Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free

most effectively pointed. In chapter 32, Huck, masquerading as Tom Sawyer, pretends to have just arrived on a riverboat that was delayed by an explosion on board. Aunt Sally asks, “Anybody hurt?” “No‘m,” is Huck’s quick reply. “Killed a nigger.” “Well, it’s lucky;” said Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt” (p. 201). Even motherly Aunt Sally, who seems well-meaning enough, is at home not only with this term “nigger” but also with the news of the death of an African American, who in her language is neither a human being nor worth a sigh of remorse. Further, Huck’s use of “nigger” in this instance adds detail to his cleverly turned lie, and asserts a sense of (white) community with Aunt Sally to hide his real intention of freeing Jim. As Huck suspected, Sally and family have bought Jim and kept him hidden as part of their own plan to sell him down the river. Behind what at first seems like her wonderful good manners lurks the monster of race hatred, unabashed.
    Clearly, if in this scene we change the racial designation to “Negro” or “negro” (the more common nineteenth-century usage), we would lose the violence of the word “nigger”; but it is also true that with the emendation we would sacrifice the deepest, most slashing irony that Twain turns against the word and the world of prejudice underlying it.
    The second problem I want to raise also involves race—the portrayal of Jim. Here a whole book-length essay could follow. But for this space my central complaint is that in this realistic novel, Jim is just not real enough, not true enough either to historical type or to human dimensions that transcend historical type. I’ll start by observing that the greatest critic of his era on this question of African-American portraiture, Sterling A. Brown, disagrees with me on this point, and in fact has strongly commended Twain’s portrait of Jim. Like Huck and Tom, writes Brown, Jim is “drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Running away from old Miss Watson who... ‘pecks on’ him all the time, treats him ’pooty rough’ and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi.” e Brown finds Jim’s humor rich, not the stuff of minstrel buffoonery alone: “His talk enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s ‘Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’ ” (p. 46).
    But as Brown observes, “he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and save money so he could buy his wife, and they would both work to buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them.” In Brown’s evaluation, “Jim is the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchmen should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, ‘cain’t git no situation.’” Here is parental tenderness and shame as Jim ”tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever.” Says Jim: ”Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb—en I’d been a-treatin’ her so!“ f
    Likewise, in his first writings about Huckleberry Finn, the novelist Ralph Ellison strongly defends Twain’s presentation of Jim (whom incredibly even he, Ellison,