is, I'm quite certain, totally authentic for a slave of the time, place and situation.

I was saying that "speaking like Uncle Tom" was a survival trait, and the literature supports me.

As I said way back when when I first dived into this, you are apparently viewing Huck as a perfect narrator, that he tells us everything exactly as it happens, without any subjective input. Nope. Non. Nyet. Nein. He is an unreliable narrator. We are shown Jim as Huck sees him, which is probably not the real Jim, yes? I'm not saying that Jim's speech was so ingrained that it never slipt, but I will say that Huck's view of what Jim's speech was defines the relaying of said speech.

Unreliable Narrator: "A NARRATOR who may be in error in his or her understanding of things and who thus leaves readers without the guides needed for making judgments....Huck Finn, in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is often uncomprehending about the situations he describes, as are most NAIVE NARRATORS; hence he is unreliable. Immature narrators...may be unreliable on account of their lack of sophistication. Others...suffer some retardation or derangement that impedes or precludes reliability."

Naive Narrator: "An ingenuous character who is the ostensible author (often the oral narrator) of a narrative, the implications of which are plainer to the reader than they are to the narrator. . . . Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ring Lardner's Haircut are other well-known examples of the use of the naive narrator."

Bobbo, my boy, you apparently don't understand what "unreliable narrator" means. It doesn't mean he's an idiot or a liar or a someone who contradicts himself. It means that his beliefs, attitudes, ideas, or viewpoint don't reflect the author's.

Throughout this thread, your detractors have argued that the only one we can trust as knowing how the dialect really was was Twain himself.

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extreme form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

Sociable Jimmy

Early dialect story by Mark Twain that has been used in recent scholarship to argue that Twain was inspired to use the vernacular dialect of a child in the narration of Huckleberry Finn by his encounter with a gifted young African American story teller. First published in the New York Times (Nov. 29, 1874).

Paul Fatout revived the article in his eclectic 1978 anthology of Twain's "little-known efforts," Mark Twain Speaks for Himself (Purdue Univ. Press). He notes that by transcribing Jimmy's speech, "Mark Twain may have been attuning his ear to the variations of Negro dialect and attempting to get it down credibly on paper."

The swaggering buffoonery of the minstrel clown is represented early in the novel when Jim awakes and finds his hat in a tree (one of Tom's tricks), and then concocts a tale about witches and the devil....Jim and the other slaves have the superstition-steeped minds that give the whole scene a mistrel flavor, a quality that cannot be explained away by concluding that Jim has been successfully hustling the other blacks. The notoreity and the five-cent piece that Jim ends up with (not to mention the counterfeit quarter that Huck gives him for telling his fortune from a hair ball) can be interpreted as successful con jobs on Jim's part only if we isolate these scenes from the many additional superstitious episodes in which no hustle can be inferred. For example, Jim thinks Huck is a ghost when he encounters him on Jackson's Island, and he believes that all the camping supplies have been acquired through witchcraft.

A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—hear them plain; but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says:

"No, spirits wouldn't say: 'Dern the dern fog.'"

The first group of scholors are correct is saying that Jim's superstitions are the result of his situation — as are Huck's the result of his position. Huck and Jim lived in very different circumstances. Despite your assertion that Huck and Jim 'come from and live in the same environs,' the inescapable truth is that Jim was a black slave and Huck was a free white, trashy though he may have been.

This question shows a palpable ignorance of the differences of culture. Jim's spiritual beliefs are going to be as far away from Huck's as either of them is going to be from ... oh... the Puritans.

To reply to one point that I saw while racing through here—"Was black culture inherently more superstitious than white?"—I suppose that depends in part on whether you regard Christianity or Judaism as superstitions, but that aside, yes, it was.

It isn't a matter in which I have a lot of natural interest, but I needed to know—both generally and specifically—the nature of religious and social beliefs among black slaves in the West Indies during the last half of the eighteenth century. Consequently, I have some seven or eight books dealing with various aspects of the question....

The thing is, when you enter the nineteenth century, you no longer have distinct tribal groups or origins of black slaves, and most of the commonality and structure of their religious beliefs (separate tribal groups had distinct religions, though some large groups had marked similarities) had been destroyed, leaving the now indistinct "black" culture (as opposed to the distinct original tribal cultures) with the superstitious remnants.

There's a very interesting book called (I think; I was in the eighth grade when I read it) THE STARS FALL ON ALABAMA, which deals extensively with black superstitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It's an anecdotal, rather than a scholarly work, but it's very interesting to see—from the perspective of the later books I read on African religions—the religious roots of what were then disconnected superstitions (by "disconnected," I mean that certain customs and beliefs obtained, with no conscious reference to spiritual substance).

Jim gives his impression of "King Sollermun" and his harem in a minstrel-like repartee (chap. 14), and his confusion about stock market profits is seen in a farcical account of how Jim's stock—his cow—failed to increase his fourteen-dollar fortune when he "tuck to specalat'n'" (chap. 8). Throughout the novel Jim is stupefied by information that Huck shares with him, as when they discuss Louis XVI's "little boy the dolphin." Huck's miseducation makes him the brunt of the humor here as much as Jim, but the reader is shown many sides of Huck's character, whereas Jim is usually either the total fool or the overgrown child. In episodes where he behaves as an adult, as when Jim chides Huck for "trashy" behavior after Huck tells Jim he has merely dreamed their fogbound separation, Twain often mixes Jim's befuddlements with his insights. If Jim is momentarily wise, it comes off as an accident because he is simultaneously the head-scratching darky. In the fog scene he puzzles, "Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I?" (chap. 15).

During Mark Twain's times most white commentary on minstrelsy (including MT's own remarks for his autobiography) assume its accuracy, its essentially faithful imitation of African-American speech, singing and dancing. Since the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand, nearly every commentator agrees that the minstrel show "coon" is a racist caricature.

I thought Jim *did* understand the point of the story -- that it illustrated how wise Solomon was supposed to be -- only Jim didn't see it as wisdom at all.

It makes me feel that if you just view him as a stereotype because of the *way* he talks, you're selling him way short.

COLUMN ONE
Cries for Freedom Still Ring

In long-ago lawsuits uncovered in St. Louis, slaves tell of their suffering. Dozens won release from bondage before all-white juries.

By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer

Among heaps of musty affidavits about contract disputes and unpaid debts, the archivists have uncovered 283 "freedom suits" filed in St. Louis from 1806 to 1865.

Decades before Dred Scott became the most famous slave to sue for freedom, the imposing, domed courthouse here echoed with the defiant voices of Tempe, of Ralph, of so many others who refused to accept their bondage. They dictated their petitions to lawyers or clerks and signed them with faltering Xs in black ink. "He has frequently abused and beaten her, particularly yesterday." "Unlawfully an assault he did make in and upon her."

Before this cache of documents was discovered, historians had no idea how many slaves had put their faith, and their fates, in the courts. They thought Dred Scott was an anomaly. Now, they are uncovering evidence of an underground grapevine that passed word about the freedom suits from slave to slave, emboldening men and women and even teenage children to sue.

Dozens won their cases, persuading juries of 12 white men to set them free. A few even won damages against their masters.

"This is a stunning find. It's just phenomenal," said Lea VanderVelde, a law professor at the University of Iowa who is writing a book on the freedom suits.

She describes 19th century St. Louis as a frenetic boomtown in which many slaves roamed the streets largely unsupervised. In the Deep South, slaves were isolated on their plantations. Here, they were often ordered to run errands, to unload parcels on the docks, to help a tradesman in town or to do the laundry at a local hotel. Some were even sent to the free territory of Illinois to labor in the salt mines, though their masters kept their wages.

The relative freedom of movement allowed slaves to mingle with one another and with the free blacks who worked on the river steamboats or owned barbershops in town. They got together as well at regular Friday night parties, dubbed "Negro balls," and at church on Sunday. Every meeting gave them an opportunity to swap news of friends who had successfully sued for freedom, to exchange tips about the best lawyers or most sympathetic judges.

The grapevine worked so well that whites raged, filling newspapers of the 1830s and '40s with rants about how freedom suits were subverting discipline among their slaves.

"You get a sense of how difficult it was for the state to maintain the institution of slavery. People want freedom," said David Konig, a history professor at Washington University. "Their language in these lawsuits is not supplicating. They're not coming into court on their hands and knees. They're demanding."

[I]n another mood, he speaks irritably of Syrians and their sore-eyed children, who remind him of Indians: "These people about us had other peculiarities which I had noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till it amounted to bark." He calls the Bedouins "Digger Indians," a mythical tribe invented by Americans to give full expression to their contempt.

Most folks don't know that there is a *third* Huck and Tom book, called _Tom Sawyer Abroad_, nowhere nearly as well-done as the first two. In it, Huck and Tom *and* Jim commandeer a visiting carnival's hot air balloon and wind up in the Sahara desert. (Okay, okay! But this is not MY plot.) In this book Jim is a full partner (his english has improved, as well) and it is often through his agency that the others are saved from severe ends. It is a fairly slim book and was probably done for a boy's magazine, as well, and, it seemed to me, it ended well before it might have; probably at editorial insistence. My point here is that, in it, Twain does address those issues you raised anent the ending of _Huck Finn_. Jim is seen as fully human, as being more intelligent (even to the less discerning; I maintain that Jim is often shown as more intelligent & kinder in both TS & HF, despite suggestions from others to the contrary) as either of the white boys, as being the social equal to Huck and Tom, though it is true that Tom cannot bring himself to say so.

I ascribe [Jim's improvement] to a rise in self-esteem as a freeman and/or, possibly, to a response by Twain to criticism that the earlier speech was just TOO danged hard to read.

[I]n the next published work about Huck, Tom, and Jim—"Tom Sawyer Abroad"—nothing is left of Jim but the clown.

...Jim stands out vividly as a child among children, the stage role assigned to adult black males.

Jim comes across as the most immature member of the group. He loses his head in episodes with lions, mirages and other apparent apparitions. He overreacts in the good times, too....

He is easily tricked by the children, as when they exploit his ignorance about fractions and dupe him into choosing to shovel a disproportionate share (four-fifths) of the sand that has collected in the balloon.

I...don't compare anything in Huck to anything in Tom Sawyer. I don't consider HF the middle book in a trilogy.

I've never met anyone who considers them the literary equivalent of HF. Drop it. You're dragging in extraneous subjects.

One example of a minstrel-like monologue...compared with similar minstrel-inspired material in "Huckleberry Finn" and in "Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy," leads us to consider the Huck/Tom/Jim narratives as a unit in terms of their portrayal of Jim.

Twain writes: "To my mind [the minstrel show] was a thoroughly delightful thing, and a most competent laughter-compeller and I am sorry it is gone." He saw his first minstrel show in Hannibal in the 1840s. "...[W]e had not heard of it before, and it burst upon us as a glad and stunning surprise." Sharing the commonplace notion of white contemporaries that their imitation of black character and culture was realistic as well as funny, he writes:

The buffoonery and extravagant comic arguments of Bones and Banjo, the stock minstrel characters, were believed to be particularly funny because of their assumed accuracy:

Twain's taste in humor reveals his socialization as an American, not merely as a southwesterner, in the ethics of white supremacy.

Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where private is public and the public private, where black is white and white is black, where the immoral becomes moral and moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall. It is not at all odd that this blackfaced figure of white fun is for Negroes a symbol of everything they rejected in the white man's thinking about race, in themselves and in their own group. When he appears, for example, in the guise of Nigger Jim, the Negro is made uncomfortable. Writing at a time when the blackface minstrel was still popular, and shortly after a war which left even the abolitionists weary of those problems associated with the Negro, Twain fitted Jim into the outlines of the minstrel tradition, and it is from behind this stereotype mask that we see Jim's dignity and human capacity—and Twain's complexity—emerge.

As a reconstructed Southerner, Twain was a repository of all the contradictions in his society. Tom's book and Huck's book are conflicting visions of the same past, and at the end one vision prevails, and it is the wrong one. The same thing that made Twain blow his greatest work generates its troublesome moral conundrums—the depiction of Jim. Twain loved dialect; he had an ear for it and it came easily to him, so it is Huck Finn who struggles against the white mores of his time to help the black man, Jim, escape from slavery, but it is Huck's progenitor who portrays Jim, in minstrelese, as a gullible black man-child led by white children.

The irony may not be redemptive.

Twain is presenting a more or less idealistic view; the world as it ought to be — not as it generally is or was.

Your point about the "boy's story" origins of both _Huck_ and _Tom_ I think explains the simplisitic nature of the "distorted ... America" of both books. Twain is presenting a more or less idealistic view; the world as it ought to be — not as it generally is or was. One function of children's literature is to show the ideal as a final product so that the child reader can learn correct behavior and the reasons for it.

I have no doubt that Twain wrote _Huck_ to be instructive to kids. I believe he wrote it as propaganda — anti-racist and anti-slavery propaganda — and was forced by editorial requirements to make Jim's situation less dire than he would have liked.

Huck's choice to "go to hell" has little to do with any respect he has gained for Jim as a human being with an inalienable right to be owned by no one. Rather, his personal affection for the slave governs his overthrow of societal mores. It must be remembered that Huck does not adjudge slavery to be wrong; he selectively disregards a system that he ultimately believes is right. So when he discourses with Aunt Sally, he is expressing views he still holds. His emancipatory attitudes extend no further than his love for Jim. It seems valid to argue that were he given the option of freeing other slaves, Huck would not necessarily choose manumission.

According to the complaint, Doe and other similarly situated African-American students suffered psychological injuries and lost educational opportunities due to the required reading of the literary works....It further alleged that the assignment of the literary works "created and contributed to a racially hostile educational environment."

[A] study conducted in 1983 to examine "the effects of reading 'Huckleberry Finn' on the racial attitudes of ninth grade students" corroborates the contention that junior high school students lack the critical perception to successfully negotiate the satire present in the novel. According to the committee that directed the study, the collected data indicated "that the elements of satire which are crucial to an understanding of the novel go largely unobserved by students." That approximately one-third of the group...regarded "Huckleberry Finn" as merely an adventure story "after several weeks of serious study" left the committee convinced "that many students are not yet ready to understand the novel on its more complex levels."

Given the degree and instances of irony and satire in the book, the difficult dialects and general reading level of the book, and the tendency of many readers to read the book at the level of an adventure story, the committee believes, the novel requires more literary sophistication than can reasonably be expected from an average ninth grade student.

Umm, one note. Huck Finn is a *novel*. It isn't history. I don't feel compelled to point out every deviation from history, any more than I feel the need to point out that Polyphemus wasn't real when I teach The Odyssey.

I had a conversation with my friend, a young lady grad student in Florida. Of the exchanges she said:

I'm not willing to "write off" Huck Finn either, regardless of whether or not I suffer from white guilt, and that has never been the premise of this discussion. Huck Finn is, at moments, one of the greatest American novels ever written. It is also an important American novel, in that it is among the first works ever to acknowledge and portray that valid and lyrical southern dialect to which you refer.

However, one of the central issues of the book is the hypocrisy of the way in which white America, which claims personal freedom as one of its founding tenets, has enslaved, oppressed and denigrated the African-American. One cannot discuss Huck Finn as a piece of literature without discussing this issue. Mark Twain, known as a satirist, was clearly trying to point out the foolishness of slavery. The question is not whether or not Huck Finn is a racist book, and therefore invalid, but whether or not, as twentieth-century readers, there are questions we can ask ourselves about the misconceptions about African-Americans we still might hold, and whether or not some of these misconceptions might be present in this book.

This is especially urgent, given that this is the most widely required piece of reading in America's high schools today. If there is anything in this book which might lead to further racial divisiveness, oughtn't we better have a look at it before we give it to our kids?