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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
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Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.
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Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens in the aftermath of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and for a time, it has the same joyous feel as the boys continue their antics of rebellious 12-year-olds. But the return of Huck Finn’s drunk of a father, Pap, hints at the darker, more serious themes of this novel. After being kidnapped and beaten, Huck escapes his father by faking his own death and then going on the run. He soon crosses paths with a runaway slave, Jim, and together they raft their way down the Mississippi.

Like its predecessor, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is largely a series of vignettes with a very loose overarching plot. Huck and Jim travel from Missouri through Kentucky and Arkansas and into the antebellum South, getting into scrapes and making escapes along the way. There’s some great humor in their conversations on the raft; their argument about the wisdom of King Solomon is priceless. And there’s classic Twain satire and exposing of hypocrisy here, from the feuding Grangerford and Shepardson families to the con men known as the Duke and the King.

So why was I reading this classic novel during Banned Books Week? For that, we have to talk about race and racism. The characters here (and the author, for that matter) are products of their 19th century time. The n-word is used relentlessly in this book, even by the slaves themselves, and it is jarring. Huck says casually racist things here that are heartbreakingly awful; on one occasion, for example, he compliments Jim by thinking “I knowed he was white inside.�� And some critics fairly read this book as irredeemably problematic, reinforcing racist stereotypes and repeatedly deriving humor from a variation of a minstrel show.

But I come down on the side of those who read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as transcending and challenging the racist stereotypes of the time. Huck has been taught by society all his life to view blacks as slaves, as less than. And at a pivotal moment, he writes a letter to report where Jim can be found by his master, and at first he thinks the letter is the right thing to do:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Huck says the wrong thing, and uses racist language, again and again throughout this book. But he ultimately recognizes and acts on his and Jim’s shared humanity and equality. That might be the best we can realistically expect from a book published in the 1880s. And some days, it’s obvious that our society has not come nearly as far on this score as we’d like to think we have.

Is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel? It’s written by an immortal, epically talented writer. It was one of the first books to truly capture the course, plain spoken language of its time. And by focusing on racism and slavery, it speaks to America’s original sin. So yeah, it just might be, even though I prefer To Kill a Mockingbird. Highly recommended.