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Run, Nigger, Run: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a Fugitive Slave Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Harold Beaver
Harold Beaver
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

At the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Nigger Jim is a free man. ‘Nothing More to Write’ Huck calls that final chapter. But for Jim, surely, it could only have been a beginning. Jim was now free to purchase his wife from off that neighbouring plantation, as he had planned all along ‘saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent…’ Now even Miss Watson's Jim could claim ‘a new name’, in token courtesy to that wayward spinster; and as Mr Watson maybe, if he could not buy his own two children, he might even yet have to ‘get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them’. Was not that a more likely outcome for Jim than more ‘howling adventures amongst the Injuns’ as planned by those youngsters, Huck and Tom?

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , December 1974 , pp. 339 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 Jim is deliberately detached, too, from the nigger minstrel tradition. For though he is recalled as ‘singing’ (in Huck's dark travail of the soul in Pikesville), none of his songs are quoted. He merely carries around ‘a coase comb en a piece o' paper, en a juice-harp’. [jew's-harp].

2 All adjectives and phrases in inverted commas are drawn from Lamplugh, George R.'s study of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly, Scribner's Monthly /The CenturyGoogle Scholar, and Scribner's Magazine in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ‘The Image of the Negro in Popular Magazine Fiction, 1875–1900’, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 57 (April, 1972).Google Scholar

3 In another set of dialect stories, written by Twain's rival in this field, Harris, Joel Chandler: ‘The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann’, Scribner's Magazine, 1899.Google Scholar

4 Unlike Indians, who turned the bottom of their feet towards the blaze. Cf. that Louisiana race theorist, Dr Samuel A. Cartwright, on nigger hotheads: ‘Negroes glory in a close, hot atmosphere; they instinctively cover their head and faces with a blanket at night, and prefer laying with their heads to the fire instead of their feet’. Natural History of the Prognathous Species of Mankind, 1857.Google Scholar

5 Emphatically underlined in the manuscript, with marginal comment: ‘ This expression shall not be changed’.

6 Thar nigger-hater, Pap Finn (fl., c. 1790–c. 1835), must have been of the same boisterous, hard-drinking Jacksonian generation of Southern roustabouts and gamblers, who struck out west after the War of 1812, as that legendary keelboatman, Mike Fink: ‘I can use up Injens by the cord, I can swallow niggers whole, raw or cooked … Whoop! holler, you varmints … or I'll jump right straight down yer throats, quicker nor a streak o'greased lightening can down a nigger's!’

7 Bk. 1, ch. 3 (1941).

8 Cf. Frederick Douglass's Baltimore master in full cry: ‘If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do.’ Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, 1845, ch. 6.Google Scholar

9 Melville, Herman, Benito Cereno, 1855.Google Scholar

10 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876, ch 2.Google Scholar

11 The name itself is, of course, an apt enough joke for that ‘drunk’ layabout. But the defunct title (of the Egerton family) suggests other connotations – both moral and practical – even more apposite for Twain's purposes. Francis Egerton, third and last Duke of Bridge-water (1736–1803), employed James Brindley to construct a ten-mile canal, part way by aqueduct, from his colliery at Worsley to Manchester. Opened in 1761, this was the first canal built in England entirely independent of a natural stream. The last Duke of Bridge-water, incidentally, never married, never even allowing a woman servant to wait on him. Immensely wealthy at his death, he had almost bankrupted himself in the construction of the Manchester-Liverpool canal, opened in 1772. Equally celebrated is Francis Henry Egerton, eighth Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829), who in his will bequeathed £8,000 for the best work on ‘The Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation’. The sum was divided between eight authors whose collected essays became known as the Bridgewater Treatises.

Thus the tide, with its suggestion of both Natural Theology and canals, was doubly apt. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn too, that ironic song of the Mississippi, may well have been intended by Twain as a ninrh and last American mock-Treatise on ‘The Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation’.

12 Levin, Harry, The Power of Blackness (1958), p. 184Google Scholar.

There was no lack of claimants to the throne of Louis XVI. But Mark Twain may well have had a particular model in mind: Eleazer Williams, the half-breed Mohawk from Caughnawaga. As missionary preacher in Wisconsin, he gained considerable notoriety by mid-century through his claim to be the lost dauphin.

13 Cf. The sign ‘Sick Arab – but harmless when not out of his head’, with ch. 3‘ We Ambuscade The A-rabs’, for a deeper implication of Tom's gang warfare. Cf. The King in ‘The Royal Nonesuch’, ‘a-prancing out on all fours, naked … painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow.’ Cf. The Duke and Dauphin on the raft: ‘just about dead broke … and dreadful blue and desperate’.

14 Cf. Fitzhugh, George, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters, 1857.Google Scholar

15 Though this recognition, of course, is roused on the wrong occasion! Thus the equally Southern volte-face: ‘You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for'em.’ Cf. Sister Hotch-kiss, Brer Hightower and Brother Marples vying to outbid each other in slandering the innocent Phelps slaves with collusion in Jim's escape.

16 ‘… and Jim was pleased most to death’ (Chapter the Last). The sum is symbolically so essential for Twain that he has to add an explanation why the ‘old fellow … sold out his chance’ of the $200 reward, after having squeezed every last cent out of the Wilks household.

17 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ch. 25.

18 To be replaced by Nat – superstitious, ‘good-natured, chuckle-headed’ Nat, the lovable nigger with twists of thread in his hair, who will not touch the witch-pie ‘f'r ten hund'd thous'n billion dollars’ and plays the abject minion to Mars Tom: ‘Will you do it honey? – will you? I'll wusshup de groun' und’ yo' foot, I will I' – as Huck had once proposed before Jim.

19 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ch. 6.

20 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, ch. 23.Google Scholar

21 The insistent and fanciful rhetoric of Tom's address is wholly Southern. For the ‘animal’ who ‘wouldn't think of hurting a person that pets him’, on the usual authority of such fables, is of course the Negro. As Huck put it: ‘everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger…’ When inverted, therefore, as here to relationships of blacks and whites, even crazier ironies resound.

Roused from his animal fantasies, the Southerner reacted both ruthlessly and sentimentally. In the rhymes of a hit lyric of that period:

The last link is broken that bound me to thee,

And the words I have spoken have rendered me free;

That bright glance misleading on others may shine,

Those eyes smil'd unheeding when tears burst from mine;

If my love was deem'd boldness that error is o'er,

I've witnessed thy coldness and prize rhee no more.

Refrain:

I have not lov'd lightly, I'll think on thee yet,

I'll pray for thee nightly till life's sun is set.

Tom's final vision of tormenting rats and snakes and spiders swarming over the chained fugitive, while he plays ‘The Last Link is Broken’ and waters ‘Pitchiola ’with his tears, could almost stand as an allegory of the black man in the Deep South after the Civil War. The final tableau ironically is of the hounded prisoner returned – hands and legs chained, guarded by guns and bull-dogs ‘till he's claimed or sold!’

22 The oath is always suspect. Cf. Huck, as an English valet, confirming a string of barefaced lies to Joanna Wilks: ‘“Honest injun, now, hain't you been telling me a lot of lies?” ‘Honest injun,” says I. “None of it at all?” “None of it at all. Not a lie in it,” says I.’

23 For just such another earlier ‘goodnatured, honest, black’ Mr Tambo on a spiritual voyage from St Louis via Cairo to New Orleans, compare Melville's ‘Black Guinea,’ the archetypal Confidence Man, His Masquerade (1857), ch. 3.Google Scholar

24 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ch. 29, ‘Huck Saves the Widow’.Google Scholar

25 ‘“For the land's sake, what is the matter with the child! he's got the brainfever as shore as you're born, and they're ozzing out!” And everybody runs to see, and she snatches off my hat, and out comes the bread and what was left of the butter ….’ ch. 40.

26 Cf. Colonel Sherburn: ‘If any real lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they–ll bring their masks ….’ ch. 22.

27 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, ch. 28.

28 Mark Twain Papers, Notebook No. 28A, c. 1895/1996.Google Scholar