Teaching "Huck Finn"

Twain's novel is not so much about race as it is about freedom

BY MINNIE PHILLIPS

I once dreaded teaching "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; the word "nigger" jeering from every page made me cringe. Each reading recalled for me the fall of 1963, when I was the only black student in my junior class at Parma High School in southeast Missouri. The word "nigger" was virulent in those days, invective that degraded a whole race's status. So my reading "Huck Finn" amid a sea of curious and contemptuous eyes, I felt, gave my classmates an unfair advantage.

Thirty years after first teaching the novel in my American literature class at Webster Groves High School in suburban St. Louis, Mo., I've decided the novel is not about race but about freedom. I have grown to appreciate Mark Twain as a master storyteller, cunning artist, and frustrated lover of humans, who rarely reciprocate or measure up to the civilization they claim or the liberty they cherish.

Little has changed in student responses to the novel among two generations of readers I've taught. Most welcome the book's unacademic style. Most admire Huck's honesty, mellowness and not-so-naïve humor and intelligence. Most agree with Twain that the book makes better reading than teaching.

Yet entrusted with the national literature, I point out the obvious: Twain's groundbreaking, unconventional language in the late nineteenth century. Here colloquial, there dialect, sometimes slapstick, and often poetic. Our own Missouri Shakespeare, without the pretentiousness.

When I turn to the subject of Jim, my black students give me that look, with the pain of remembrance, and with them I veer from the worn path of survey literature. I'm wondering why Twain sets his novel in the 1830s, during the dawn of the American frontier, when the novel was published in the 1880s, 20 years after the abolition of American slavery.

Critics say Twain recaptures and ridicules the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of a frontier society distorted by nostalgic notions of religious piety and simpler times. But impervious to critics and any history except the present, my students offer no apologies for Twain's crassness or the country's inglorious past.

I'm ready to shake them from their comfort zone, compel them to think about another time and place, while I play the role of the student. "Why does Twain use the word 'nigger' so often, and why does Jim play a major role in the novel?" I ask point-blank. The first question is easier, if more sensitive. The word "nigger" has an unfortunate history, they explain, and Twain would have been remiss in omitting its use. The question about Jim has them thinking, though, and I trudge on, speculating aloud, not expecting them to rescue or agree with me. I just want them to tell me what they're thinking and feeling. Their opinions are as good as mine.

Twain forces a crisis by including Jim, I suggest. Yet neither Huck nor Jim nor even Twain or the reader seems prepared for the bond between the two. Students figure out quickly that Jim and Huck are both "slaves" running away from something or someone. Yet I'm not ready to let them off the hook by settling for the conclusion that this is simply a coming-of-age river escapade, especially when Jim is a slave by law, heading deeper into slave country. More and more, students see that Jim depends on Huck, and, ironically, that Huck depends on Jim.

Before their river journey, Jim says to Huck, "I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself." But Jim realizes his freedom will not mean much without buying or resorting to stealing his wife and two children out of slavery. Huck's freedom is not so clear, as he discovers when the dastardly King sells Jim for forty dollars.

In deciding to write to Miss Watson, Jim's owner, informing her of Jim's captivity on the Silas Phelps farm in Arkansas, Huck returns to the teaching of his reformers. He will send the letters to Tom Sawyer, whose status he covets, and Tom will give the letter to Miss Watson. Huck's surrender to the "authorities" is almost complete.

Then Huck recalls his camaraderie with Jim, weighing Jim's humanity against the "better" judgment of a society flawed by falseness, greed, cruelty and violence.

It was a close place. I took up [the letter], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell" — and tore it up. (Puffin Books, 283)

Freedom means nothing in and of itself, Huck realizes, and Jim is not the margin of difference against whom he must establish his identity. "But somehow I couldn't strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind," Huck admits. This "other kind" of feeling becomes the compassion Huck adopts and embraces.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" remains an American novel, not only in terms of language and settings but in the issues it raises about the dilemma of freedom. Like Huck, we Americans are restless people who have failed (necessarily) to define ourselves over and over again against the "other." "The Unites States are essentially their greatest poem," wrote Walt Whitman in his preface to "Leaves of Grass," describing this rich and amorphous diversity.

The color barrier I faced as a student in the fall of 1963 required that I free myself and work to help others. I chose teaching. But my education was incomplete without connecting with people unlike myself.

Freedom lies in traveling this narrow passage, this "close place" betwixt thinking and choosing. More than birthright, law, coexistence, or adventure, it requires at some point either "going to hell" and connecting with the other, or (as Huck does in the end) going it alone. Aside from this lesson, reading "Huck Finn" is great fun.

Phillips teaches high school in Webster Groves, MO