Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (46 page)

5
(p. 23)
mustn’t ... take a child away from its father.
Twain points to the hypocrisy of this position—which ironically enforces upon Huck a cruel family situation—in light of the routine separation of black families in slavery, which the reader witnesses in chapter 27.

6
(p. 27) would a thought he was
Adam:
Huck compares his father to the biblical first man perhaps in the sense of ”as old as Adam“—that is, Pap looks as though he has been around for all of human history. Or he may be referring to the Bible, Genesis 2:6-7, which describes God’s creation of Adam: ”A mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.“

7
(p. 27) ”Call this a
govment!“:
Pap’s drunken ravings reflect positions taken by many American citizens of the nineteenth century. Certain of these issues—such as, in the next paragraph, the right of free blacks to vote—persisted deep into the twentieth century.

8
(p. 42) ”she
wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans“:
In the geography of slavery, New Orleans was an especially dreaded location. To be sold down the river to that city was to be sent with slave-dealers to the bottom of the South, at the farthest possible remove from family, then to be sold again, presumably to work in the fields.

9
(p. 71)
me reading the books:
Huck is a reader not only of school lessons but of books for pleasure. He is a great reader, too, of situations, of faces, and of people’s motives and values.

10
(p. 74)
”Den he cain’t git no situation. What he gwyne to do?“:
Here Twain directly mirrors the tradition of minstrel humor—the onstage verbal play among white actors in blackface (makeup that makes a white person appear black) enacting exaggerated versions of black language and body English. And yet the humor is irresistible. The black literary critic Sterling A. Brown cites this line as an example of Twain’s realistic presentation of the authentic nineteenth-century Southern slave. Where does the black humor end and the white imitation begin?

11
(p. 79)
”Is I
me,
or who
is I?
Is I heah, or whah
is
I? Now dat’s what I wants to know?“:
Jim’s question echoes a central concern—some would say
the
central concern—of the novel: that of identity, particularly in relation to place and time.

12
(p. 80)
he must start in and ” ‘terpret“ it:
Here Twain parodies the reader’s impulse to read too much into simple events. The twist is that Jim’s reading of events to come is not far wrong.

13
(p. 81)
so we took a smoke on it and waited:
In some editions of
Huckleberry Finn,
which was first published in 1884, a section called the ”raft passage“ or the ”raftmen’s passage“ appears following this paragraph. That section was originally part of the manuscript of
Huckleberry Finn,
but Twain inserted it into chapter 3 of
Life on the Mississippi,
published in 1883. Because of concern about matching the length of
Huckleberry Finn
with that of the highly successful
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876), the section was cut from the first edition of
Huckleberry Finn.
The present edition uses that first edition as its primary model and so maintains the cut.

14
(p. 82)
”give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell“:
An ell is an obsolete measure of length—45 inches—used in nineteenth-century England. The old expression (”give a man an inch and he’ll take an ell“) about a person taking advantage of a slight concession is racialized here to echo an American slave-owner’s watchword. These words also evoke their most famous literary use, including the slave’s own response to them, in the
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(1845). As a slave, Douglass hears his master upbraid his wife for teaching young Douglass to read: ”If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.“ For Douglass, these words had the force of revelation: ”From that moment on,“ he wrote, ”I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.“

15
(p. 87)
here was the clear Ohio water.... So it was all up with Cairo:
Having passed Cairo, Huck and Jim are heading south toward a more punishing slavery. The Ohio River was a route to freedom, with many Underground Railroad stops.

16
(p. 93)
”Pilgrim’s Progress“:
A religious allegory by John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come
(1678) was immensely popular in nineteenth-century America.

17
(p. 93)
Henry Clay’s Speeches:
Henry Clay (1777-1852) was one of the most powerful American statesmen and orators of the nineteenth-century. He served as senator and then congressman from Kentucky, and as Speaker of the House and secretary of state, and he was a candidate for the presidency. A powerful slave-holder and apologist for slavery, he devised the ”Compromise of 1850,“ a political deal that ”saved the union“ with a more rigorous Fugitive Slave Act.

18
(p. 94)
”Shall I Never See Thee More Alas“:
Here and in the following pages, Twain satirizes the period’s preoccupation with death, including the death of pets. Though expressing feelings in a manner that is often ridiculously false and grotesque, the feud between the two families—and indeed the succession of scenes of violence and death—ofiers a context for the prevalence of these sad verses and songs.

19
(p. 97)
He was well born ... worth as much in a man as it is in a horse:
One of Twain’s most frequent objects of satire was the idea of southern gentlemen and ladies whose noble goodness derives from the purity of their ancestry. The earned character that Huck and Jim possess is what counts with Twain—not money or the accidents of birth.

20
(p. 100)
”What’s a feud?“:
Huck’s innocent question, and the ones that follow, shed light on the absurdity of this particular feud and feuding in general. A word with medieval European roots, ”feud“ means active hatred and hostility; it names a state of perpetual hostility between two families or individuals, marked by murderous assaults in revenge for prior insult or injury. This feud can suggest various lines of hostility in the world of the novel—not only between black and white but between rich and poor, North and South.

21
(p. 101)
preforeordestination:
Huck collapses two mainstays of Presbyterianism : predestination and foreordination; both refer to the idea that God has decided in advance on all matters, including whether one will go to heaven.

22
(p. 104)
cut it pretty short:
This is one of several places where Huck declines to tell his readers something that is painful for him to recall. These silences are very effective and add an air of authenticity to his first-person account, in which understatement is a kind of eloquence.

23
(p. 107)
You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft:
These words lead to the chapter in which life on the raft is celebrated in beautiful language reflecting the desire on the part of Huck and Jim to escape the trouble and violence that characterize life on the shore.

24
(p. 111)
big fat ratty-looking carpet-bags:
Made of scraps of old carpet, carpetbags grew in popularity in the 1830s and 1840s with the rapid expansion of modern modes of travel. They also came to signify Northern speculators and confidence men, scorned as ”carpetbaggers,“ who saw the South as a place where they could easily make money.

25
(p. 112)
mesmerism and phrenology:
Mesmerism, developed in the late eighteenth century, was an early system of hypnotism that became discredited as a medical practice and was relegated to comic sideshows and fantastic exhibitions. Developed around 1800, phrenology is the study of the regions and shapes of the human skull to determine an individual’s characteristics and mental faculties; it also was reduced to a fortune-teller’s trick and sideshow act.

26
(p.
122) picture of a runaway nigger ... ”$200 reward“ under it.
The traveling conmen get set to use a ruse aimed at African Americans, slave and free. The conmen would print a small poster advertising someone black as a runaway, and then capture and sell that person. The handbill serves as ”evidence“ of the person’s status.

27
(p. 123)
lit his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart:
Mention of this play offers an understated allusion to the story of family feud and secret love in chapter 18. The paragraphs that follow reflect the longstanding tradition in the United States—in the cities and on the frontier, often in serious productions—of presenting Shakespeare’s works as grotesquely gnarled and reduced travesties.

28
(p. 124)
”the Highland fling
or the
sailor’s hornpipe“:
The Highland fling, a Scottish social dance in which the arms and legs are moved with great vigor, was transported to American social dances and theatrical stages, including minstrel shows. The sailor’s hornpipe is a spirited dance usually performed by a single person, originally to the accompaniment of a hornpipe, a wind instrument consisting of a wooden or bone pipe with finger holes, a bell, and a horn mouthpiece. Beginning in the eighteenth century, sailor’s hornpipes were occasionally performed on American stages, where, lest they seem too low or rude, the dances were offered as part of a ”lecture.“

29
(p. 133)
bucks and wenches:
In the colloquial language of slavery in the United States, whites used these terms to refer to African-American males and females.

30
(p. 134)
”If any real lynching’s going to be done, ... Southern fashion“:
Expressing his views about the rarity of human courage, even in the face of outrageous injustice, Twain registers his disdain for the odious American practice of lynching—executing someone accused of a crime without legal due process. While women and men, black and white, were victims of lynch mobs, in the period following slavery black men were most often the ones killed in this way.

31
(p. 142)
He was thinking about his wife ... does for their’n:
In this sentence, and the ones concluding this chapter, the reader gains a sense of Jim as someone’s husband and father, and perhaps recalls Jim’s fervent intention to free his wife and children.

32
(p. 142)
good nigger.
This phrase, part of the colloquial language of slavery, generally referred to a slave’s dependability as a loyal servant or as a work-horse. But here Huck means that Jim is a man for whom his admiration and sympathies are genuine and profound.

33
(p. 158)
”better ’n we treat our niggers?“:
This was an important question for those debating the American slavery system. One irony of the nineteenth century was the presence of former slaves—including, for a time, Frederick Douglass—in England and on the European continent, extolling the freedom of the Old World and blasting the slave system in ”the land of the free.“

34
(p. 181)
’You and your brother ... sign your names”:
The effort to prove identity with physical evidence fascinated Twain and is aptly used in
Huckleberry Finn,
a novel of disguises, masquerades, and trickery. The author would use a similar plot device again in his novel
The Tragedy of Pudd‘nhead Wilson
(1894), in which fingerprints are brought forward in court to prove an identity.

35
(p. 201)
‘No’m. Killed a nigger“:
This is the most famous statement of racial prejudice in the novel. As Huck manipulates the scene he is setting with another ”stretcher,“ Twain’s satirical knife is swift and sharp.

36
(p. 216)
”Baron Trenck ... none of them heroes?“:
Franz, Freiherr von der Trenck (1711-1749) was an Austrian officer and adventurer. Giovanni Casanova (1725-1798) was a Venetian adventurer and author. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was an Italian sculptor, metalsmith, and author. Henry IV (1553- 1610) was king of France from 1589 to 1610. These well-known historical figures all escaped from prison in dramatic fashion.

37
(p. 232)
come over from England... one of them early ships:
Twain mocks the American impulse to claim an exalted lineage based on descent either from those who sailed to the New World on the
Mayflower,
which arrived at Plym- outh Colony from England in 1620, or from someone else grandly historical. William the Conqueror was king of England from 1066 to 1087.

38
(p. 233)
”On the scutcheon ... you and me“:
Huck and Tom start to create for Jim a coat of arms, employing some of the terms of heraldry, a medieval institution in which noble individuals and families displayed their insignia. When collections of these symbols were embroidered on the coats worn over the chain mail of knights, they became known as coats of arms. The symbols, called charges, are displayed on a shield known as an escutcheon; a bend is a diagonal band across the shield, a fess is a band across the middle, and a chief is a band at the top.