The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (10 page)

Huckleberry Finn
is in this respect a bitter indictment of our social conscience, “the unerring monitor,” as he called it. It looks at how ordinary and decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity and voluntary blindness of decent, ordinary people, those who go to church and volunteer for good works and yet can easily turn, as they do in
Huck Finn,
into a murderous mob? It might have been this question that gave
Huck
such a dramatic sense of urgency when I taught it in those violent revolutionary days in Iran.

Twain remembered his own mother, who, like the Widow Douglas or Aunt Sally, was “kind-hearted and compassionate” but “was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation.” When acting on her instincts, she impulsively took the victim’s side, seemingly unaware of the contradictory nature of her actions and feelings. In his
Autobiography,
Twain mentions a small slave boy, Sandy, who came from Maryland and had no friends or family. As a young boy, he was bothered by Sandy’s incessant singing and complained about it to his mother. “Poor thing,” she told him, “when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it.” Twain remarks, “It was a simple speech . . . but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.”

As a child, Twain recalls, “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. . . . We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” From one of the slaves on the farm where he grew up, he learned the language and the mesmerizing power of stories. The best on that farm was “Uncle Dan’l,” “whose sympathies were wide and warm and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.” He explains, “He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as ‘Jim,’ and carted him all around—to Hannibal, down the Mississippi on a raft, and even across the Desert of Sahara in a balloon—and he has endured it all with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were his birthright. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.”

In real life, Samuel Clemens befriended Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and paid for the tuition of Warner McGuinn, who was among the first black students to study law at Yale. “The shame is ours, not theirs,” he wrote in his letter to the dean of the Yale Law School in 1885, “& we should pay for it.”

There were many ways of fighting slavery, from attempting to change the laws to preaching to shaming the slave owners to taking up arms. One way was to write from a silenced and traumatized perspective, which in itself was an act of insubordination and great daring. Memoirs by former slaves, both biographies and fictional accounts, are heartbreaking, reclaiming as they do mutilated and confiscated lives. But the monstrous reality weighed too heavily on their fictional narratives. Their language, often sentimental and formal, cannot adequately give voice to characters, or express their individual burdens. Decades would pass before slave narratives developed the language and the form necessary to escape from the strictures of an authority that not only dominated their reality but also interfered with their imagination. (Notwithstanding the occasional hidden gem, like an astonishing book discovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., called
Our Nig,
by Harriet E. Wilson, that in some ways could be considered a companion to
Huck Finn
.)

And then, of course, there was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
published in 1852. Despite its defects as a novel,
Uncle Tom
touched the hearts of millions of readers. Henry James said it was as if “a fish, a wonderful, leaping fish, had simply flown through the air.” It was so effective in stirring up emotion that more than a century later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, my daughter, after finishing the book, woke up every morning for a whole week crying for the death of Uncle Tom and his little friend Eva.

Unlike
Huck Finn,
which challenges all authority, perhaps especially that of religion, most of the fictional slave narratives were “Christian” in tone and message. In one sense, of course, they offered up an alternative view of Christianity, challenging slave owners and their preachers to defend and justify slavery. In this sense,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and novels by African Americans such as
Iola Leroy
claim Christianity and make it their own. As Edmund Wilson writes in
Patriotic Gore,
which Paul Berman described to me as “wrong analysis, great portraits,” Uncle Tom himself is a true example of Christian charity, turning the other cheek. His triumph lies in his refusal to become vengeful like his white masters.

It is interesting that the two protagonists in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
are also a slave and a young child, as if only a child not yet tainted by “conscience” or trained to hate by society can truly empathize with a slave. Eva, unlike Huck, is not a vagrant but the beautiful daughter of Tom’s new master, whom he loved “as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine.” We are told he “half believed,” when he first saw her, “that he saw one of the angels stepped out of his New Testament.” Tom meets Eva St. Clare on a riverboat headed down the Mississippi River, and the bond between them is based on their good hearts and love of the Bible. Eva’s kindness and friendship make Tom’s separation from his family seem easier. Unlike Huck, Eva does not change much over the course of the story: she is pure and constantly questions the condition of slaves. On her deathbed, she requests that her father free all the family slaves.

As powerful as
Uncle Tom
is, it was written for a political and social purpose, and it shows. Rather than let the characters do the work, Harriet Beecher Stowe intervenes and desperately at times tries to persuade the reader of the heinous nature of slavery. And while she portrays many characters forcefully, she cannot resist giving “white attributes” to her black characters. Little Eva, the most important character in the novel after Tom, is also the weakest. She never quite wholly acquires flesh and blood and is a little irritating, reminding us of just how earthy and real Huck Finn is. He does not play on our sentiments, but stirs our hearts in ways we had never imagined possible.

Stowe was quick to say that she was seduced by ideas; stories were for her a vehicle through which to present those ideas to incite action. Twain was attracted to ideas when he could turn them into stories. She wanted to change the world, while he challenged the world by creating an alternative reality. After touring St. Paul’s Cathedral during a trip to London in 1872, Twain wrote in his notebook: “Expression—expression is the thing—in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.”

Although from the moment they meet, Jim depends on Huck for his life and freedom, in more ways than one Huck’s own freedom and life depend on Jim. This is not only because Jim looks after Huck and helps him find food and shelter but also because he is the first person to see Huck after his staged death, and so in one sense he resurrects him. Like the rest of us, Huck needs to be seen in order to exist. Later, he discovers that he needs to feel, to empathize with others, in order to become more fully himself. All through their adventures, Huck finds his own moral compass with the help of Jim. As soon as they meet under new circumstances, Jim is transformed from Miss Watson’s “nigger” to his best mate as they go from “he and I” to “we.”

With his resurrection, Huck’s hitherto hidden qualities come to the surface as he gradually transforms from Tom Sawyer’s second-in-command and Miss Watson’s reform project into a responsible individual, one who knows how to face danger, how to take care of himself and his mate. Their relationship proves the truth of Twain’s maxim that “Lincoln’s proclamation . . . not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also.”

Jim is the most orphaned character in the story, as his whole race has been abducted from its home and subjected to a permanent state of orphanhood—a fact that adds poignancy to his escape in search of the family he has been torn from. While living as Miss Watson’s slave, Jim has no identity of his own. He and Huck need to leave the territory ruled by oppressive conventions in order to become real to each other and true to themselves. In this new territory, for the first time Jim becomes a whole human being, a father and a husband, an individual with a heart and a past. Until he and Huck discovered each other, no white person had ever acknowledged that. Just as Jim resurrects Huck, Huck resurrects Jim.

In all respects, Jim is different from the white people Huck has left behind. He questions the system of beliefs sanctioned by religious and social authorities, and he is the only individual with whom Huck has genuine exchanges. Despite their lack of articulateness, their fresh, unconventional and unsophisticated views reveal far more than we can glean from any other character in the book.

Some critics and academics in America have questioned Twain’s presentation of Jim, especially his superstition, which they feel is insulting. It is true that Jim is deeply superstitious: to him, both the animate and inanimate worlds are full of magical signs and symbols, encrypted messages from on high. For those of us who have lost our power to perceive the world magically, this might appear to be a negative point, a sign of his inferiority. And yet Jim’s superstition is not like Miss Watson’s religion—a rigid dogma, a set of rituals used as bargaining chips to secure a future place in heaven. His magical thinking is a key to his survival in a terrible world over which he has no control. Jim’s magic is designed not to harm others but to protect them, just as it protects him.

Between Tom’s manipulative fakeries, Pap’s rants and raves, the duke and the dauphin’s molestations of language to cheat decent people out of their livelihoods, and the pious Miss Watson’s stories about heaven and hell, everyone in this book is in the business of making up stories, but is there anyone among them who is more genuine and true to his heart than Jim? It turns out that this uneducated man is far more learned when it comes to matters of the heart than the educated guardians of morality and has far more common sense. Ignorance of the heart, in this book, is the greatest sin.

Huck’s relationship with Jim provides his wandering with a legitimate meaning and purpose. In fact, by choosing the most dangerous company possible, that of a runaway slave, Huck goes not just against the values of the small town he has left behind but against his own better judgment. With Jim, the real adventures of Huckleberry Finn begin. Away from the authority of the white masters, away from the house that enslaves Jim and oppresses Huck, they create a world with their own rules.

As they navigate, observing the “lonesomeness of the river,” they are constantly threatened by the danger and violence that emanate like poisonous fumes from the land and its “smothery houses”: the feuding between the seemingly civilized and churchgoing Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, the cold-blooded and open killing of a helpless drunk, seething mob anger, the tarring and feathering of the duke and the dauphin. Charlatans, murderers and decent, God-fearing people will all hunt down runaway slaves. These events gather to create a symphony of savagery and fear, variations on human cruelty and brutality, inviting us to agree with Huck that “it was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.”

From its first to its last page,
Huck Finn
shows us that everything that is accepted as the norm, as respectable, is in essence not normal or respectable. It is a book in which “educated” people are the most ignorant, stealing is “borrowing,” people with “upbringings” are scoundrels, goodness is heartless, respectability stands for cruelty, and danger lurks, most especially at home. It is a book in which being “white” is not a badge of honor and you will go to hell if you do the right thing. In fact, apart from Huck himself and the three orphan sisters whose inheritance he tries to preserve, there is hardly a white character in the book who does not do something either despicable or idiotic. Each time Huck wonders how someone like Jim can be so “white,” he is denying that the values of humanity and decency are in fact “white” and suggesting that perhaps their rightful owner is a slave named Jim.

While there is a great deal of violence in the book, not once does Twain show us a physical act of violence against a slave. Perhaps this is because it would take away from the deeper violence, the humiliation and annihilation of a person that results from refusing to acknowledge him as a human being, the desire to generalize him out of existence, to deny him human feelings and emotions. Within the confines of this upside-down world, the only way for Huck and Jim to survive is to be dead, which is why, all through their journey, they conceal their real identities and take on various disguises. Yet the book is not about the search for identity; it is about the necessity of hiding one’s true self.

This flight and violence and obfuscation presented us, in Tehran, with a startling similarity to our own lives. Farah and I knew something about this, because in those post-revolutionary days we all went underground and learned to hide our true selves. When you live in an authoritarian state, to remain alive you have to pass yourself off as someone else. Jim and Huck break every possible rule by lying, cheating and stealing. But we believe them to be good and true. So they force us to question and reexamine what we would consider to be basic, unchanging moral principles: Under what conditions might it be right to lie, to break the law, to cheat, to blaspheme?