[PEN-L:33506] Re: Huck Finn

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> > Just for accuracy's sake. I suppose some label racist for that reason,
> > but the feature of the book focused on by those who read it is not the
> > language but that last terrible section in which Tom Sawyer frees Jim.
> > Try to imagine a book in which two black men subject a white woman to
> > such humiliation in the process of helping her escape from a gang of
> > black hoodlums.
>
> Wo. You're talking about the great American novel here. If I
> remember right, the "humiliation" is Tom's idea and when Huck finds
> out about it, he's pretty disgusted and takes off with
> Jim....westward. It seemed pretty clear to me that Twain means for
> the reader to feel disgusted by Tom.
>
> Joanna

No.  In the "Evasion" chapters, Twain has Huck, mistaken by Sally for
Tom Sawyer, continue to act "Tom Sawyer."  Then, Tom arrives and
talks Huck into going along with his plan of pretending to be his
younger brother Sid Sawyer and (together with Huck who is playing
Tom) "invent[ing] all the difficulties" to make stealing Jim more
adventurous.  Twain, through his ironic double voice, allows the
reader to understand both Huck's naive response to Tom's plan and
Twain's own critical comment on the failure of reconstruction
allegorized by it (in other words, "disgust" is Twain's, not Huck's):

*****   Mark Twain, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, Chapter 34

..."My plan is this," I [Huck] says. "We can easy find out if it's
Jim in there. Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft
over from the island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the
key out of the old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off
down the river on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running
nights, the way me and Jim used to do before. Wouldn't that plan
work?"

"Work? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it's
too blame' simple; there ain't nothing to it. What's the good of a
plan that ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as
goose-milk. Why, Huck, it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking
into a soap factory."

I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different;
but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got his plan ready it
wouldn't have none of them objections to it.

And it didn't. He told me what it was, and 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....   *****

In the end, Huck doesn't take off with Jim; Huck "light[s] out for
the Territory" _by himself_, leaving Jim and everyone behind.
Remember, Jim has his wife and two children who are still slaves in
the novel's end.  Jim talked about _his_ plan in Chapter 16:

*****   ...Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to
myself. He was 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, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned
on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both
work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them,
they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk
such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in
him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the
old saying, "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." Thinks I,
this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I
had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and
saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man
I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm....   *****

In the last chapter of the novel, after making Jim endure a
life-threatening ordeal, chased by farmers with guns and dogs on
account of his prank letter that "There is a desprate gang of
cut-throats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your
runaway nigger to-night," Tom gives "Jim forty dollars for being
prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good."  Huck says that
"Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says: 'Dah, now,
Huck, what I tell you? -- what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan'? I
tole you I got a hairy breas', en what's de sign un it; en I tole you
I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin en it's come true; en
heah she is! Dah, now! doan' talk to me -- signs is signs, mine I
tell you; en I knowed jis' 's well 'at I 'uz gwineter be rich agin as
I's a-stannin' heah dis minute!'"  There is a tragic irony in the
phrase "pleased most to death."  The reader can only hope that Jim
could at least use the forty dollars to help buy back his wife and
children.  Forty dollars wouldn't have been enough, though:

*****   "Stand up and Sound off!!"
The Illicit Slave Trade
Chapter Four of "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at
the Slavery Issue"

by Lawrence R. Tenzer
October/November 2001

...The average daily income of a person prior to 1850 was under one
dollar and after 1850 not much over that. With this in mind, the
monetary value of slaves can be put into perspective. Antebellum
statisticians Henry Chase and C. H. Sanborn published an analysis
which calculated that in 1850 the average price for a slave was $400,
more money than many ordinary people would earn in a year. Some
slaves were worth more and some less, but with prices in the hundreds
of dollars, even slave children were worth a lot of money. Frederic
Bancroft has studied slave prices extensively and states, "Between
1830-1860, according to the year and the region, each babe in arms
added from $100 to $200 or more to the value of its slave mother....
In the 'fifties, average boys or girls from 8 to 12 years old would
bring at least $400 or $500; the best sometimes more than twice that
much." Ulrich B. Phillips has done extensive work on slave prices and
charted his findings (hereafter referred to as the Phillips chart).
As noted, the prices given are for prime field hands (unskilled young
men), but Phillips adds that "artisans often brought twice as much as
field hands of similar ages, prime women generally brought
three-fourths or four-fifths as much as prime men; boys and girls
entering their teens, and men and women entering their fifties,
brought about half of prime prices for their sexes; and infants were
generally appraised at about a tenth or an eighth of prime. The
average price for slaves of all ages and both sexes, furthermore, was
generally about one-half of the price for male prime field hands."
As can be seen from the Phillips chart, in 1860 at the peak of the
slave trade, the price of a male prime field hand was $1,800 in New
Orleans and middle Georgia, $1,200 in Virginia, and about $1,250 in
Charleston. Remarkable but true, it may be said that when slave
prices were at their highest, one prime male slave had a cash value
comparable to what a day laborer might earn in three to four years!
Certainly, carpenters and others in the skilled trades earned higher
wages, lesser quality slaves brought lower prices, and all slave
prices were lower prior to 1860. Even with these factors taken into
consideration, the real monetary value slaves had becomes apparent
when slave prices throughout the antebellum period are compared with
the annual wages people were paid during that time.

<http://www.multiracial.com/readers/tenzer4.html>  *****

Would Jim be able to buy his family, live with them, and prosper?
Would Huck give him any part of the "six thousand dollars and more"
that he managed to hide from Pap and that is now safely in his hands,
now that Pap's dead?  The novel does not say.  The title of the last
chapter is "Nothing More to Write."
--
Yoshie

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