Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

A deep track.

Huckleberry Finn, Chapters XXXIII & XXXIV

Sure enough, Tom Sawyer is on a wagon coming from the river. Huck hails him and after assuring Tom that he is not a ghost quickly explains his situation. Tom comes up with a plan that has Huck take his trunk back to the farm (which he will do too, leaving Uncle Silas to believe he has a hundred-dollar horse.) On hearing about Jim, Tom almost exclaims something then stops. After some consideration promises Huck he will help deliver Jim from bondage, which Huck cannot believe:

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard -- and I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn't believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger-stealer!

"Oh, shucks!" I says; "you're joking."

Back at the farm, Tom shows up on the wagon a half hour after Huck's return, and as his ride heads back to town, inquires if Silas is Archibald Nichols, in fact a neighbor who lives three miles away. No, says Silas, but stay for dinner before I take you over there. During dinner there's some tomfoolery (sorry) before Tom tells the amazed family that he is really his brother Sid, who begged to come with Tom to visit (one more plot device which hinges on the slow means of communication at the time.)

During dinner Huck and Tom unsuccessfully try to pick up a clue as to where Jim is being held until one of the children asks Silas if he and the two visitors can go to the show in town that night.

"No," says the old man, "I reckon there ain't going to be any; and you couldn't go if there was; because the runaway nigger told Burton and me all about that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the people; so I reckon they've drove the owdacious loafers out of town before this time."

So, those who betrayed Jim are fittingly betrayed by him. After the family retires for the night, the two boys sneak out of the house and head to town, Huck with the idea of warning his two tormentors. He is too late. Huck and Tom see the King and Duke covered in tar and feathers in the hands of a mob who are carrying them out of town astraddle poles. (A fitting end for kings?) And consider, given the time and place, and presuming first- and second-degree burns from the hot pitch, how long it would take to clean-up and recover from something like that--all the while homeless and begging for handouts. A cruel and unusual punishment, and Huck shows compassion for his two tormentors.

Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

And then, in another of Twain's fine psychological strokes, Huck tells us he feels bad for feeling guilty that he couldn't help the two scoundrels:

But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.

Upon reflection the two figure that Jim is being kept in a small padlocked cabin where they've seen a slave carrying a plate food entirely fit for a dog if not for a slice of watermelon along with it. They plan the best way to save the man. Huck suggests getting the canoe ready the next night, stealing the key to the padlock from Silas when he's asleep, dart to the raft and shove off, running nights as before.

Too simple, says Tom, and describes what they should do insead.

I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.

Reconnoitering the cabin they find a high window boarded up, easy to get Jim out of Huck says. Too easy, says Tom. Searching a leanto attached to the cabin, they find a dirt floor: Tom was joyful. He says:

"Now we're all right. We'll dig him out. It'll take about a week!"

At breakfast the next morning they find the slave bringing Jim's breakfast, and ask him if he's feeding a dog. Yes, the man answers, a curious one too. Want to see him?

In the cabin, Jim is delighted to recognize Huck and Tom, calling them by name. Silas's slave is astonished Jim knows them, but Tom, in what to me is the cruelest exchange in the book, easily convinces the simple and superstitious man that the words he heard Jim speak were instead the enchantment of witches, a trick Jim readily plays along with. Then Tom voices perhaps the most hateful lines in the book, though meant to conceal his plan, all the more awful for being something within the realm of common thinking for the time.

"I wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger. If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn't give him up, I'd hang him." And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to look at the dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers to Jim and says:

"Don't ever let on to know us. And if you hear any digging going on nights, it's us; we're going to set you free."

Early on I remarked on the sadism inside Tom Sawyer, a manipulative fabulist whom, if grown up, Twain would have likely despised. What is endearing in a boy can be hateful in a man, and--without giving too much away--I propose that we are to see the increasingly delusional and dangerous machinations of Tom in the chapters to come as a pointed criticism of a certain kind of deranged dreamer, a type which American culture has prized from Twain's day up to our own.

That said, the pointless, minstrel-show ridiculing of the Phelps family's slave in this chapter, albeit at Tom's cruel hands, really is Twain at his worst. We might best leave it by considering if the whole book had been filled with bilge very like, however artful, Huckleberry Finn would have been forgotten a century ago.

Previously Chapter XXXII
Next Week Chapter XXXV

Many Are Culled

Robert Reich puts into sober prose what J M Kunstler has been harping on now for yonks: ain't gonna be no stinkin' recovery.

To be honest, the most discouraging thing about the past half-year is not the Obama team's struggle for a somewhat more equitable version of the previous status quo (as little as I agree, I understand how a responsible executive needs to hew to incremental change.) No, what has me smacking my gob in dismay is the moronic cheerleading for the way things were, for their version of reality, by putative guardians of the commonweal. I refer to our now hopelessly compromised press.

I know, I know, few more than I have harped more on the age-old connection between the vested interests (i.e. advertisers) and our daily journals of news and opinion. And I've said here a couple times previous that what we are witnessing in that department is nothing new, only, because of the digital transformation, more obvious. But Jesus Farking Christ, a glance at the NYT will show it is still fluffing Manhattan real estate. Listening to NPR news (which I do very rarely--for reasons outlined here) will often reward you with the phrase extreme interrogation techniques, which some critics label "torture". (Ira Glass, you smug prick, quit your job now.)

Being away in far northern Vermont in the days before the Fourth, and because the radio gave the only news I could get, I gave a concentrated ear to Spalin's resignation speech that Friday, via NPR, and was utterly appalled that none of the All Things Considered personalities (two reporters and an anchor whose names will be familiar to all who listen regularly to that waste of time) could bring themselves to say what was bleedingly obvious, that we were being treated to an open-air nervous breakdown.

Now in fairness to the show, it played extended clips from that ga-ga address, and the anchor edged as close as she could to saying the "crazy" word, but neither of the political reporters could bring themselves to mention anything other than it was unexpected, that her life and family had been upended this last year, that it had something to do with 2012, that it was a game changer. Honestly, it was no better than the drippingly dumb AP story of a couple days later, in which everything looked upside for that foxy challenger.

Now, Sully sees something like conspiracy in the MSM's refusal to tag Spalin as the ding-dong belle she is. (For my money, the Anonymous Liberal had the best take on the dreary affair.) I see it somewhat differently. Spalin is only the most recent, extreme, worst, and very likely last product of a senile system gone to ground, the SUV of GOP politics.

I should not have to point out that a very large system had a lot invested in the SUV, and so clung to it far past its time in the sun. I think the MSM is sticking with Spalin this summer to show that what it does still matters, that the mojo still works, that the recovery will be V shaped, when it won't, it won't.

Franken's Time

Little remarked on, in the national press at least, is how much of Al Franken's political career has been inspired by the late Paul Wellstone, which to my way of looking at things is a great and wonderful thing.

Wellstone was my senator for six years and I remember where I was when I heard his plane and life (and the lives of his wife and daughter, two aides, and two pilots--one of them stunningly incompetent) were lost. I also remember voting in Minnesota for the first time after moving there and feeling so pleased that I could vote for someone like Paul Wellstone.

Senator Wellstone was the main obstacle to passage of the infamous bankruptcy bill which the financial "industry" so wanted, putting a permanent hold on legislation which made it harder to file for bankruptcy in the first place and placed further restrictions to zeroing out debt. His sudden, some would say mysterious, death ended that opposition. I fully believe that once the banking goons knew they had the population firmly by the short and curlies that the predatory lending began in ernest--as did an economy built upon the backs of wage slaves which has only recently come crashing down.

I'm not prepared to dig up the charts to prove it, and I'm not especially regarded for saying so, but I do believe Senator Wellstone would have lost that election to the Oleaginous Boob anyway. The last vote he cast in the Senate was against the Iraq War resolution ("I cannot vote for war", he said in the chamber) and the mood in the country, and especially the dingbat suburbs of the Cities was all for kicking some furrin ass.

Ambassador Mondale, as the last-minute DFL standard-bearer, polled marginally better in Duluth and the Iron Range than Wellstone did six years earlier, and just as well in the Cities and Rochester. The election was decided in those suburbs (a portion of which, remember, also returns Michelle Bachmann to DC every couple years.) Could Wellstone have done better in these rotten boroughs that year than Uncle Walter? Color me skeptical.

Also little remarked outside MN was how much, and how well, Senator Franken campaigned across the state over the last couple years. (Local boy made bad--then good, David Carr noticed however.) He could talk about growing up there (which Ole Boob could not), and knew how to sit at a spaghetti supper in Fergus Falls, was at ease in a VFW hall in Cloquet. It was really close, and he lost a big lead along the way, but he won.

Al is taking the oath today on the Wellstone family bible. I expect great things from him, mainly because I get the feeling he has an example which allows him to expect great things from himself.

Copyright Infringement Theater Presents

What's up, Doc?

Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XXXII

Jim's betrayal and imprisonment ends the raft portion of the story and ushers in the resolution of the tale which many readers over the years have found disappointing. I am not one of them. Noted in our consideration along the way have been echos and touches Twain drew from Cervantes and Shakespeare, two writers who did not shy from using coincidence when the mood hit. Twain is in good company, and those who yearn for a more "realistic" ending do so, I submit, for being beguiled by Twain's groundbreaking natural and realistic presentation of life.

This new way of presenting the world in fiction, honest and colloquial, though kicking open the door for 20th century American fiction, was always in service to a higher aim: a corrosive satire on American hypocrisy, and the forces that formed it. Not only did Twain want his novel widely read, which argued very much in favor of a happy ending, the return to the conventions of 'young adult' fiction allowed him far more possibilities for a genuinely subversive text than a realistic telling of what awaited captured runaway slaves in rural Louisiana ca. 1835.

The Phelps place is a small cotton plantation; a big log house with three slave cabins close by. On approaching, Huck hears a spinning wheel above the buzzing of insects and feels what we might call an existential dread: I knowed for certain I wished I was dead -- for that IS the lonesomest sound in the whole world. Modern readers will just have to take his word for it.

Half way to the house, Huck riles the farm's dogs who hold him at bay until a slave woman, and her three children, comes running from the kitchen to call them off. She is followed by the mistress of the house, with her children, smiling broadly and welcoming Huck as if he were expected.

He plays along with her misunderstanding, that he is her nephew Tom. She tells him to call her Aunt Polly, and he does. Did he have breakfast on the boat? Yes, he says. Why was he so late? Boat blew a cylinder-head.

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinder-head and [....]

The above is an old, old joke--no one was hurt but many were killed--here used to highlight a certain thoughtlessness of the time and Aunt Polly. She does love to talk, and on she goes. Where's his bag? Hid it, says Huck. He makes up another story about how he got to eat so early on the boat. Then she wants to hear all the news from home. Huck, stumped, is about to tell the truth (or at least tell her he is not kin) when Polly sees her husband Silas coming back from the river landing where he had gone to met their guest. Polly tells Huck to hide.

After Polly plays the trick on her husband, Silas wants to know who the boy standing in his kitchen is. Why that's Tom Sawyer! she says.

By jings, I most slumped through the floor! But there warn't no time to swap knives; the old man grabbed me by the hand and shook, and kept on shaking; and all the time how the woman did dance around and laugh and cry; and then how they both did fire off questions about Sid, and Mary, and the rest of the tribe.

But if they was joyful, it warn't nothing to what I was; for it was like being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was.

There is a lot going on in this very simple scene: the recovery of family and sense of identity, the connection of Huck Finn with Tom Sawyer that harkens to the novel's first line. Huck may as well be Tom for all that he can tell the Phelps of their far-off family. Jim is nearby too, and we might see the black woman and children who came running to free Huck from the hounds (symbolic of what Huck has done for Jim) as a deft representation of the promise of wife and children restored to Jim as well.

In one sense Huck and Jim, after their odyssey among riven families, orphans, and castaways, have come home, a place which still presents certain problems, but all of a distinctly domestic nature.

Now I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one side, and pretty uncomfortable all up the other. Being Tom Sawyer was easy and comfortable, and it stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a steamboat coughing along down the river. Then I says to myself, s'pose Tom Sawyer comes down on that boat? And s'pose he steps in here any minute, and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep quiet?

Huck says he'll go fetch his bag, no help needed, thanks. And as the chapter ends sets off to see if Tom has arrived.

**Editor's note: I'll be taking the holiday weekend off and will be back to consider Chapter XXXIII in two weeks. Enjoy the 4th, everybody!**

Last week Chapt. XXXI
Next time Chapts. XXXIII & XXXIV

Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XXXI

The four drift for days and days. They are now in the deep south, Spanish moss give the riverscape a haunted look. The Duke and King, finally a safe distance from their Wilks family debacle, go back back to their old bag of tricks, lectures on temperance, medicine, or fortune telling. Nothing works. Huck notes the two of them plotting something.

They land two miles below another small town and the King goes off to reconnoiter, telling the Duke and Huck to follow if he does not return by midday. He does not and they find him drunk in town. As the two con men are arguing, Huck races back to the raft ready to finally give them the slip but discovers Jim is gone. Huck runs through the woods yelling Jim's name over and over and, distraught, begins to cry.

Quickly coming to his senses, he sets out and meets a boy who tells him that the person he asks about was picked up as a runaway slave and is now in custody at the Silas Phelps farm two miles downstream. The King had gone to town with the fake runaway slave handbill that quoted the $200 reward and, saying he could not stay around to collect it himself, sold Jim's location for $40.

We have here reached the moral nadir of the book, where the combined actions of human refuse and a hideous social order allows for the legal selling of a companion for the cost of a weekend bender. Huck is finally at an utter loss. Better Jim is a slave at home, he thinks, as long as he'd got to be a slave than among strangers. The game is up. He resolves to write Tom Sawyer asking him to alert Miss Watson as to Jim's whereabouts.

Huck's thinking immediately goes along moral lines, and he reviews the punishment, social and divine, that awaits wicked, nigger-loving abolitionist thieves like him.

[...] here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and ain't a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, "There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you'd a done it they'd a learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double.

Huck writes a terse note to Miss Watson directly, telling where to find Jim, and feels momentarily absolved. But then, in one of the most beautiful paragraphs in this beautiful book, he recalls life on the Mississippi with Jim.

[...] and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog[....]

Then, in the novel's most celebrated passage, Huck chooses eternal damnation over giving up Jim, "All right, then, I'll go to hell", and tears up the note.

Note the quotation marks. This is the only part in the story where Huck speaks to himself aloud, where the voice separates itself from both the expression of his active interior monologue--what he recalls thinking--and the flow of his outward narration--what he says happened. It flags that point where Huck judges his action the most clearly, and acts the most decisively. After dark he takes the raft down river a couple miles to be closer to where Jim is being held.

Next morning he sets out and finds the Phelps place, only reconnoitering to go back later from the direction of town. He then heads into Pikeville where he finds the Duke putting up a poster for another Royal Nonesuch. He makes up a story about helping a farmer overnight, says now he can't find the raft or his slave Jim, his only possession in the world. The Duke admits that the King sold Jim--and drank up most of the money--and says he doesn't know where the raft is, that the two tried finding it to sleep on the night before (note the alcoholic audacity of this) and that it was gone.

The Duke tells Huck that Jim is being held by a farmer 40 miles inland (a mile for every dollar of Jim's betrayal), three days travel by foot, and bids him to start walking. Huck sets out in that direction until he's sure the Duke isn't watching him, then doubles back to the Phelps place.

Last week Chapts XXIX & XXX
Next week Chapt XXXII