HUCKLEBERRY FINN He begins to show his age
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from April 1985.
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He's been holding his own recently against one group of disadvantaged with which humankind in its variations has always been afflicted: those born without a funny bone.
But I don't know if he can make it through old age. He's 100 this year, or just slightly younger than his boyhood friend, Tom Sawyer. who also is creaking at the joints. Alarmingly so.
You know Huck's story, I presume. It's mostly about a boy and a black slave on a raft. He is said to be the favorite of his creator, Mark Twain, and it's not hard to guess why.
Twain probably came closest in expressing through him the despair he felt about the human species' potential to love and understand. The current accusation that Huck was racist would be in keeping with his skepticism. Twain put the word "nigger" in Huck's vocabulary. He also had him write a letter reporting Jim, the slave, to be a runaway, but then choosing to consign himself to everlasting hell rather than mail it and betray his companion. His critics today can't separate the epithet from the deed, which is unfortunate. They miss both the message and the beauty of the novel.
That was quite a decision for a kid to make — and it got him in trouble with his first generation of readers, adult variety, 20 years after the Civil War had ended. Such thinking encouraged lawbreaking, Twain's contemporaries proclaimed.
Among those who denounced his work was. Louisa May Alcott, author (she would have insisted on "authoress") of "Little Women," "Little Men" and other books. Yet it isn't this that worries me about Huck's anniversary. My concern is that he's outliving those who can celebrate with him.
That wasn't so when I first read his books. Most of us were still barefoot boys (and girls) in the summertime then. We played his games, shared his fears and had so much trouble assimilating our acters. Even then, though, we were drifting apart. We didn't, for instance, share Huck's many superstitions although my grandmother was a storehouse of these.
My mother played mind cop after each of her visits, extracting those that Grandma might have left behind, and putting them to death. She succeeded generally - except for such things as breaking mirrors and bad luck and toads giving warts. Our friends provided too much in the way of supporting commentary to dismiss these entirely.
We played in the woods, though. as did Huck and Tom; explored caves; built rafts and floated on the wide river, skinny-dipped in ponds and creeks; told ghosts stories around a campfire; formed alliances against the goodie two-shoes; fretted through church services; swarmed noisily to wherever the action was - and probably would have been taken in hook, line and sinker by Tom Sawyer's fence scam. Sure, some of these things still go on. Not the last. Modern children have seen a thousand such ploys on television and no writer has come along to describe what has replaced Twain's scheme of things in a way that could be shared by several generations.
The swimming hole for which his friends were headed would be condemned today. More, a gang of boys on a raft on the Mississippi would have had a safety patrol boat on their lee before they got 4 feet from shore, waving life jackecs at them.
I think it's true that today's mores and technology deny our young much of their childhood. their age of innocence, which could probably best be described as a period of slow, awkward and thoroughlearning.
Crime rates aside, it's a safer world now, as a visit to Tom Sawyer's cave shows. Electricity serves there in the place of knotted cords of wood to light the way through the labyrinth. It's not as much fun, though, as peering into the blackness beyond the torchlight and having the imagination touch the unseen terrors existing there.
"She makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder." Huck protested to Tom Sawyer about the foster home in which he had been placed. "The widder eats by the bell: she goes to bed by the bell; she gets up by the bell everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."
We didn't talk like that as kids but we could interpret what Twain was saying. He has kept Huck alive as a boy we recognized for 100 years.
He also issued this "order" about that book. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished: persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." That's a reasonable note upon which to end this.
