ESSAY
A Bend in the River

Roger Rosenblatt on the meaning of rivers

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.

Ever since the Jordan, people have used rivers to find something (Jim and Huck's escape) or someone (Conrad's Kurtz or Coppola's). But in America rivers have meant more than quests and more than entrances and borders. They have been tests of what the country wanted of its wilderness and of itself — reminders of the beckoning wilderness of the American mind. Water seems always to be where the great national story unfolds — Melville's ocean, Dreiser's lake, Fitzgerald's bay. But as Twain suggested, nothing was ever as deep as the river. The Atlantic becomes transformed into endless boulevards that run back and forth from the sea, offering both the allure and the illusion of eternity, which means that our rivers, like ancient sacred entities, can lead the country wherever it wishes to be led. They have served as the passageways to killing grounds and tyrannies, where the "dark" people have been slaughtered or subdued by the children of "the light." They have allowed robust expansions as agents of social mobility, both vertical and horizontal. They have opened America to its imagination. They have invited exploitation of the natural conditions around them and of themselves — dammed up, dried up. They have allowed for collective and individual moral choice: kill or don't kill. Enslave or set everyone free.

Everything the river offers turns on the idea of America as Eden — an idea no less enchanting today than it was to the colonists. The country finds Eden; the country loses Eden; the country yearns for Eden. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain described his early infatuation with the river's beauty at sunset: "A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal."

Like Adam, he exulted, "The world was new to me." And then he lamented that "a day came when I began to cease noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face." Yet when he came to write his novel, all the original wonder returned to him: "Once or twice at night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again."

America lies around the bend in the river, but it is the bend itself that determines the country's worth. Somewhere in that curve is the capacity to start over and do it right. Somewhere too is Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in which no lesson takes hold. The river carries the country into its sin and grandeur and magnificent contradictions. Deciding to free Jim and himself, Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," referring to salvation.