How it Ends

“It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a n*****.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

That’s from Chapter 32 of Huckleberry Finn.  In an unfamiliar place, unsure of his own safety, Huck has been misidentified by this middle-aged woman he doesn’t know (she turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally), so he has to make up a story to explain why he’s apparently late arriving.  A fabricated steamboat accident does the trick.  But for some reason he can’t do it without including this detail, a detail that screams “black lives don’t matter.”   And Aunt Sally affirms it. 

Huck’s gratuitously dehumanizing line makes readers wince, not just because of the awful sentiment it conveys, but because it follows hard upon the novel’s moral climax – Huck’s famous resolution to “go to hell” in order to liberate his friend Jim from slavery.   Did he have to backslide so fast?  Some readers contend that these lines couldn’t be his true feelings, that he’s just tickling the prejudices of his mark, as he typically does when he’s scamming somebody.   Maybe.  But the problem is that this instance of casual racism – whether from the heart or just a ruse - merely previews what can be read as the mother of all backslides, the last twelve chapters of the novel: rather than treating Jim's speedy liberation as the prime directive, Huck plays along with Tom Sawyer’s self-indulgent, overcomplicated, and utterly needless fantasy version of Jim’s escape.  Moreover, Twain undercuts whatever anti-racist bona fides the novel has built up by indulging in minstrelsy-style-humor at the expense of Jim and other slaves in this section.  So disappointing.

And there’s a lot to be disappointed about.  Although Twain's portrayal of black characters in general is tainted by stereotyping,  up to now he has come down hard on white bigotry against black people.  The earliest instance may be the virulently racist tirade he puts in the mouth of one of the book’s most monstrous characters, Huck’s father (Chapter 6), a self-own for the ages.  Most of all, as portrayed by Twain, Jim is plainly the most virtuous character in the novel.  In a world shot through with white villainies, the one slave we come to know, a character referred to constantly by the most odious racial epithet we've got, is more courageous, more loyal, and more humane than anyone who labels him with that word.   My two favorite Jim moments are when he chews out Huck – eloquently, indignantly, and heartbreakingly – for tricking him into believing he was dead (Chapter 15), and when he reveals to Huck his deep grief over striking his daughter for having disrespected him, not realizing she was deaf (Chapter 23).  The character at the bottom of the racial caste system is of far greater heart than any of the whites who regard themselves as his superiors.  This bitter irony, one every character in the novel, Huck included, seems blind to, is the core of Twain’s anti-racist satire.  Moreover, it is the core of Twain’s lacerating portrayal of the Southern white church:  thanks to the slavery-sanctioning organized religion he has been immersed in all his life, Huck cannot get it out of his head that in helping Jim escape, he’s become “a low-down abolitionist”, going to hell for committing a robbery.  But in Chapter 31, tempted to turn Jim in and relieve the guilt that's oppressing him, Huck recollects Jim’s many kindnesses to him and resolves to risk the fires of hell rather than return his friend to slavery.

It is a stirring moment.  Yet a matter of hours later comes his cringe-inducing conversation with Aunt Sally.   And over the next several weeks a boy who has shown a genius for escape from real danger becomes compliant with childish shenanigans that make a mere game of getting Jim out of chains.  And the author who has given Jim nobility makes a clown of him again.  It can be maddening to read. How many copies of Huckleberry Finn have been thrown across the room while readers labor through the last twelve chapters?

Explanations abound for Twain’s seeming loss of the anti-racist thread in this section.  One idea is that as much as Twain may have despised mistreatment of black people, he despised Romanticism even more, and he let his urge to mock Romantic literature and those under its spell swamp every other interest.  Another explanation concerns the circumstances of the novel’s composition.  Though set in the 1850s, Huckleberry Finn was written in the early 1880s, amid the collapse of Reconstruction and its efforts to provide civil rights for freed blacks in the South.  Whether Twain meant it to be so or not, the farce of Tom's escape plan mirrors a general white betrayal of black yearning for full freedom, one that continues to this day.   Toni Morrison speculates that the silliness of the conclusion is Twain's way of softening the blow of the inevitable rupture in any childhood white/black friendship of that era:  "Every reader knows that Jim will be dismissed without explanation at some point; that no enduring adult fraternity will emerge.  Anticipating this loss may have led Twain to the over-the-top minstrelization of Jim." 

For most readers, none of these readings really explain away what makes the conclusion feel like such a big narrative fail.  The author's reversion to demeaning jokes at Jim's expense is damning enough; can't Twain at least make Huck’s moral evolution stick?  I want Huck to be 'woke'.  But he isn't.  And maybe that's the point.  His experiences with Jim haven’t turned him into a barefoot William Lloyd Garrison.  He hasn’t realized that slavery is wicked.  There's no "I reckon I'll go dismantle me some systems of oppression."  It was easy for him to come up with that callous thing to say to Aunt Sally because that kind of thinking doesn't just evaporate after a couple of enlightening experiences.  The extent of Huck's journey on race is that he just can't bring himself to betray his friend -  that's all.  In his situation - he's barely educated, his society is arrayed against him learning to think differently about black people -  mere dedication to Jim's freedom is pretty damn good.  The problem is that he lets this avowed dedication get sidetracked by his spineless subservience to Tom Sawyer and his jackassery. To me, this failure on Huck’s part is what may give us – and by “us” I mean white readers like me - something worth holding on to from the last twelve chapters of Huckleberry Finn, especially in these times, when so many of us are vowing publicly and in our hearts to be better about race.  These chapters depict (imperfectly to be sure) what usually happens in the aftermath of a resolution to do something worthy and needful but hard, something that may put us at odds with the world and threaten our comfort.   We don’t follow through the way we should. 

To a large extent, what's wrong with the last twelve chapters of Huckleberry Finn is what's wrong with us.