The more I read, the more I came to feel that this book is full of the blues. Huck Finn is a lonesome, unhappy boy whose reflections on his surroundings are often sublimely sad and lonely. Before taking off on the water with Jim, Huck feels trapped in the house with his night-thoughts of loneliness and death:
Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars was shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared, I did wish I had some company (p. 7).
Early one morning, before he meets up with Jim, Huck is alone on Jackson’s Island, lounging on the grass. Again the scene is rather melancholy. The sad boy is killing time. “I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them” (p. 36). That night “it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain’t no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can’t stay so, you soon get over it” (p. 38).
Only with Jim on hand as Huck’s friend and partner-in-escape does nature begin to shine. Shared with Jim, even a sudden summer storm on the river strikes the boy as marvelous:
It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—
fst!
it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
“Jim, this is nice,” I says. “I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread” (p. 47).
Sometimes what Jim and Huck share on the raft is loneliness. Huck’s poetic descriptions of their shared sense of the river’s soft blue lonely quality stay in the reader’s mind. “We would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along,” he says, “and by-and-by lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat, coughing along up stream.” And soon “there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness” (p. 109).
At the other end of the novel, in the bright, sunny back country where the Phelps family lives, Huck, alone again, is seized by desolation:
It was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny—the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about
you.
As a general thing it makes a body wish
he
was dead, too, and done with it all (p. 198).
Approaching the Phelps’s home, Huck “heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that
is
the lonesomest sound in the whole world” (p. 199). Considering ways to thwart the villainy of the king and the duke, Huck “slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue” (p. 164).
Through the course of the novel, Huck has much to feel blue about. His mother is dead, and his father is a drunken back-country vagabond who beats Huck, imprisons him, and tries to steal his money. The women who take him in, Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson (“a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on”) offer Huckleberry a genteel home whose rules of tidiness and decorum are so tight-fitting that he cannot wait to get out the window. Up the river, comfortably housed church-going families are pathologically locked into a pattern of killing one another, children included, for reasons some (all?) of them cannot remember. Ruthless “humbugs and frauds,” in Huck’s phrase, swarm the land: The king and the duke use what they know of human greed and sentimentality to separate the townsfolk from their money; they force Huck (until he tricks the tricksters) to participate in their elaborate ruses. Bullies and cowardly lynch mobs produce another plague on communities along the river. And, poisoning everything, the region’s economy depends on the enslavement of African Americans and on the vigilance of white people in owning them, and then in capturing and returning runaways, should they break free. Pap Finn so resents a well-dressed free black citizen and voter, with his “gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane,” that he can’t cannot see why “this nigger” is not “put up at auction and sold” (pp. 27-28).
Not that Huckleberry is an abstract thinker—the poetry of his language is in its gritty specificity and its rhythm—or even advanced enough to oppose slavery as an institution. But he has learned that Jim is a man and a friend and a wise, guiding father-figure, one of Albert Murray’s brown-skin shade-tree uncles,
o
and that he, Huck, will do what it takes to help Jim escape slavery. Though the scene in which Huck decides that he will go to hell, if that’s what assisting Jim means, is more comic than tragic—for Huck already has made clear his preference for the exciting bad place over the dull good place trumpeted by Miss Watson
p
—Huck has decided to take whatever risks may be associated with helping Jim. In this sense Huck is a “blues-hero,” an improviser in a world of trouble who optimistically faces a deadly project without a script. Remember that the blues is not just a confrontation with a world gone wrong; to that gone-wrongness, the blues answers that the instrumentalist-hero (and the community of blues people identifying with the artist’s expression) have just enough resiliency and power to keep on keeping on, whatever the changes in fortune.
Getting Jim free is not a simple business. One might say that Huck and Jim’s trip toward freedom is haunted by the blues. Along with the various efforts to recapture and sell Jim back down the river (including those of the duke and the king), consider chapter 15, in which Jim and Huck are separated by a swift current, and then seek each other through a thick wall of fog. As night falls, Huck paddles in a canoe after Jim and the raft, but the boy’s hands tremble as he hears what seem to be Jim’s answering whoops:
I whooped and listened. Away down there, somewheres, I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come, I see I warn’t heading for it but heading away to the right of it. And the next time, I was heading away to the left of it—and not gaining on it much, either, for I was flying around, this way and that and ‘tother, but it was going straight ahead all the time (p. 76).
Confused by the swirling current and blinded by the fog, Huck hears calls in front of him and calls behind him, and finds himself in the territory of the blues. “I couldn’t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don’t look natural nor sound natural in a fog” (p. 77). Huck keeps still and quiet, listening and waiting. “If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once—you’ll see” (p. 77). The hard truth is that in the storm and fog they have passed Cairo, the port leading to the North. They have been pulled south again and will have many more difficult scenarios to endure—in the hands of the king and the duke and then with the Phelps family—before they can light out for freer spaces. These travelers, like the great singer/guitarist Robert Johnson, have “got to keep moverin‘, the blues fallin’ down like rain, blues fallin’ down like rain.”
This impulse to move on, even without a satisfactory destination or solution in sight, echoes a trainload of rambling blues. In the first chapter, Miss Watson needles Huckleberry about the way he sits and stands. She warns him about hell, “and I said I wished I was there.... All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change.” As for making it to heaven, Miss Watson’s goal: “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going,” Huck says, “so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn’t do no good” (pp. 6-7). Once he decides to run away both from the widow (and her sister) and from Pap Finn, his plan is sketchy, but it is enough to go on.
And in his bid to make his getaway, Huck is nothing if not a brilliant improviser, in the blues mode.
q
He invents a scenario that convinces the town that he has been killed. With things on the raft “getting slow and dull,” Huck decides to go ashore and investigate the talk among the villagers along the river. To hide himself, our restless improviser dresses as a girl and tells a woman whose house he visits that he is Sarah Williams from Hookerville, “all tired out” from walking all the way. Would he like something to eat? “No‘m, I ain’t hungry,” declares Huck, cooking up a story. “I was so hungry I had to stop two mile below here at a farm; so I ain’t hungry no more. It’s what makes me so late. My mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore” (p. 53).
As the woman’s belief in his act as a girl falters, Huck makes use of her suspicion that he actually is a boy-apprentice on the run from a cruel workplace master, which would explain the desperate disguise and secrecy. Warming up to this new role as runaway apprentice, Huck supplies impromptu details:
Then I told her my father and mother was dead, and the law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the country thirty mile back from the river, and he treated me so bad I couldn’t stand it no longer; he went away to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my chance and stole some of his daughter’s old clothes, and cleared out (pp. 62-63).
Though the woman is too sharp to fall for his act as a girl, Huck does gain enough of her confidence to obtain the information he has come for—that a posse has a bead on Jim, and that the two of them had better move on quicker than planned. And note the themes of Huck’s invented tales: hunger, sickness, death, abandonment, separation, escape. These are the subjects of the blues; and just as Huckleberry’s larger story, within the fully orchestrated blues sonata that is the novel, is at bottom about freedom, resiliency, and heroic action, so are these, at bottom, the subjects of the blues: the improviser’s capacity, in spite of all disconnection, to connect and to make a break for freedom.
To get help for a gang whose boat Huck has stolen (and because of which theft he feels guilty), the boy stops a man passing on a ferry and pretends to weep before serving up another bluesy tale of woe. “Pap and mam, and sis and Miss Hooker” are all in a peck of trouble, Huck declares, because while making a night visit to Booth’s Island, Miss Hooker and her black servant-woman took a ferry but lost their oar, so the ferry turned down the river and ran into an old wrecked boat, the
Walter Scott.
With the servant and the horses lost, Miss Hooker climbed aboard the wreck. “Well,” says Huck, unwinding the yarn, “about an hour after dark, we come along down in our trading-scow, and it was so dark we didn’t notice the wreck till we was right on it; and so
we
saddle-baggsed”—that is, they were slowed to a complete halt. “Well, we hollered and took on, but it’s so wide there, we couldn’t make nobody hear. So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help somehow” (p. 70). To seal the deal that the man on the ferry will go to offer help (the stranded gangsters), Huck plays on the ferryman’s greed by claiming, as if incidentally, that Miss Hooker’s uncle is the fabulously wealthy Jim Hornback. Again, underneath Huck’s comedy of manipulation is an orphan’s tragic tale of a family mired and separated by forces beyond their control, a blues in the night on the river. And again there is the larger drama of the quest for freedom and democracy (our nation’s word for love) through quick and artful improvisation.
Like a blues musician, Huck creates in the moment. With fertile imagination, he solos. He fills the vivid breaks in the action with invented phrases, gestures, and disguises, songs of self and community in love and trouble, characters trying to piece things back together, trying to get home, and then again, perhaps better still, to get away, to break free. Sometimes, as a soloist, Huck
overblows.
For instance, in the scene where Huck pretends that Jim did not actually experience but only dreamed up the storm that left them separated, Huck’s invention is merely self-serving, the smarty stuff of Tom Sawyerism. When Jim sees the trick, his heartfelt words, containing a stinging rebuke, achieve a kind of blues cadence:
When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los‘, en I didn’ k’yer no mo’ what become er me en de raf‘. En when I wake up en fine you back agin’, all safe en soun‘, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is
trash;
en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed (p. 80).