At its best, Huck’s language is the language of the blues: vigorous, ironical, understated, grainy with detail, swingingly playful. Like the blues-singer, Huck has little patience for sentimental language or the headlong, tearful action that goes with it. This novel’s ongoing parody of airy poems about dead relatives, etc., parallels the blues’ disdain for the easy tear, sentimentalism’s shallow parade of false feelings. Huck’s impatience with Tom Sawyer’s egocentric reliance on bookish precedents—even when he can’t say what some of the highfalutin’ words he uses actually mean—is also true to the blues, which favors not only the improviser over the set text but also language that is clear and unabashed. “While you’re steppin’ out someone else is steppin’ in,” says a blues song by Denise LaSalle—never mind all the Tom Sawyerist indirection and pretense. When real trouble haunts the book—the death of Huck’s new friend Buck, for example—Huck does not gush; instead, the situation itself is so eloquent that he can barely speak, there is nothing to say. In the spare diction of the blues, worlds of meaning erupt. These are the strange silences that Toni Morrison notices elsewhere in Huck: He loves Jim too much to make a speech about it. Like a true bluesman, Huck’s art is magnificently understated and full of stark but meaningful moments when there is nothing for words to say. His answer to Jim’s rebuke about Huck’s tricking of Jim after the storm had separated them is not direct; we only know that he was ashamed and that he crept back to apologize.
It is Ellison who directly connects Huck’s resolution, the line in the novel’s famous last sentence—“to light out for the Territory”—with the blues of Bessie Smith, who, in the “Workhouse Blues” also declares that she’s “goin’ to the Nation, goin’ to the Territor‘.” In his collection of essays called
Going to the Territory,
r
Ellison says that in her song, Smith’s will to take off for the “Territory” beyond U.S. borders parallels the journeys of slaves and ex-slaves, and their children, toward the broader freedom and multiplied sense of possibility associated not only with the North but with the Western frontier and, more generally, with the uncharted frontiers of the future. Jim, of course, “lights out,” too. Indeed, Mark Twain’s master-stroke is connecting Jim’s quest for freedom from slavery with the nation’s effort to grow up, morally, as Huck is able to do as he lights out for a territory we hope will be more humane and freer for all.
Making this case about this novel as a sort of “Blues for Huckleberry” or “Huck and Jim’s Lonesome Raft Blues” does not depend on our straining to show that Huck is black. And yet it is intriguing to remember that, culturally speaking,
all
the boys and girls of that period (and of our own period) from all the towns like Huck’s home in Grant’s Landing, Missouri, whatever their specific racial bloodlines, known and unknown, were both black
and
white—as well as Native American.
Here Bernard De Voto’s reflections on Mark Twain’s own boyhood can help us understand Huck’s “blackness.” De Voto observes that in the world of Mark Twain’s boyhood,
black and white children grew up together.... They investigated all things together, exploring life. They hunted, swam, and fought together. ... So the days of Sam Clemens were spent among the blacks. Negro girls watched over his infancy. Negro boys shared his childhood. Negroes were a fountain of wisdom and terror and adventure. There was Sandy and the other slave boys who played bear with him. These and others preserved him sometimes from drowning. There was the bedridden old woman who had known Moses and had lost her health in the exodus from Egypt. There was Uncle Dan‘l who told the stories that Harris was to put in the mouth of Uncle Remus, and, while the fire died, revealed the awful world of ghosts. There were the Negroes with whom he roamed the woods, hunting coons and pigeons. There were the roustabouts of the steamboats, the field hands shouting calls over their hoes, and all the leisurely domestic servants of the town.... Olivia Langdon, whom he married, was to give him a principle for dealing justly with the human race. He ought, she said, to consider every man black until he was proved white.
s
De Voto also tells of Mark Twain/Sam Clemens’s love of Negro spirituals. As an adult in Hartford, Connecticut, he would sometimes stand under the moonlit night, singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and delivering the song’s final “Glory, Hallelujah,” “with a great shout.” “Away back in the beginning—to my mind,” said Twain, the singing of blacks “made all other vocal music cheap... and it moves me more than any other music can.”
t
While as far as we can tell, Twain never heard blues music as such, he heard the various American musics, including the Negro spirituals, that blended to become the blues. And there is a “nobody knows the trouble I see” as well as a “glory Hallelujah” shout in the blues. Both extremes of feeling find their way into this novel,
Huckleberry Finn.
If
Huckleberry Finn
may be read as a blues narrative, with blues characters and plotlines, the book’s mode of composition by improvisation also is strongly suggestive of the blues. Manuscript evidence and letters from and to Twain indicate that he first conceived of
Huckleberry Finn
as an extension of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
in which Huck had first made an appearance as Tom’s friend, dirt-poor but smart and natively good at heart. Twain decided that the new book would not bring Tom into adulthood, as Twain’s friend William Dean Howells had recommended, but instead would tell the story of this other boy, Huck, who had so much appeal that he had nearly taken over Tom’s own
Adventures.
The decision to shape this new novel as a first-person narrative, a chronicle told in an everyday voice by a boy trying to cope with the trouble he sees, was brilliant and bluesy. It is also important that Twain did not first conceive the book as a weapon against slavery, or as even about slavery in any central way. In fact, Jim did not figure as a major character in the book’s early drafts; nor at first was there any indication that Twain intended to have Jim run away from slavery. Evidently Twain’s plan was to write a series of episodes satirizing American foibles and hypocrisies, particularly when it came to religious practices, as his model book
The Adventures of Gil Blas
(1749), by Alain René Le Sage had done. According to scholar Victor Doyno, “Twain initially considered having Huck escape from his father’s cabin to set off tramping across Illinois. Then the novel would have been a ‘road’ book, like Gil Blas’s, instead of a ‘river’ book. But when he [Twain] remembered the June rise in the river level, with logs and rafts coming from upriver, he soon had Huck spot a free-floating canoe, and that gave him the mechanism for Huck to travel down the river Twain knew so well.“
u
Twain brings Huck to Jackson’s Island, according to Doyno, without knowing what would happen next. Further, Twain ”may have been a bit puzzled by the
Robinson Crusoe
—like moment when Huck first discovers the campfire on Jackson’s Island because he did not yet know in his imagination who else was there. When he finally realized, after much sequential revision, that the person by the campfire was Jim, he was so excited—and, I think, happy—that he wrote ’I bet I was glad to see him!‘ in running script, lifting his pen off the page between words only four times (his habit when writing very rapidly) instead of the normal seven times. Placing Jim by the campfire was a crucial discovery/creation on the part of Twain’s imagination, because it gave Huck a companion who would give the book surprising new possibilities.“ Composing the book over a ten-year period, with one episode suggesting another, and with Jim’s leap for freedom challenging Huck to be more than an adventurous picaro or vehicle for incidental satire—he had to face the implications of loving Jim and identifying with his goal—gradually Mark Twain shaped the novel into
Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn as we have it today. Huck became a moral hero hotly engaged in a battle between what Twain called ”a sound heart and a deformed conscience.”
There is a sense in which all novels, and perhaps all works of art, are improvised. Still,
Huckleberry Finn
strikes me as a special case because when it began one of the two main characters hardly existed, and the most significant part of the plotline was not yet imagined at all by the writer. Starting and stopping, improvising over ten years, Twain found out what the book was about. In the process he seems to have discovered that improvising on the blues is the American mode. In
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Huck not only makes up stories to dupe the dupes and undo the tricksters he meets along the river, he develops a style of resiliency and optimism, a readiness in the face of distress and even disaster that spells his survival as well as his moral development. He learns what the great improvisers in music learn: that improvisation at its best is not a trick but a style and process; it is a philosophical and aesthetic attitude with which to face the future ready to swing with others. Improvisation is swinging freely, with discipline and with love. In the end, that capacity for free but disciplined loving swing with others—at the heart of the blues—is what
Huckleberry Finn
is all about.
And in this new millennium, how wonderful for me, brown-skinned reader and inheritor of the legacy of the blues (as well as of the traditions of the American novel), to discover that my love for this music and, alas, yes, my love for this book—wrong notes and all—are linked, tied as tight as the strings of old Robert Johnson’s blues guitar.
Robert G. O‘Meally
is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirteen years; since 1999 he has been the Director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of
The Craft of Ralph Ellison
(1980) and
Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday
(1991), and the principle writer of
Seeing Jazz
(1997), the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on jazz painting and literature. He edited the collection of essays
Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings
(2001) and
The Jazz Cadence of American Culture
(1998), which was awarded an 1999 ASCAP—Deems Taylor award, and coedited
History and Memory in African-American
Culture (1994) and The Norton
Anthology
of African
American Literature
(1996). O’Meally wrote the script for the documentary film
Lady Day
and for the documentary accompanying the Smithsonian exhibit
Duke Ellington: Beyond Category
(1995), and he was nominated for a Grammy for his work as coproducer of the five-CD boxed set
The Jazz Singers
(1998). He lives in New York with his wife, Jacqui Malone, and their sons, Douglass and Gabriel.
Notice.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
By Order of the Author Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance.
v
Explanatory.
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
The Author.
CHAPTER 1
Y
ou don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers,
w
as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece, all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me;
1
but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead
x
again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.