A Bend In the River

Twain placed Huck and Jim on the river because the river was time, motion, beauty, baptism and violence, but mainly because one could not see around the bend. Civilizations are formed by bends in the river--the Nile, Congo, Thames, Yangtze--a twist of the land, water and fate that, by making it impossible to see what comes next, raises hopes of the possibility of everything.

The Mississippi did that from the start. In the spring and summer of 1768, Montfort Browne, Lieutenant Governor of Florida, made his way along the lower Mississippi to the area of "the Natches," where he found "the most charming prospects in the world." By the mid-1770s, colonial explorers were following rivers everywhere into the country. They came from central and western New York by way of the Ohio; from Maryland and Virginia by way of the Tennessee; from western North Carolina through gaps and passes in the Appalachians to the Tennessee and Mississippi valleys, along river routes hundreds of miles long.

America was created by people riding its rivers--the most fruitful, profitable places to settle lying just around the bend. The country itself was a bend in the river, a story about to be disclosed, a promise of progress--that, of course, and a murder plot. Following rivers with Indian names, the latest Americans could kill off the first. For better and worse, the Old World married the New by a band of water.

No wonder so many American artists have written, sung, painted and even gone round the bend, gone mad, in the name of rivers. In his overboard essay on Huck and Jim, Leslie Fiedler wrote that the river supports "the American dream of isolation afloat." Out of that isolation in motion comes every inspiration, from contemplation (Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers") to adventure (Hemingway's stories) to despair. The poet John Berryman looked down into the Mississippi and jumped to his death. The river is expanse, but it is also loneliness; Huck finds a loving relationship with Jim, but he is alone in his moral predicament. The American rivers show us a country equally capable of generosity and advancement, and of drowning in freedom.