Was Huck’S Family Happy?

Iv’e always considered Huck Finn to be more anti slavery. However I think it is more nuanced than that. Mark Twain was trying to capture a very turbulent time in history. And the genius of the work is that it is told through the eyes of a child. This allows the reader to come to terms with difficult concepts like death, racism, slavery among others the way a child would. The point of the book wasn’t to spell out a message for the reader, it was to guide the reader to start asking questions about the injustices of the world.

I wrote a paper in high school based on it’s reading as anti-Racist discourse. I was not allowed to finish my presentation, was sent home, my suspension was bartered down detention by my parents. It was a coming of age moment seeing my parents and teachers I admired in a completely different light. By the way, I’m from Cincinnati where Samuel Clemens is just as well known for investing in new technology as for the books he wrote.

I think we have to remember that Huck Finn is a novel, not an essay. MT exposes the hypocrisies and cruelty of society and individual characters. The awful stuff with Huck’s abusive father is stated in a pretty matter of fact way. Huck’s views themselves are extremely limited. And if I remember correctly, Jim has the dignity to get angry with Huck at some point when Huck plays a mean prank. Jim is actually the only compassionate, moral person in the book… MT is definitely critical of his world, but as a comedian and a satirist, he exposes the darkness through irony and parody. His views are implicit. If you want non-fiction, try Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. It’s just incredible.

I always saw Jim’s change of character in the final act of the story (which, like Hemingway, I consider to be the weakest part of it) to be his intentional resorting to a common defense mechanism in reaction to being caught in a dangerous situation. Many slaves would pretend to be more passive and less intelligent than they actually were, to appear less threatening to, and thus decrease the likelihood of abuse from, the wealthy planters who had absolute power over them in that time and place. Earlier in the story, specifically in the chapter “Was Solomon Wise?” (Chapter 14), Jim is shown to be highly intelligent, albeit uneducated about the world outside his own environment, when he easily defeats Huck in a debate over the existence of foreign languages, which Jim disbelieves in when Huck tells him about it. The key to understanding the message of the novel is to look at it in the context of the time and place it was written. It was absolutely one of the most fierce and biting anti-racist works of 1880s America, and many white Southerners of the time were enraged by this. If robbed of this context, and judged as if it had been written in 2021, it certainly comes across as being “racist”, due to the frequent use of the “n-word” that was endemic to the dialect the book was written in and the “minstrel” stereotypes that were hard-wired into 1880s American thought.

Good discussion, but I’m a little surprised by her failure to even mention the moral heart of the book. Heck’s decision not to turn Jim in when all conventional morality told him to do so is profound, moving, and radical. There’s little defense for the trashy ending, but I sometimes suspect that it’s part of the book’s disguise. It was sold, by subscription, as another rollicking, droll tale of boys’ adventures, not as a subversive tale grappling with child abuse, slavery, and the nature of morality.

This kind of reminds me of a quote I heard once. The gist was that for someone who considers themself a progressive/radical/revolutionary the goal should should be to create a world where they themself would be condemned as a reactionary. It’s a joke, of course, but points to the idea that even those who are working against one or more of the injustices of our time are likely to be missing several others. I feel like that’s what’s going on with writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and why it is hard to put their work in “racist vs. not racist” boxes. They were being actively anti-racist by the standards of their time (certainly anti-slavery), but from the perspective of our time still clearly had some unfortunate racial biases remaining. So we can both appreciate what they were trying to do and be uncomfortable about the bits they didn’t do quite right.

There should be a consideration of intent and content and the author as well: Twain was racist in his own right, especially towards native Americans. However, his intention was to show the ultimate humanity and dignity of African Americans, and it is ultimately an anti-racist work. The racist language comes from the unfortunate period. People use Huck Finn and Blazing Saddles to either justify using racial slurs or condemn them no matter what the context, but both interpretations are removed from the context of the actual use.

I have my degree in English. Twain has been one of my favorites for many decades and I feel you have portrayed him in a good light from troubling times. You’ve given me much to think about and I greatly appreciate your perspective on the text. I think the idea of putting Huckleberry Finn in context with a larger discussion on racism in America is wonderful. I don’t believe excuses need be made for troublesome passages but context means so much and you’ve given me a better understanding of the context.

I read the book on school vacation when I was about 12. I read it again recently, and picked up on the brutality (especially the child abuse from his father) Huck faced, and how he rebelled in his own way against society and racism. He was just a child. He smoked pipes and lived on his own, but he was still a child. I think Mark Twain was a product of his times, depicting Jim as a stereotype. I still always loved Huck’s and Jim’s friendship. Against the world, all they really had was each other.

I always figured if Twain had written something that everyone felt comfortable with today we simply wouldn’t have it as it never would have been printed or read in his own time. Twain’s genius was his ability to tell grounded, relatable stories about the kind of people many didn’t give a second thought, and covertly hidden within that narrative were messages that would have been outright rejected before even reading had they been more obvious. His approach would often help the fence-sitters to reconsider their prejudices as they, for instance, find themselves sympathizing with the character with clearly the most integrity and moral fortitude in the book in the form of Jim. He wrote for his audience at the time, and given his background I’d say Samuel’s disposition was damn near a miracle. That boy from Missouri somehow found his own way through unimaginable racial hate and emerged an enlightened figure.

What people forget with so many old works is that they will always be a product of the time and the authors conditioning. Even if a creator is pushing in the right direction, most humans can’t usually handle facing the depths of their society’s injustice. Now we can and should discuss at what level fictional works that don’t condemn problematic views by today’s standards should be taught, but that they should remain should not be in question. Fighting for justice in our day and age is like repairing the damage of a toxic dump. Just because we have to deal with the damage left behind, doesn’t mean we should sneer at those that drained the dump because they couldn’t see how deep the poison ran.

That’s the problem with illiteracy; people that ban books are not generally Readers. They don’t get that Huckleberry Finn was satirically vicious in its attack on the idiocy of racists, the cruelty of slavery, and the humanity of the slave in contrast with the ignorance, inhumanity, and supposed superiority of those considered to be of a higher caste, from the drunkard to the con men, the criminals and the pathetically retrograde “aristocracy”. Growing up in the South it was the first Woke thinking I experienced in regards to the systemic stupidity intrinsic in Southern/Rural “culture”. The language used for each character was an ingenious and accurate approach to dialect which served to breathe life into character individuality and distinguished the works of Twain/Clemens in his art of breathing life into fiction by showing the grainy imperfections, differences, and individual personal perspective. There may well be a case to be made of not introducing this work to younger students who have not been prepared to read it in the full context of the period or of literature in general. This is probably only arguable due to a failure in Social and Literary Education. One could also argue that this work might serve as the basis for said Education and could easily of itself be a two part course in Humanities Studies.

I was seven when I red this book for the first time. Even I am not from USA, I understood this book as a story against racism in America. I understood how cruel and unfair was to “own” another person. Twain made it christal clear through the book. I understood how people at that time had different views than we have now, and how they were bordened by the rules of their society, and saw it as a story about survival of two powerless people who could only count on their friendship, cooperation and their wit, a boy and a slave, and I could sympathize with both of them, as I felt that I was also powerless as a child. It is still one of my favourite books, and I loved both characters. Also, for me, the book finished at the moment Huck and Tom met on that road, the rest of the book I found irritant and wrong. I hated that part, and I didn’t like Tom’s chatacter in it at all. I even fantasized of another ending 🙂 that’s how much I loved this book.

I was in a psych ward in June 2013 for six days. They had a “book corner” there, just a bunch of donated books on shelves, that you could borrow during your stay. I read “Huck Finn” then for a second time after reading it first my junior year in high school. If Twain was alive, I’d thank him for transporting me to a fascinating place, with compelling characters, for those six days. What a book. I adore every line.

Historical context is always important when looking at (or reading) any work of art. But, the thing that always gets to me about ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is when everything and everyone in this child’s society is telling him that turning Jim in is nothing less than a matter of his eternal soul – Huck decides ‘Alright, then, I’ll go to Hell’.

After perusal this, I think part of it might be that Huck Finn might be more appropriate for college level courses, as opposed to high-school or younger. The kind of stuff where it can be part of a professor’s entire course on literature, where the students are hopefully a bit more mature and the classes are hopefully more diverse, and its context in both literature and history can be explored.

With books like Huck Finn, I’m always reminded of another book– “The Female Man” by Joanna Russ (published 1970). It is a book that deals with feminism, homosexuality, and transgender issues. For 1970, it is extremely progressive, and the text promotes equality. But nowadays, many parts of it would be considered backwards. Like Huck Finn, the author’s intention is clouded with the stereotypes and thinking of the time it was created in. But in the last chapter of the novel, the author herself comes out to address the readers and, I’m paraphrasing here, states that for all her noble intentions one day people will look at this novel and think it is backwards, and she says it is a good thing. Society will continue on, we will (hopefully) grow to better understand and empathize with each other, and her novel (and all other works) will have its place as a microcosm of a more barbaric time.

All I can say is that my Mama read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to me as a child before I could read for myself. I suspect she may have done some editing along the way because as far as I can remember, she never used a certain word then or at any other time. Nor would she accept its use in her presence. I can’t speak for others but I’ve no doubt that the book was a major factor as to why I rejected the Jim Crow society and culture I was born into as I grew up.

I’ve read it through 3 times in my life. The first time being a 3rd grader in 1973, having heard my school library in Lakeland Florida was looking to ban it. It was one of the wisest choices I ever made. The introduction to the works of Mark Twain, one of the greatest souls to have ever lived in my honest opinion.

By 19th century standards it wouldn’t be considered racist but by late 20th century/ 21st century standards, yes it is very racist. Now that’s not to give the people of the nineteenth-century a pass because even back then a lot of them knew the things that they were doing when it pertains to race was wrong.

Twain used abusive language quite deliberately and was much criticized for doing so. Basically, he was throwing it in people’s faces, showing racism is embedded in our speech. The last few chapters let the book down with a thud. He really didn’t know how to end it, so he resorted to “burlesque,” as that kind of humorous writing was then called.

I feel like people don’t understand how to read text from older authors. I remember reading this book as a child and really appreciated how it showed the dynamics of society in life back then. I feel like people are looking at things through a modern lens and trying to insert that into a book that does not have that lens.

Thank you, for another great article with a lot to think about. I especially appreciated Dr. Thomas’ words at the end, and I think pairing Huckleberry Finn with Douglass’s Narrative is an excellent idea. I’m thinking of the passage in which Douglass describes the singing of the slaves and how this is misinterpreted by whites, which leads me to something I’ve long thought about Jim. I couldn’t say if Twain intended this reading (unlikely), but my impression was that Jim sees the character of Huck, Tom and all the other white character’s much more clearly than they see his or even each other. There’s little hints of this, throughout but especially in the scene just before Huck apologizes to Jim on the raft. But, Jim is required, everywhere, and at all times, to put on an act, to please white people for survival. I think every misadventure along the river attests to this. I might wish the last section made this clearer, but I think Jim sees right through Tom and Tom’s game, and I vaguely recall that he even tries to allude to this to Huck (It’s been a while, I’ll have check) but Huck doesn’t really see it, and goes along with Tom’s whole shenanigans because he trusts Tom, I guess? (I feel like this is as much a mystery, as any). Anyway, it’s another layer to the agonizing dramatic irony of these chapters. I think, Jim stays because he could not possibly trust that the opportunity to get away is real–and, in fact, it isn’t. Jim’s best bet is to continue playing his part, so he does.

This is a decent look into one of America’s Great Novels and all the controversy it stirs to this day. Jim, as someone noted earlier in some other posts, is really the only reasonable, major adult character in the book. His goodness and friendship opens Huck’s eyes to the evil of slavery and the racism that made that institution possible. When Huck says to himself “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”, he knew that helping Jim escape was against his upbringing and the laws of the adults who ruled his life, but his conscience knew that they were wrong and he would help no matter the consequences. As far as what some people claim is a “white savior” trope, I counter that Jim saved Huck’s soul (and physically helped him out of sticky situations) before Huck tried to save Jim from captivity. A complaint I have about this article is the use of “stupid white boy” when discussing Tom Sawyer and his “Count of Monte Cristo” plot to bust Jim out of captivity, rather than acting sensibly. If Ms. Weekes had been discussing a story where a boy of color had acted childishly (which Tom was), would she have called this character a “stupid black boy”? I’m sure she would find that offensive and wouldn’t say it, so she should understand why I find the converse to be the same and not at all cute.

Norm Macdonald on Huck Finn: “You don’t want to take Mark Twain, one of the greatest writers ever to brush ink to paper and change his words. On the other side of the coin, you don’t want to have a young African-American boy in school hearing that word out loud and causing him pain. Its a thorny issue, but I figure it this way…it’s done in the first-person, therefore, you just change Huckleberry Finn to a black kid!”

I did read Huckleberry Finn in school. We live very far away from the South, but I did grew up there. To me, Huckleberry Finn was a very real book, that show the equal but not equal viewpoint of my homeland. My classmates hated Huckleberry Finn, but I gave them a viewpoint that the teacher would never had, and they liked it more as we read it. It not Racist and total is Racist at the same time. It was the viewpoint of s non racist white in the time of the writing. I see it as both hope, and fear. That we want to get together in unity, but cannot because of our background.

Huck Finn was read to my almost totally white fifth grade class by our male black teacher. He substituted the word “slave” for the N-word while reading it. That said, what stuck out most to me as a child was the horrible behavior and character of the white people in contrast to the ethics and morality of Jim. In particular, I really disliked Tom Sawyer by the end of the book.

I remember reading this in class and one of my white classmates was WAYYY too excited to say the n word. He was very quiet and a lot younger than everyone else so it was quite shocking to hear this kid say it with such gusto. My teacher had to explain to him that we could just skip over the word and not read it out every time

As an ignorant white guy, I think any work of art should be judged firstly by context and intent. The rapresentation of Jim that we may see now as stereotypical and low key racist was never intended to be seen as any of that (from what we know anyway) and would have ben outrageous to the book reading white audiences of the time for it’s progressiveness. It’s all too easy to criticize Twain by our modern standards but it’s a disservice the author, it’s intentions and the circumstances the book itself was written in.

I’m torn on Huck Finn. I’m hispanic, my parents are Mexican immigrints, so my views are going to be different from other people of color simply because I’m not black. Mexico was pretty heavily colonized multiple times, and so I have a stronger relationship with the history of imperialism than slavery. When “Heart of Darkness” was taught at my school, I made sure that I’d already read “Things Fall Apart”. The fact that one is taught and the other isn’t is an actual travesty. With Huck Finn it feels a little different. There is something about the middle of the book, I belive chapter 29 or 30, when Huck says, Alright then, I guess I’ll go to Hell” that right there is really the entire arguement behind letting it be taught in schools. But honestly, Toni Morrison exists. If you’re teaching race in America, “Sula” or “The Bluest Eye” are going to be infinitely better in that task in than anything Mark Twain or Harper Lee have to offer.

The depiction of Jim when he is back in captivity is less a portrait of Jim and more a portrait of white slave owning society. They think they’re heroes and saints but really they’re killing and torturing this man who we (as Huck) know is a human who should be free. The book is about the psychology of whites who allow slavery to happen. It’s not flattering. The entire book jim has no real choice to be free, his best hope is to pretend to be owned by Huck. In the end, when you find out he was actually free practically the whole time, you realize how little good that freedom would have done him.

I’ve never understood why people don’t understand that media produced during a completely different set of social norms, can’t be held accountable to our sociatal norms. Take Pippi Longstocking. In a book from the 1940s theres a reference to her father as the “n-word” King. That has been erased in both the reprints and erased from the movie all together, in an attempt not to offend. Swedish National Television (SVT) said the following to their edit: “If you read to a child, the adult can preface and explain things to them . But the SVT has such high credibility, that parents let their children watch our shows unattended. We believe we shouldn’t support a a word or expression that can be conceived as hurtful”. Now, I have a lot problems with this. In the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the national television has written in their charter that they must be educational and provide public service. What they SHOULD have done was make an educational program telling about the times in which the books were conceived. Give context to the text, while maintaining their own modern values. It’s really NOT that difficult. You can’t erase the past because you don’t like what’s in it.

Thanks for going through that. Your article helped me to better understand why some people are calling it racist. When I read it as a kid, it was understood in general to anti-racist and intended to reflect the language and culture of the time. I can now see why the depictions might be uncomfortable or painful. You make a strong argument for teaching the work within a context.

All I can say is: I read Huck Finn when I was eleven, in the early 60s, when civil rights was a front-burner issue. And I remember thinking that the most inflammatory sentence in the book was Huck–after having written a letter telling Jim’s former owner where Jim was–remembering their time together on the Mississippi, and the orthodoxy of the time that failing to report a runaway slave could get one sent to Hell; whereupon Huck says to himself: “Alright then, I’ll go to Hell” and tore up the letter. That was a daring sentence in many ways…

Having read nearly everything that Twain wrote, I understand why many don’t understand the point of Tom Sawyer’s action. You have to understand that Twain was a humorist and a smart ass. From his rewriting of the story of “Adam and Eve.” to his critique of the German language, there is little that is sacred to him. Especially in his later years. He was a cynical bastard who hated people who read meaning into his writing that wasn’t there. The story’s central conflict is with Huck Finn. He thinks it is evil to help Jim. Society has told me so. But in his heart, Huck loves Jim. He is in moral conflict through most of the book. In his mind, he has to decide whether to obey society and go to heaven by turning Jim in, or help Jim escape and go to hell. Huck decides to go to hell. At that point Huck became a man. He sacrifices his immortal soul for a person he loved. Tom Sawyer is still a child. So he acts like a child, and plays his stupid pranks. Tom is a foil to Huck, and the last chapters enhance Huck and his attitudes even more. I don’t know if Twain intended this though. He was a smart ass and probably didn’t want his novel to be considered a “moral” treatise. My eyes always got damp when I read “”All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” And I read this book often as a boy. A white boy. No. This book should be encouraged, ugly language and all.

I’m conflicted on the idea of forgoing Huck Finn (but I agree it should always be read with care and not as a checkbox that needs to be cleared.) As a white emigrant who grew up outside of the States, the way the book’s structure first teaches us to identify with Huck under his father’s abuse, and then dives into the horrors of slavery, is really quite striking. Jim is definitely minstrel-ized; but from a somewhat outside perspective, going in not knowing what to expect, I read that as a consequence of the expectations of the society he’d been raised in. It was presented alongside Huck struggling against the shadow of his father, so I read that Jim behaving like a minstrel character was a result of the expectations placed upon him. It was analogized to Huck fighting an uphill battle against the criminality of his father, both as the expectations of society and as his own learned behavior from prolonged, isolating exposure to it. The end of the book might as well not be present; both Huck and Jim have their character development ignored for the sake of Tom taking over the narrative. It ends the book by re-establishing the status quo from before the book, essentially. Jim may be free, but he appears to have forgotten freedom, and the problem of slave-catchers addressed earlier in the book is left unanswered. Speaking of the slavers, that was the true horror in the book for me. Even Pap Finn isn’t half as horrifying. Their sheer disregard for anything other than making money off of a black man’s suffering still makes me severely uncomfortable to think about, 8 years after first reading and only 150 years after the setting of the book.

As an English teacher, I think it’s so important to teach the context surrounding a story. We should teach these stories, not as irreproachable works of art, but as the flawed reflections of a deeply unjust society. We need students to understand WHY it was so messed up that Tom kept Jim from his freedom and Twain denied Jim his personhood, and how this reflects the attitudes of the time and still affects us today. I love this novel as a work of art, but at the same time still acknowledge its flaws.

I think we lose something valuable when we take books like Huck Finn off the shelves, especially for students. This is a piece of history and the story it tells is undeniably connected with the time period it was written in. When read with maturity and this understanding, however, I think we learn to better evaluate how times have changed and perhaps even better identify issues within our own society. Overall, I’d go as far as saying that we need students in our modern era to read these books and understand the history and culture they are associated with.

I learned so much about history, the history not covered in the regular curriculum, through English lit classes. I acknowledge I probably got lucky with my teachers (and I was in a well-funded, diverse, NYC public school), but these classes were so instrumental to my fuller and more nuanced understanding of social realities and history. I do have to say, my teacher did a really good job getting us to recognize and discuss the weaknesses in Huck Finn while also appreciating Twain’s craft and wit. Maybe we were also really mature kids 🤷🏻‍♀️

It is racist! Everything is racist, and has been since we used the concept to cleave a cultural line through our society! But there’s a section of people who have spent a lot of time examining and re-examining the idea of race and racism, and not everyone has been following along, so it’s hard to have a meaningful discussion about it when everyone isn’t even speaking the same language. 10:22 Toni Morrison gives a beautiful take on what someone can get from that book when they’ve had the time to grow a deep understanding of what exactly it is that they’re looking at. 11:35 But this is a great take on how you might want to treat it in the scope of a high school curriculum. Reading doesn’t work like a single direction data download into your brain – right from translating the symbols on the page into words in your head, the whole thing is an exercise in interpretation — what you’re able to get out of a text is 100% shaped by what you bring to the table. So in the context of white high school students, especially from majority white communities, maybe it’s just not a great place to start if you’re trying to build a lesson plan that tackles those issues? Mark Twain wrote a bunch of books and was a super interesting dude; there’s lots to choose from!

I think it should be taught. Especially in the south. The book is culturally close enough to southerners to make them feel comfortable while providing them with a mirror in which to reflect their feelings of racism onto. A lot of emotions The time of mark twain is not that different from ours… Politicians and racists just change their language. N work = thugs, linch** = police violence, segregation = redlining / gentrification. Right now, it feels like the united states is doing nothing to combat its growing racist resentment.

“but one of the things about him having written SO MUCH is that we were able to see his thoughts evolve with the times.” Gee, it’s almost as if historical and cultural figures aren’t static embodiments of whatever sins they may have stumbled into as a result of their relative ignorance and/or cultural milieu and should therefore be annihilated as such… … but anyway yeah this vid’s pretty good

One of my favorite summer reading books. Honestly one of the best parts of school memories reading this in class. Tom sawyer is the ish, Its the characters and their choices that gives the book so much more then the slavery era. My civics teacher was strongly pro black and we would deep dive into these times to understand the people, the people make society and their choices lay the foundation for culture and forms culture. cant understand one without the other, Don’t be too focused on the wrong thing.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the way I think about bigotry in past works of literature is to ask: was this, in the context of its time, pulling away from the existing bigotry, or confirming it? In both this case and Uncle Tom’s Cabin I’d have to say they were pulling away, and that has to be taken into account even though they didn’t reach the point that we nowadays would wish they had. Something specific to the context of the time, I think, is that a lot of white people thought “Well, enslaved people would be perfectly happy in slavery if only they would be properly deferential and obedient.” Both Uncle Tom and Last Few Chapters Jim I think are pictures of deferential enslaved people who are not happy at all, in response to that myth. It follows, of course, that if one was adapting such works for a modern audience, it would be a betrayal of the spirit of the original works for the adaptation to carefully preserve the aspects of the originals that are racist by today’s standards. Modern adaptations should challenge modern racism as the originals challenged their own time’s racism.

This is a brilliant speech! It gives a lot of insight into the questions of progress, what to make of such old, critical, but imperfect literature. It is very important to study the context, where does the writer come from, and which was the typical life and thinking of his audiences. I believe that Mark Twain is also a lot about compassion, among all those tragedies, and therefor opens up doors to progress.