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Huckleberry FinnBlack, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream, 1 The Trespassers A ninth child had not been informed that the students were to come as a group. When she arrived alone, there were shouts from the mob, which now numbered about five hundred: "They're here! The niggers are coming!""Get her! Lynch her!" The student tried several times to pass through the troops; on her last try, she was stopped with bayonets. The mob yelled, "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school." With the troops standing by impassively, someone screamed, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree." A white-haired woman fought her way through the mob, shouting: "Leave this child alone! Why are you tormenting her? Six months from now you will hang your heads in shame." The mob hollered, "Another nigger-lover. Get out of here!" The woman, a professor at a Little Rock college, stayed with the child until she could get her away on a bus. Joining with her to protect the child during the wait was the New York Times education editor, who was threatened as a "dirty New York Jew." In the next weeks, there were attacks on black men and women and on their homes, as well as assaults on black and white journalists. Finally, confronted with the Little Rock black community, which refused to surrender to the authorities or the mob, and also challenged by national and world opinion, the president acted to enforce the desegregation order; he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and directed the secretary of defense to send in regular troops as needed. 2 The incident at Little Rock had myriad consequences, explicit and tacit. One of the latter appears to be an action taken by the New York Board of Education. Just eight days after the confrontation at Central High, the New York Times reported, in a front-page story, that the board had "quietly dropped" Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from approved textbook lists for elementary and junior high schools. The novel, the Times also related, could still be purchased for school libraries and used as a textbook in high schools. The story linked the board's action to objections from the NAACP. The NAACP denied having protested to the board, but acknowledged that it "strongly objected to the 'racial slurs' and 'belittling racial designations' in Mark Twain's works." 3 Although there is no evidence that the NAACP protested directly to the board,
objections from one or another source certainly reached the board. But the official in
charge of curriculum development stated that no objections had come to her attention. She
said the novel had been taken off the approved textbook list because, as the Times put it,
it was "not really a textbook." 4 In giving this explanation, which was notable
only for its surrealism (a book approved as a textbook was removed for not being a
textbook), New York City school officials apparently believed they had converted a
controversial move into an administrative correction, and so could escape responsibility
for their own action. 5 II Since these lines descend from a supposedly more innocent time, it might seem they really were intended for children. But not only is it quite illogical to expect that children would be delighted by Huck's newfound respectability, it also seems odd to contrast the novel's respectability in the eyes of real parents with Huck's lack of it with fictional ones. Clearly, when the editors spoke of Huck's ostracism in his "early days," they had in mind not Huck's status in Tom Sawyer, but Huck Finn's expulsion from the Concord Public Library in 1885 as the "veriest trash," "rough, coarse, and inelegant," 9 unfit for "our pure-minded lads and lasses," 10 and the copycat expulsions that followed. The editors were Emily Fanning Barry, an English teacher at Teachers College, and Herbert B. Bruner, who headed its Curriculum Construction Laboratory. Under the aegis of the publisher, Harper & Brothers, they conducted the study, which involved "thousands" of reports obtained from an unspecified number of teachers and pupils. The editors describe the student participants according to class, nationality, and location. Since they do not mention race, it is quite safe to assume "children" meant "white children." 11 That this study undoubtedly included white children only does not mean the editors consciously sought to exclude black children. Their apparent absence from the study simply mirrored the exclusion of blacks from vast areas of American life. And even if the editors had been amazingly ahead of their time and wondered how black children might feel about Huck Finn, there would have been no reason to pursue the daring thought. Certainly it would have had no value for the publisher, given that black schools were likely to receive books handed down from white ones. While the study, the classroom edition, and growing support from educators laid the
groundwork for Huck Finn to become required reading, something more was needed to bring
the effort to fruition. This arrived in the form of essays by Lionel Trilling ( 1948) and
T. S. Eliot ( 1950) that provided the novel with the "academic respectability and
clout" that assured its entry into the nation's classrooms, points out Peaches Henry.
12 Trilling, who launched what Jonathan Arac calls the "hypercanonization" of
Huck Finn, 13 spoke of it as "one of the world's great books and one of the central
documents of American culture." 14 Eliot termed it a "masterpiece." 15
Both, however, were concerned with defending it against the by now largely anachronistic
morality charge. Eliot made the point fairly subtly by stating he had not read the book as
a boy because his parents considered it unsuitable, while he also spoke of things in it
that would delight boys. The matter is, though, handled quite explicitly by Trilling, who
remarks that Huck is "really a very respectable person." 16 If Huck is objective (as other commentators have also held), 2 he speaks faithfully for an author who can be unequivocally relied upon. In fact, though, Huckleberry Finn presents an author-narrator relationship of quite a different kind. That Twain's perspective is antislavery and Huck's is not, and that the concept of racial prejudice, meaningful to Twain, would be meaningless to Huck--these preclude any possibility of a consistently objective narrator. And, too, while Twain often purposefully clouded Huck's "restive eyes" with ideas received from the society Huck lived in, there is, again, the question of the degree to which Twain's own eyes, clear and penetrating as they could be, were not also thus shadowed. Fitzgerald's remarks also illustrate the role of commentators in creating a legendary Huck. Although some of the myths around Huck Finn have not traveled beyond critical circles (for instance, Trilling's myth of Huck as "the servant of the river-god," who "comes very close to being aware of the divine nature of the being he serves"), 3 others occupy a favored place in the national consciousness. One of these is the myth of Huck-the-rebel. It is not that this myth is entirely devoid of truth, but rather that it favors lesser truths over greater ones. The distinction between Huck as legendary rebel and the Huck that Twain created can already be detected in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. There Twain describes Huck as a "romantic outcast," but even this phrase does not express Twain's own attitude. It is instead that of the properly-brought-up village boys: "everything that goes to make life precious, [Huck] had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg." 4 These boys see a Huck who can come and go as he pleases, is not expected to attend school or church, is free to swear and to fight if he feels like it. Twain, though, allows us to see that it is the boys' vision of Huck that is romantic, not Huck's life: if he can do as he pleases, it is only because his father is the town drunk and his mother dead. So it is not surprising to learn, in Huckleberry Finn, that Huck is prone to melancholy, is sometimes so sad he almost wants to die. If most readers of Tom Sawyer, despite Twain's signals to the contrary, see Huck as a rebel, one explanation may be that they have allowed Huck's deeds to eclipse his motives. Take, for instance, Huck's first violation of a taboo in white-black relations. In a passage in Tom Sawyer that prefigures Huck's relationship with Jim, Tom asks the homeless boy where he will sleep. Huck replies: "In Ben Rogers's hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man, Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't ever act as if I was above him. Sometimes I've set right down and eat with him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." 5 On the one hand, Huck--whom Twain described as a boy with a "sound heart and a deformed conscience"--is humanly appreciative of help from Uncle Jake and reciprocates by giving Uncle Jake what help he can. He is also perceptive enough to recognize that the black man wouldn't like him if he acted as if he were above him. Yet Huck does consider himself above Uncle Jake--not as an objective matter of social station, but because the man is black and Huck is white. (Although Huck never doubts that Uncle Jake, who remains offstage, is taken in by his pretense, a reader may wonder whether an Uncle Jake would not be wary of a white boy who, even in his innermost thoughts, cordons him off as "nigger.") It was not unusual for the young sons of slaveholders to have a relationship with a
slave (traditionally known as "Uncle") in which the man would tell the boy
stories ( Twain himself had such a connection with an "Uncle Dan'l"). Where
these boys would go to a black man in search of diversion, Huck goes to Uncle Jake out of
need. As a result, the white boy's role is determined by the black man rather than the
other way around. But the need that drives Huck to Uncle Jake is also a source of shame,
making him do something he "wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." Still, it
does not seem that Huck would have any objection to sitting down to eat with Uncle Jake
were it not for a mind's eye that looks on censoriously. No incident could better suggest
the vast social and emotional distance that separated even the poorest whites from the
blacks than this one, which finds Huck--a boy who dresses in rags and sleeps in barrels,
whose reputation is so disgraceful that the schoolmaster punishes Tom Sawyer for talking
to him--desperate about what people will think if they find out he ate with a black man. 6
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