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Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices
MELUS, Fall, 1995 by Randall Knoper
Fishkin focuses her argument first by concentrating on the similarities between Huck's voice and the voice of a young black character named Jimmy, the title character of a very short sketch Twain published in 1874. While this choice gives her a sharp focus, as her argument falls into the contours of an influence study, she risks obscuring the larger and more cogent point about Twain's culture and its racial mixing. In Fishkin's effort to demonstrate that the voice of Jimmy "became a model for the voice with which Twain would change the shape of American literature" (15), she lays out a variety of interesting linguistic similarities (though many of these, it seems - repetition, frequent use of the conjunction "and," frequent use of double negatives, and so on - could be said to characterize other pieces by Twain, including, say, his famous "Jumping Frog" sketch). But as the concerns turn to whether Jimmy actually existed, whether Twain's meeting with Jimmy might have taken place as he described it, and where Jimmy may have lived, the importance of Jimmy and the slight sketch he appears in loom too large, and the more persuasive understanding - that Huckleberry Finn emerged from exceedingly complex and untraceable cultural circumstances, including uncountable interracial exchanges, borrowings, and thefts - sinks out of sight. Ultimately, even when Fishkin acknowledges that Twain knew many black speakers and had a rich memory-store of African American language, she is anxious to "prove" her "discovery" that Jimmy crystallized these memories, that Jimmy reconnected Twain to the black speakers he had known as a child, and that Jimmy inspired him to use that linguistic repertoire to create Huck. If Twain himself seems to have made nothing of Jimmy as a source or influence, Fishkin declares, it must have been because he was unconscious of the importance for his art of this boy's language.
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The first section of the book is titled "Jimmy." The next section, titled "Jerry," tries to anchor aspects of Twain's writing, even more tenuously, in a young African American whom Twain mentions in "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1901). All we know about Jerry is that he was "gay and impudent and satirical," that he imitated the pulpit style of village clergymen, and that he believed that "whar a man gits his corn-pone" determines his opinions. From this Fishkin imagines Jerry's "sermon" as an instance of "signifying" - a performance, she explains, that marks distinctions between its surface meaning and real meaning - and she concludes that "Jerry's sermon certainly preaches the message that whoever accepts at face value the meaning of the words will be misled" (60). Here, again, the important and persuasive general points - that Twain understood and mimicked African American signifying, and that he partook of various (and multi-racial) trickster traditions - lose some of their force as they are overshadowed by the hard-to-defend assertion that Jerry taught these things to Twain, and Jerry "awakened Twain to the power of satire as a tool of social criticism" (4).
Fishkin does periodically back away from the overstatements of the importance of Jimmy and Jerry; she notes repeatedly that many such voices undoubtedly had an impact on Twain and his art (7, 33, 58). And Fishkin's cogent points about the importance to Mark Twain of African American language and culture do come through; they of course are not completely overshadowed by the argument about the influence of Jimmy and Jerry. But the impulse to simplify Twain's history of racial exchange lessens the analytical power of the book. Fishkin's fruitful and insightful efforts at complicating and enlarging our understanding of the conditions of Twain's creativity - by adding African American influences to the mix - conflict with her simplified vision of the particular sources and origins of Twain's writing. She criticizes as "reductive" those narrower genealogies that trace a black tradition and a white tradition, with no crossing of the color boundary, because they do not acknowledge what Werner Sollors calls "the pervasiveness of cultural syncretism in America" (141); the same sort of principle ought to preclude the clear lineage she traces from Jimmy and Jerry to Huck Finn.
A similarly simplifying tendency mars Fishkin's discussion of the connection between Twain's writing and minstrelsy, particularly the question of whether Jim is a minstrel stereotype. While she helpfully challenges the familiar conclusion that Jim is a simple minstrel image, and that he is therefore simply racist, she does this primarily by arguing that much of Jim is taken instead directly from African American culture. That is, she tends to keep intact a dichotomy between racist minstrelsy and authentic African American folk tradition. It would have been better for her to take her cue again from Ralph Ellison, who told her in an interview that minstrelsy, along with demeaningly racist images, brought accurate African American vernacular speech into mainstream culture (90). It would have been better to acknowledge not only that African American traditions and language surface in both Huck and Jim, but also that they could as easily have come through minstrelsy as from actual, particular blacks.
