Twain—White Saviors

A rare piece of good news caught me off-guard last summer. In the midst of forced deportations and military crackdowns and midnight bombings, San Diego bishop-designate Michael Pham appeared spontaneously at local immigration hearings accompanied by other faith leaders. There were eight in total, including an imam. According to the Times of San Diego, the arrival of Pham and others apparently unnerved ICE officers, who “scattered|” in the face of the delegation, and “nobody was detained” that day, even though there were “at least two white vans. . . parked on an adjacent street with no license plates but padlocks on side doors.” It’s important to note that this scene played out at the courthouse: every immigrant and refugee there was attempting to follow the rules and laws of the United States, while the ICE agents—law enforcement—were unidentified and masked.

The idea that the arrival of a few priests and holy people on the scene would be enough to drive off the secret police is shocking on face, but I guess we are all afraid of hell or something like it. Michael Pham is a Vietnamese refugee, born in Da Nang in 1967, right in the middle of the Vietnam War. He was officially installed as a bishop in San Diego on July 17.

One of the triumphs of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that Huck is the only white person in it who’s not afraid of hell. “You can’t pray a lie,” he determines, and then begins the steady process of removing himself from the slave society. This is an elegant solution, but what about the rest of us?

For a lot of years people read the novel as a story of a white savior—of a kid who helped rescue a Black man from slavery, and who learned along the way that Jim was really a person. Such a reading has caused a lot of problems; specifically, it can’t reconcile the constant use of the N-word with the novel’s happy resolution, and even though it humanizes Jim, it still reduces him to second-class status in the novel. This misreading also overlooks a few clear realities: first, that Jim essentially saves himself, and that he saves Huck a couple of times, too; second that Huck is a child; third, that even after Huck delivers his stunning declaration that he plans to go to hell to save Jim, he only really re-enslaves the man with the help of Tom Sawyer. Jim is unnecessarily in chains for the last quarter of the novel, long after Huck’s moral reckoning. Finally, such a reading ignores that Jim was always free, because the Widow Douglas has died and released him in her will—a detail that Tom Sawyer knows for most of the novel, but keeps to himself because he thinks it’s more fun to pretend that Jim is still a slave. Jim’s slavery was always a construct and Huck still participates in it, accidentally, even after he determines that it’s wrong. “It’s such a devastating turn at the end of the novel, after Huck resolves to free Jim, to see him overwhelmed by Tom Sawyer’s absurdities, and to watch him participate in the demolition of Jim’s freedom,” Professor Neil Schmitz argues in “Twain, Huckleberry, and the Reconstruction” in 1971. He adds that:

The capriciousness with which Tom postpones the declaration of Jim’s assigned freedom suggests the extent to which he believes Miss Watson’s remission actually frees Jim. The document means only that Jim will not be sent down river, and no more. If anything, his emancipation offers opportunities for a new form of exploitation which Tom immediately seizes—the chance to manipulate the black man’s feelings, to play godlike with his aspirations. In brief, Jim’s situation at the end of Huckleberry Finn reflects that of the Negro in the Reconstruction, free at last and thoroughly impotent, the object of devious schemes and a hapless victim of constant brutality.

Here, Schmitz suggests that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a slavery story—it’s a Reconstruction story, about the ways that slavery and oppression are recreated through language, legality, and trickery. It’s a story about how it would have felt, if you were somebody who didn’t believe in slavery, to see the slave society dismantled only to watch it replaced by a Jim Crow reality of segregated sidewalks, bathrooms, courts of law, and lynchings. Taken a step further, today Jim resembles so many contemporary immigrants and refugees, detained by armed and masked men even though they are sitting peacefully in judicial chambers and attempting to follow the rules. Judges, lawyers, and gunmen ultimately determine whether or not freedom exists, what it looks like, and whether it applies to a given person at all.

Two different agendas operate simultaneously here: Twain is telling a Reconstruction-story, while Huck’s story is about the violence of slavery. This generates a number of contradictions in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it means that any strict reading that considers Huck a fully reliable narrator is the wrong one. Huck’s greatest moment occurs when he triumphs over his crisis of conscience and determines that “you can’t pray a lie.” But Twain recognizes that this is not enough: the machinery of violence is bigger than a single decision. Twain also sees the future. Huck is optimistic at the end of the novel, because he intends to “light out for the Territory,” but Twain knows perfectly well—twenty years in advance—that “the Territory” is about to be the site of grotesque and brutal violence as the federal government cracks down on the tribes living there. So Huck is not so free—only Twain really understands the game. If readers take Huck at his word—that Jim is free (and by extension that slavery is over), and that people need simply to retreat to the wilderness and ride it out until society improves, then it is easy to fundamentally misread the novel. Even though it is cast as a story of one kid’s escapades, Twain’s reality is much darker and much more bitter, just like ours.

Finally, it’s easy for Huck to suggest that people of conscience should run to another environment—Huck is a kid, already an outcast, with nobody to lose, and the novel is at least thinly disguised as a children’s story. (My grandparents used to have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a set in their house; the books next to it in the box were Johanna Spyri’s Heidi: A Girl of the Alps and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows). Twain and Jim, though, are adults, complete with loved ones and crushing responsibilities. Huck never really mentions—and certainly never admires—the fact that at the conclusion of the novel, Jim plans to walk straight back into slave-holding territory and attempt to free his wife and daughter. Given how easily Tom Sawyer was able to re-enslave Jim once without any papers at all, this is an act of shocking boldness and bravery, certainly as wild and dangerous as anything anywhere in Huck’s story. Jim is silent about his plans at the end of the novel, but we know what they are—he wants his wife and daughter back, and the forty dollars that Tom gave him as compensation for the brutal practical joke will not be enough to buy them out of slavery. What other way is there?

For his part, Twain never fled the South, either; departure comes easily to Huck, but not to him. No, Twain stayed in Missouri for his entire life, observing the effects of the lethal cocktail of judicial segregation, combined with the violence of extra-judicial nighttime killings. Rumor has it, his outrage only multiplied. In the early 1900s, Twain would write an article entitled “The United States of Lyncherdom,” but elect not to publish it because he would not have “even half a friend left” in the South. No doubt, the writing of Huck Finn carried its share of risks, too. Twain acknowledges as much before the novel even starts:

NOTICE.

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.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.

One final marker of all of my misreadings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that I used to assume that this was a threat, when in fact—at another glance—it looks like a warning. This G.G. sounds like a dangerous man, and it’s a mark of my whiteness that I always imagined him as a white guy, a sort of mustachioed artillery commander with a big gut and a threatening and racist attitude. Scholars suggest, though, that G.G. was probably not white at all. The initials G.G. likely stood for Twain’s hired butler, George Griffin, who had survived slavery and gone to work for the Clemens family sometime earlier. If so, G.G.—a black man—has the first word of all in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he’s not issuing a threat so much as cautioning everyone involved. It sounds as though Twain consulted Griffin in advance; Griffin would have understood the risks. Writing—or reading—Huck Finn is a risky move. But, in any case, Twain didn’t run.

And what about us? Where would we run to? No, flight is only an illusion in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. More than anything, the novel is about the maintenance of conscience in a slave-state that remorselessly pretends it’s something holy. The nation’s desire to hide behind God is maybe why a bishop or two can rattle its foundations and shake its spirit. I don’t know whether or not Twain believed in God at the end, but I know he did not pray to a slave-state, forced deportation, concentration camp God, and he didn’t pretend to. Ultimately, the secondary message of Huckleberry Finn is that ultimately, for all the ease of lying, the only remaining thing is sometimes simply to tell the truth about what sort of God is backing this play, if God exists at all. Bishop-designate Michael Pham is not an American by birth and he is not white; it would seem that napalm and Agent Orange and other munitions forced him here, but every person needs to stand on some sort of ground, whether or not you can call it a country. It reminds me of a story I heard about a former nun, one who had finally left the convent. In the end, she admitted something that sounds an awful lot like Huck, and therefore also an awful lot like Twain. She said, “When I pray, no one answers. I only pretend he does. Then I do whatever I think God probably would have suggested.” Here, she hesitated, and, after a long pause added: “Usually, it’s obvious.”