Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (49 page)

Edward Said used these terms in a lecture at Columbia University in April 2000.

William Dean Howells,
My Mark Twain,
New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910, p. 101.

Jonathan Arac,
Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Randall Kennedy,
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,
New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.

Sterling Brown,
The Negro in American Fiction,
1937, reprint: New York: Atheneum, 1969, pp. 67-68.

Brown, p. 68.

Reprinted in
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,
edited by John F. Callahan, New York: Modern Library, 1995, p. 88.

Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” reprinted in
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison,
p. 112.

Conversations with Ralph Ellison,
edited by Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995, p. 172. Some of Ellison’s mixture of feeling about Twain’s creation is suggested in Ellison’s novel
Invisible Man,
New York: Vintage Books, 1972, in which a white character named Emerson, son of a company tycoon, reveals to Invisible Man a letter that has kept him running in circles. “With us it’s still Jim and Huck Finn,” Emerson says to the young black man. “A number of my friends are jazz musicians, and I’ve been around,” he goes on. “I’m Huckleberry, you see.” Thus white Emerson’s gesture of camaraderie, the moral action, must be discerned through a screen of well-meaning condescension in which Invisible Man is ironically saddled with the starkly limited role of Jim—a now-realistic, now-minstrel figure whom black readers barely recognize as one of their own. To compound the irony—and perhaps to underscore Ellison’s sense of Twain‘s—Invisible Man sees a black couple in Harlem evicted onto the pavement along with their belongings, including “a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, ’knocking bones,‘ used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-faced minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums” (p. 265). These evidences of a minstrel past, of connection to this tradition, may be distasteful, but they figure as part of black identity, too, as we recall that not only white men but black men blacked-up for minstrel shows. Distasteful as it may be, these evidences of minstrelsy are part of black American (and white American) identity.

Morrison, Toni, “Re-Marking Twain,” reprinted in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
edited by Susan K. Harris, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 377.

Green Hills of Africa,
1935, reprint: New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953, p. 22.

Plessy v. Ferguson
was decided in 1896, but the debates were alive as Twain was completing
Huckleberry Finn.

It is true that at the time of this novel’s creation, the form of music called the blues was just in the process of being created. Twain could not have modeled his narrative after the form, but he used some of its ingredients and habits of mind in the making of his work. Houston A. Baker, in
Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), might say that
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is part of a blues-
matrix—
that is, it falls within the broad network of the blues form and feeling whether it literally antedates the musical form of the blues itself or not.

This definition owes a lot to Ralph Ellison’s essay “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 1945, reprinted in
Living with Music,
edited by Robert G. O‘Meally, New York: Modern Library, 2001, pp. 101-119; and to Albert Murray’s
Stomping the Blues,
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Murray speaks of this type of American citizen in
South to a Very Old Place,
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

For this insight, I am indebted to Arac’s
Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target,
p. 34.

As Constance Rourke notes in
American Humor: A Study of the National Character
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), American storytellers, “streaming nonsense,” were nothing if not superb improvisers. Huck, and, as Rourke observes, Twain himself, certainly were also part of this brashly inventive American vernacular tradition.

Ralph Ellison,
Going to the Territory,
New York: Random House, 1986.

Bernard De Voto,
Mark Twain’s America,
1932; reprinted in
Mark Twain’s America, and Mark Twain at Work,
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967, pp. 65-66.

De Voto, p. 39.

Victor A. Doyno, “The Composition of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,”
reprinted in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
edited by Susan K. Harris, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 12.

A word that refers to military equipment. Twain’s use of it here, to describe an imaginary officer who patrols that which is officially ordained or properly sanctioned, sets the stage for unself-conscious comedy.

Exaggerated accounts of the facts.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
with its own truths tightly woven into its form, is by definition a “stretcher.”

A large barrel made to hold a ship’s supply of sugar.

The story of Moses and the bulrushes. See the Bible, Exodus 2:3-10.

Going.

Fatten up.

Cast metal, usually gold or silver and often brick-shaped.

Jewelry.

Mules domesticated for packing or hauling.

Fools.

An arrangement of bars or steps meant to prevent the escape of cattle or to force people to pass one by one through a wall or fence.

Written down, foreordained.

Beat; derives from tanning, the process of converting an animal skin into leather.

Slang for “pay” or “hand over”; from Spanish
pongale,
for “put it down.”

Bullied.

Cheap whiskey, named for the distance from which it could make a person drunk. A rod is 16.5 feet.

A violent state of mental and physical disturbance, characterized by hallucinations and trembling; induced by prolonged excessive use of alcohol.

Cheap, homemade wooden chair.

Idle talk, perhaps with a motive to deceive.

wood sized just right to build a fire.

A long, sturdy fishing line that reaches across a stream, bearing hooks hung by short lines.

Pronounced “sloo”; a place of deep mud; a marsh or swamp.

Calm water, without much current.

Starboard; the right side of a vessel.

A superstition claimed that a cannon’s explosion would erupt the dead body’s gall bladder and thus force the body to rise to the water’s surface.

According to another superstition, bread treated with mercury (“quicksilver”) and/or blessed by a preacher would float toward a drowned human body.

Baker’s bread came from a bakery; corn-pone was a meager home recipe of cornmeal, salt, and water, baked in an oven or cooked in a frying pan.

Near.

Sand, in this context, means “resolution” or “courage,” and craw means “stomach.” Huck is saying he didn’t feel very self-confident.

Slang for nervous fidgetiness, fuss, and stomachache.

Abolitionist; a participant in a political movement to bring about the end of slavery.

A portion of cheap tobacco.

Mud turtles.

Hide is the cow’s skin; tallow is the animal’s fat, used in soap, candles, and margarine.

A single-bladed jackknife designed in the eighteenth century by Russell Barlow.

A small drawstring bag carried by a woman as a pocketbook or workbag.

A metal comb typically for grooming horses.

Lively; clever; fresh.

Twain has the Negro Jim valued above Huck’s pap.

Blades on a farm machine used to sift and smooth the soil.