Hello, Radio Readers! I’m Jane Holwerda from Dodge City, KS. Welcome to more conversations about “Rivers and Meandering Meanings,” as we wrap up Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that 19th century American novel set on and around the Mississippi River.
The final chapters play out a complicated plan devised by Tom Sawyer to help Huck Finn steal Jim back. That Tom Sawyer becomes an agent of change in this novel seems a puzzling plot device. But it is a device in keeping with Twain’s parody of the novels of French author Alexander Dumas, like The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask. A grandson of a French nobleman and a Jamaican slave, Dumas crafted stories where noblemen wrongly imprisoned in isolated fortresses escape against the greatest of odds only after decades of deprivation. Early in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Sawyer gets his friends to act out scenes from Dumas’ novels, so we readers ought to be prepared for Tom’s re-entry and games.
Not so much Huck. Instead, Huck seems to believe Tom wants to help Jim. But when Huck shares his idea, to steal the key to the one room ground-floor shed where Jim is held then together break for the raft and river, Tom scoffs. Huck’s plan is too easy. No challenges, no complications, as there should be. After all, there are rules to follow and expectations to meet: tunnels need to be dug, with spoons. A journal of Jim’s imprisonment must be written, in blood. Jim’s cell must be infested, with rats, snakes and spiders. Like Huck, Jim can’t see the sense of what he’s asked to do, but he “allows that…white folks…knowed better than him; so he …said he would do it all just as Tom said.”
When Tom’s plan fails – amidst a throng of angry, frightened men with guns—Jim is again captured, but this time threatened with lynching then chained, wrists and ankles – only then does Tom reveal that Jim had been legally freed by old Miss Watson months prior. But why, Tom is asked, why go through all that mockery and unnecessary malarkey to help Jim escape? Why? Seemingly astounded that anyone should have to ask, Tom shouts, “For the adventure!”
These final chapters of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are difficult reading for me, so much so that I frown and sigh through the last 100 or so pages, every time I read them. Tom and Huck, setting up a grandiose prison escape from a shed, performing what on the surface of things are boyish pranks, seemingly with complete indifference to Jim’s humanity. Jim is merely a tool or toy for the purpose of these boys’ adventuring. And not even Huck can decide whether, in helping Jim, he is stealing a slave, abetting a fugitive, or risking all for a friend.
My disappointment in Huck is not eased by the fact that throughout the novel, property laws are broken as various characters steal cargo, canoes and rafts, admission to fake theatrical productions, large sums of money, inheritances, spoons, candles and even tin plates. Yet, for the most part, the characters uphold laws that define some people as chattel property. Is Huck happy about Jim’s emancipation at novel’s end? Or is he relieved that the laws provisioning Jim’s freedom also assure the continuation of slavery itself?
Makes me wonder: if Twain were writing about American culture in our 21st century… whose rights might he aim to help us see as threatened, whose lives dehumanized? And where would I stand on the issue?
