Dat truck dah is trash.
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Ford Maddox Ford, the late modernist, is credited with coming up with the “Page 99” test: he said one can tell the quality of any novel by looking at page 99. This is now my go-to strategy when browsing in the bookstore, and it has become my hack for author reading events (because it is impossible to decide what to read at such an event since obviously, I want you to read the whole book) — why not start with the 99th page?
I dropped in on page 99 of that old favorite, Huck Finn while writing my lecture last week. It is the last page of chapter 15:
Huck Loses the Raft.—In the Fog.—Huck Finds the Raft.—Trash.
At this point in the book, Huck and Jim have had many adventures on the raft, and made it a far way down the Mississippi River. They think they’re near the mouth of the Ohio River at Cairo when a fog rolls in, so thick it obscures everything for “20 yards.” They lose each other, with Huck on the canoe and Jim on the raft. It’s dangerous since neither of them can navigate the snags and trees that threaten to tear their boats apart. They whoop and try to find one other. It’s a long night.
If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it once—you’ll see.
At dawn, Huck finds his way to Jim and finds him asleep. Once he has tied himself up safely, Huck decides to play a joke on Jim:
When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar. The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. So she’d had a rough time.
I made fast and laid down under Jim’s nose on the raft, and began to gap, and stretch my fists out against Jim, and says:
“Hello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn’t you stir me up?”
“Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead—you ain’ drownded—you’s back agin? It’s too good for true, honey, it’s too good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o’ you. No, you ain’ dead! you’s back agin, ’live en soun’, jis de same ole Huck—de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!”
“What’s the matter with you, Jim? You been a-drinking?”
“Drinkin’? Has I ben a-drinkin’? Has I had a chance to be a-drinkin’?”
“Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?”
“How does I talk wild?”
“How? Why, hain’t you been talking about my coming back, and all that stuff, as if I’d been gone away?”
“Huck—Huck Finn, you look me in de eye; look me in de eye. Hain’t you ben gone away?”
This prank seems harmless enough at first, right? Huck is a 13-year-old boy, with a thick streak of nonsense, and here is a chance to pull one over on Jim. But Jim has had an entirely different night — one filled with anxiety and mourning. He thought Huck was dead. He thought he had lost his companion and responsibility to the fog.
It’s Jim’s care and love that makes him such an indelible character, and it’s right here on the page. He’s just so effusively grateful that Huck is alive and okay. If you’ve read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all the way through, you’d know that there is no guarantee that Huck would make it out alive — the book is littered with dead children and dead bodies. It’s the Hunger Games out here. A few chapters earlier, Huck faking his death to get out of the shack where he has been locked in by his abusive drunk father is a major plot point, so, Huck's dying seems very possible. As an adult, Jim knew the danger that they were in, felt the weight of it.
And Huck, well, he doesn’t know how to love. That is what makes him such an indelible character. This boy coming into his teenage years has been living on the edge of society, on the edge of homelessness. Right when he was settled in with a kind woman, who gave him a home (with carpet!) and access to literacy, religion, “sivilization” and steady meals, his father, Pap Finn comes in through the window at night — the villain, an agent of chaos and threat. And in the moments, before Pap crawls in the window, when Huck is sitting alone thinking about his life, despair crawls in. Whether or not Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens,1835-1910) says it straight out, Huck has seen trauma, and he doesn’t know what love is. Fraternity perhaps, with his friend Tom Sawyer. But not parental love.
Jim has run away from enslavement, and Huck knows that. He also knows that there is a reward for finding Jim. Chapter 16, which starts on page 100, is all about Huck’s indecision and inner turmoil, his heaven-or-hell choice, to uphold a social contract and to return Jim, or follow his moral compass, which wants Jim to be happy and free. On the off chance that you made it through high school without reading this book, I will not give away this juicy aspect of this book. Suffice it to say, that Jim has entrusted Huck, with his life, his freedom, and his future. And Jim is effusively loving. He tells Huck about his love for his two children, left behind in slavery. He tells Huck he loves him, over and over again.
A big part of the book is taken up by Huck figuring that love out. When Huck is with Jim, he doesn't feel so alone, desperate, or suicidal. In Jim’s company, Huck is at peace, consoled, and safe.
Here on page 99, we’re still early on that journey, and like teens like to do, Huck is testing the limits of Jim’s love and trust. He looks Jim “in de eye” and lies straight to his face. He gaslights Jim until he doesn’t know what way is up:
“Well, looky here, boss, dey’s sumf’n wrong, dey is. Is I me, or who is I? Is I heah, or whah is I? Now dat’s what I wants to know.”
Toni Morrison, in her introduction to the Oxford English edition of the book in 1996, wrote that
“much of the novel's genius lies in its quiescence, the silences that pervade it and give it a porous quality that is by turns brooding and soothing”
One of those silences happens next.
“Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn’t any of it happen.”
“But, Huck, it’s all jis’ as plain to me as—”
“It don’t make no difference how plain it is; there ain’t nothing in it. I know, because I’ve been here all the time.”
Jim didn’t say nothing for about five minutes, but set there studying over it. Then he says:
“Well, den, I reck’n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain’t de powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain’t ever had no dream b’fo’ dat’s tired me like dis one.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim.”
So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable. Then he said he must start in and “’terpret” it, because it was sent for a warning.
The pause in the ruse that Huck is playing on Jim, reads over quickly. But if we linger there a moment, we get a glimpse of Jim that Huck can’t see yet. Because Huck is a white boy raised in a slave society, and somewhat ignorant at that, he paints Jim as a fool in his narration. In Huck’s narration, Jim is a minstrel clown in an ill-fitting suit, hiding, as Morrison points out, the intelligent, loving father beneath.
Jim is not a fool, and in this moment, he is “studying” the situation and trying to find a way through it, and through the power and trust dynamics that underpin this complex relationship. He tells Huck about his “dream” — the terrifying night they’ve had in actuality — and uses it to tell the future. The next paragraph accurately sketches out the rest of the book, a wink from Mark Twain for those who have read the book once through already. Here’s Morrison again:
The withholdings at critical moments, which I once took to be deliberate evasions, stumbles even, or a writer's impatience with his or her material, I began to see as otherwise: as entrances, crevices, gaps, seductive invitations flashing the possibility of meaning. Unarticulated edies that encourage diving into the novel's undertow-the real place where writer captures reader.
The flashes of meaning here capture us because we know that this father-son relationship between a white boy and black man in a slave society, this love, can only exist on the raft. As Morrison points out — it is a temporary relationship — and once they both get what they need, passage to freedom, they will separate. There is no potential for this adult friendship to continue in 1850 when the book is set, or 1880 when it was written.
When the fog clears enough for Jim to see the raft and the state it is in, Huck gives up the joke.
Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn’t seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:
“What do dey stan’ for? I’se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los’, en I didn’ k’yer no’ mo’ what become er me en de raf’. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun’, de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo’ foot, I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.”
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back.
Remember, we are still reading from Huck’s narration — the confusion he described in Jim could be real or not. But the fathering here is real. I think this is a masterclass in reprimand. Jim steps out from behind the clown suit and parents Huck: first, he shares his own emotions, how it felt to lose Huck, then he points out the harm done. He doesn’t call Huck trash, but instead, does that thing all parenting books tell us to do: don’t label the child, label the action. People who lie and embarrass their friends are trash.
Trash is a loaded word for a poor white boy living on the edge of society. “But that was enough.”
Another silence follows. Huck chooses to “humble himself” to a Black man (he uses the n-word here) with an apology in the next line, but as Morrison points out — he doesn’t record it. We don’t get the words.
Morrison put this book in her top five, Ralph Ellison said it was the “pivot” of American literature, and Ernest Hemingway said, “It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” William Faulkner called Twain the “father of American literature.” To say that this book has “Great American Novel” status is to state the obvious. I’ve seen the book read in criticism —
As a masculine escape into the wilderness, away from the moralizing dictates of society or, as Huck Finn would put it, a female-dominated “sivilization.”
As a critique of American pre-war society from the vantage point of an outsider
As a comedy, a satire, a book for boys
As a psychological novel: an awareness of the effects of trauma; reading cognitive dissonance & self-justification in the 1850s
As a frightening escape through the chaotic, terror dome of the American South in the 1850s
As American Realism, the story of ordinary persons, told in an accurate vernacular dialect with immediacy and life-likeness,
As a “declaration of independence” from capital L- Literature, like Dickens
And Huck Finn has been banned as much as it has been celebrated. I have brought it off and on my syllabi, and I am teaching it again after a few years off — and not because it wasn’t a worthy book for students of American Literature to read. I think all serious students of American Literature should read it. But the fact is, there are two key issues with the book that make it hard to teach. The first is the obvious one: the n-word is on every other page — including page 99. It takes a great deal of racial maturity for a classroom of students to manage that, and it can become uneasy for the students of color in the room. Some readers, who haven’t read this carefully, can easily mistake the narrator’s ignorance for the truth and start talking that nonsense. When I first moved to the Netherlands, I wasn’t sure how to handle it, so I gave myself a few years to read the room first. I’m glad I brought it back, mostly.
The second reason has to do with the last third of the book. *UGH* When first the Duke and the King start playing around with Jim’s personhood and freedom, and then Tom Sawyer, who straight-up plays with him like a toy, it upsets me. This is supposed to be a happy ending, but instead, it is a return to the logic of slave societies. Then, when Huck goes back to being alone and orphaned, he immediately threatens to run away. The ending of the novel is a disavowal of Huck and Jim’s real but impossible relationship. It reads like a cop-out by a humorist writer, who showed his young readers something real and then hid it away in the fog.