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Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices

African American Review, Spring, 1995 by Pascal Covici, Jr.

From Ernest Hemingway and Ralph Ellison to the Reconstruction era in general and the convict-hire system that helped make Reconstruction so unconstructive for so many, and from the black and white writers of Twain's time, and earlier, to William Faulkner and various efforts, black as well as white, to get the South and the matter of race stated, this compact volume moves from its initial insight into the cadences of Jimmy's speech as Twain recreated them on the page, first for Livy and then for the New York Times, to a consideration of what Twain's Huck owes to the real-life Jimmy. Not just language, but specific strategies of evasion and - more important - a sense of human community, of real brotherhood, Professor Fishkin traces persuasively to the generic black voice that Twain knew as a child and valued as an adult: "Black Africans, he wrote, in Following the Equator, 'should have been crossed with Whites. It would have improved the Whites and done the Natives no harm.'"

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In what for me is the only, very tiny, shortcoming in her argument, the author answers the question "How 'black' is Huck's speech?" with minimal attention to the issue of oral as opposed to written narrative. She makes excellent use of Richard Bridgman's The Colloquial Style in America, and her explication of the differences between the narrative style of George Washington Harris's "Sut Lovingood" yarns - despite their brutally colloquial vocabulary - and of Huck's story clarifies spectacularly one's sense of each. But she had a golden opportunity to explore the value to Twain of the language of an essentially oral culture (that of illiterate blacks) as it preserves and explores values destroyed, or at least denigrated, in the thought patterns that accompany literacy. Perhaps she will explore more fully the matter of orally transmitted culture in her promised full-scale return to the general issue of black voices in American, presumably "white," literature. This is a large and complex issue, and probably she was right in leaving it alone in this initial foray. Anyone who would understand the ideals of black community as reflected in Huck's unanalytical, concrete, and activity-loaded language will be in her debt, however, if she returns to it in the near future. What Eric Havelock has done for the contrasting intellectual styles of Homer and, e.g., Plato, Professor Fishkin is in a perfect position, now, to do for the black and white cultures of America, and for the blending of the two.

What emerges as "Twain's final subversion of racial categories" in Huck's adventures may well have been more a matter of Twain's intuitive grasp of the ways of an oral culture, the culture reflected in the black characteristics of Huck's speech, than of any coherent racial stance on Twain's part. In fact, Professor Fishkin joins a number of recent readers in expressing a startled wonderment at the curious fact that the author who could present Jim's magnificently selfless nurturing of the despicable Tom Sawyer (after Tom has been wounded as a result of his own asinine and cruel, as well as cruelly unnecessary, "escape" plot) also chose "passages that strike readers today as most redolent of the minstrel show" as among those with which he most liked "to entertain audiences during readings from the 1880s through the 1890s."

These are murky waters, and this was not the volume in which to explore them fully. It is, in any case, in precisely this matter of cultural difference and amalgamation that Professor Fishkin has many of her most interesting insights. I cannot say that the fourth and longest section of the book is far more interesting or amazing than any of the first three, for "Jimmy," "Jerry," and "Jim," both collectively and individually, added immensely to my knowledge of Twain's art, of black speech as transcribed onto the printed page, and of values and attitudes explicated in and implied by that speech. The title of the exhilarating fourth section, "Break Dancing in the Drawing Room," as the author says, "can serve as a nice metaphor for Twain's behavior as an artist in Huckleberry Finn." In addition to clarifying the ways in which Twain's book flouts cultural taboos, section four explicates Twain's sense of the authority that the spoken word can take on, demonstrates the black influence on allegedly white American literature, and concludes an earlier argument for adding more black voices to the curricula of our colleges and high schools - not on the grounds of "political correctness" but for the sake of historical and cultural insight and understanding.

These threads play back and forth across all sections of the book. Briefly, and with a distorting simplicity, I shall try to summarize them, beginning with the well-documented sense of Twain as having been caught up in efforts to "belong" to the genteel, and racist, society of the polite East at the same time that his intuitions and experience led him into rebellion, mostly covert but often not. Putting the public reception of Huck's book into the context of genteel expectations, Fishkin makes masterful use of some choice excerpts from contemporary reviews. On the one hand, according to one of the Concord Library Committee members responsible for banning Adventures from the Library shelves, "The whole book is of a class that is far more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people. . . ." On the other hand, an anonymous reporter in the Boston Globe, recognizing "the library's position that the book was 'too coarse' for a place among the classic tomes that educate and edify the people," cut to the heart of the genteel matter with the ironic advice to "Mark" that when he "writes another book he should think of the Concord School of Philosophy and put in a little more whenceness of the hereafter among his nowness of the here." With even more disregard for the proprieties than he had shown in his 1876 destruction of his narrator's conscience (in "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut") and in the 1877 "Whittier Birthday Speech," Twain had tried to pull black speech into the drawing room, had tried to substitute slave-quarter break dancing for white formality and propriety.

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices

African American Review, Spring, 1995 by Pascal Covici, Jr.

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