Huck Finn’s America Turns 250 – Religion & Liberty Online

The 250th anniversary of the United States of America is nearly here, and preparations in the capitol city are well underway. An octagonal, blood-splattered Ultimate Fighting Championship cage has been cleared from the South Lawn of the White House. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, algae is blooming and paint is peeling in the Reflecting Pool, providing the nation with a steady stream of insights into aquatic ecosystems, federal contracting practices, and the law of unintended consequences.

As a scholar of American literature, I have no idea what George Washington would think if he were to walk around his namesake city today. I imagine he might find it a bit disorienting. But Samuel Clemens—the Missouri-born writer better known as Mark Twain—would feel right at home.

For better or worse, violence, showmanship, and grift are not new additions to American culture. Whether that thought lifts your spirits or makes you sigh, now is a good time to revisit Twain’s classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Although a tongue-in-cheek “Notice” cautions readers not to expect a didactic tale—“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”—the truth is that Huck Finn is a book about how to keep your soul properly ordered, even amid societal disorder.

Reading it today, alongside dire headlines about rising mental health issues and falling test scores among American youth, what stands out most is what stood out to Beloved novelist Toni Morrison in 1996—namely, Huck’s terrifying vulnerability as a 14-year-old boy fending for himself in a world of unpredictable, and often untrustworthy, adults. Huck’s father is the town drunk. He disappears for long stretches and is violent and abusive enough when he returns that Huck fakes his own death and sets off on the Mississippi River to get away—only to find that menace and entrapment lurk around every corner of the antebellum South, as surely as they did in Pap’s cabin. Huck’s nightmares and repeated bouts of what in modern parlance would be called suicidal ideation testify to trauma’s lasting effects on a child.

Violence in the novel stems from any number of motivations: institutionalized racism, aristocratic family feuds, an abusive parent’s perverse envy of their child, squabbles among thieves and outlaws over money and honor, and the kind of guilty, hangdog groupthink that makes a mob want to preemptively shoot someone “in the back, in the dark” before they can themselves be shot, since that sort of cowardly attack is “just what they would do.”

Though Huck chafes against the strictures of civilization, the starched collars and lengthy Sunday morning homilies that keep him from moving as freely as he’d like, Morrison correctly perceived that he is “running not from external control but from external chaos. Nothing in society makes sense; all is in peril.”

Our own civic moment, alas, feels similarly fraught.

 When society is as likely to harm as to help, the crux of the novel becomes what—or rather who—can provide emotional security and physical safety for Huck on his journey. Nature provides some relief, but not much. More than once, thunderstorms, strong river currents, and gigantic steamboats threaten to (or actually do) destroy Huck’s raft.

Freedom and peace emerge not from the river or the rambling life per se but from the benevolent actions of good people.

Most famously, Huck finds solace and companionship in Jim, a runaway slave. Though neither man is legally in control of his own fate—Huck because he has not yet reached the age of majority and Jim because of the color of his skin—each recovers a sense of agency and worth by caring for the other. They are separated and reunited more than once on their meandering journey. Each time, their joy and relief upon reuniting is palpable: “It was Jim’s voice—nothing ever sounded so good before.”

On shore, a series of women provide Huck, whose mother died when he was small, with glimpses of maternal care and domestic peace and plenty. These mother-surrogates are on the whole memorable, well drawn, and exceedingly likable characters. Mrs. Judith Loftus in particular holds her own against Huck in an amusing battle of wits. But this maternal care can’t quite be depended on, the way Jim can. Huck never sees the same kindly woman twice.

Good deeds in the novel are sometimes, though not always, associated with religious faith. Hypocritical believers tend to be miserly, like the sanctimonious Miss Watson, whose plan to sell Jim down the river for $800 is what prompts him to run away in the first place. Or they’re double-minded, like the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, who worship together on Sunday mornings and hatch plots to kill one another every other day of the week. The Christians Huck admires resist worldly thinking. They lend a hand to those whom others would just condemn: “I judged she would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions, for rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in.” Arguably Huck’s highest praise is reserved for Mary Jane, a young woman nearly robbed of her inheritance by traveling fraudsters: “She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn’t no back-down to her, I judge.”

This constant “judging,” I would argue, is what makes the novel a masterpiece, rather than just an adventure story to pass the time. By judgment, I am not referring to the condemnation of others. (That’s something Huck never really proves able to do. When the fraudsters are tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail, he just feels sicks to his stomach: “It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”) Instead, I am referring to the human capacity to sift and weigh, to deliberate, and then to decide, either to agree or disagree, to speak or remain silent, to act or stay still. Huck is surrounded by questionable role models, but his lively interior world inoculates him against slavishly following their bad examples out of habit or fear. Sometimes he’s forced to go along to get along for the sake of sheer survival, and often enough he invents any number of fibs to smooth his path. But within the sanctity of his own mind, Huck never cuts corners when it comes to the most profound issues of ethics or truth.

This inner punctiliousness comes to a climax in the “crisis of conscience” scene, where Huck—situated as he is in a society of topsy-turvy values—decides that he won’t turn Jim in as a fugitive from justice, even if it costs Huck his immortal soul: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Decisively rejecting Miss Watson’s religion, though not necessarily Mary Jane’s, Huck reflects:

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again.

This passage is a beautiful testament to the persistence of the natural law, no matter how confused the cultural standards of the day. And to the power of conscience, which always finds a way to remind of us of enduring truths even when (or maybe only when) it’s inconvenient. Huck repeatedly worries that his bad start in life might make it impossible for him ever to be good, but the reader, having access to his thoughts, knows that Huck very much already is good.

Of course, eight chapters later, when a doctor asks him how exactly Tom Sawyer ended up with a bullet in his leg, Huck makes up a tall tale as easy as breathing. He claims Tom was asleep and “must a kicked his gun in his dreams, for it went off and shot him in the leg.” The doctor reacts with amused, kindly skepticism:

“Oh,” he says. And after a minute, he says: “How’d you say he got shot?”

“He had a dream,” I says, “and it shot him.”

“Singular dream,” he says.

It may be as fitting an image as any for the summer of our semiquincentennial. We are a nation that began with a dream of unprecedented freedom and equality, but somehow we can’t stop detouring into violent tragicomedy. Anyone who hopes to navigate this singular American dream without turning cynical or getting shot could do worse than spend a day or two with Huck Finn as companion and guide. Therein freedom lies.