Literary articles - Mark Twain 2025
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, and Male Friendship Across Racial and Class Lines
Sharon D. McCoy
Abstract
Using biographical, historical, and textual analysis, this essay explores the complex dynamics that emerge among Huck, Jim, and Tom, especially during the pranks of the “evasion.” While biographical events do not translate into literary inspiration, Twain's inter-class and interracial relationships, particularly with George Griffin and John T. Lewis, can illuminate the role of pranks, their complex effect on power dynamics in friendship, and the underlying coherence of the novel. As part of Clemens's domestic sphere, these men helped Clemens to envision a sense of male friendship separate from but partly constrained by societal strictures. While many readers have caviled at Tom Sawyer's return in the novel's final section, that return tests everything Huck has learned or thought he has learned about himself, friendship, society, integrity, and community. Tom's secure sense of self within society's hierarchy exposes Huck's and Jim's tenuous positions and disrupts their fragile, insular, and domestically based friendship.
Keywords: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; race; friendship; the evasion; domestic sphere
Friendship is at the heart of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After all, Huck's last thought before his famous and much-discussed decision to “to go hell” is Jim's statement that Huck “was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now” (AHF 31.270).1 Yet friendship across class and racial lines is complex at its core, always involving careful attention to the surrounding society's power dynamics to maintain anything like a genuinely reciprocal relationship: before remembering Jim's words (almost verbatim), Huck remembers saving Jim from the slave catchers on the river, and his friend's gratitude. Notably, he does not remember his own horror in the scene immediately preceding this, when Huck realizes for the first time that Jim has a family—and an agenda—of his own, aside from helping this young white runaway escape. Even more significant is the actual ending of the vaunted “go to hell” chapter: it ends not with a statement of friendship or romanticized commitment to racial equality, but with Huck's desire to “stop Jim's mouth” and to “get entirely shut” of the scoundrels who remind Huck so much of his pap (31.275).2 Huck's friendship with Jim does not and cannot exist in a vacuum, nor can either of them ever afford to forget his own vulnerability to the dangers of the broader society and its stratifications; Tom Sawyer's return during the extended “evasion” sequence in the last third of the novel serves to accentuate and reify those broad stratifications, even as Tom disrupts the immediate social order of the community. While this understanding of the novel's coherence might discomfit readers who would like to see it as a more idyllic or positive statement of friendship across society's stratifications, I would argue that the novel's continuing relevance derives significantly from its exploration of the often-uncomfortable balance of affection and conflicting self-interest in such relationships, both in fiction and in life.
Of his own childhood, Twain writes that the “class lines were quite clearly drawn, and the familiar social life of each class was restricted to that class.” Despite its being a “little democracy,” this “aristocratic taint” was present and accepted (“JLC” 85), not surprising in a democracy founded on slavery. Further, the primary and limited exception to such tacit “restrictions” would have been the necessary interaction between the white children of slave-owners and the enslaved adults who helped to raise them or the enslaved children who watched over them and were their compulsory companions. Sam Clemens's childhood was no exception, and in his writing, Twain makes fairly frequent references to African American slaves owned by his relatives or hired by his family who were important in his development, including the slaves of his own age who “were in effect comrades . . . and yet not comrades.” He remained conscious always that “color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible” (AMT 1.211). Yet this was a significant case in which “familiar social life” was not “restricted” to interaction within one class. The tensions between democratic ideals of social mobility and entrenched aristocratic class lines remained crucial during the years of the composition of the novel, during the Gilded Age and beyond. As had already been true during Northern gradual emancipation, once slavery had been abolished nationally the conflicts regarding competition and class and racial equity, if anything, intensified. Yet the impact of what Twain calls this “inconsistency” on the power dynamics of friendships in Huckleberry Finn has never yet been fully considered.
With his receipt of the reward money and his unofficial adoption by the widow, Huck makes the very American leap from being a “person of no family” (“JLC” 85), the “pariah of the village” (ATS 6.63), to the height of the aristocracy that the town has to offer. Yet this is never an easy or fully accepted leap, by Huck or by anyone else. It is further complicated by the violent upheaval of his father's return, against which the widow's aristocracy and its ability to protect the boy prove wholly impotent. While Huck is at first confident in the security of the widow's superior social position, he turns to Jim for advice—not to his guardian—when he recognizes signs that his pap has returned. And the elder Finn's reclaiming of his son, despite the widow's and Judge Thatcher's efforts to stop it, reinforces the “inconsistency” in Huck's own elevation. Finn's loud, vile, and public declarations of his legal right to the money that would make him the richest man in town challenge American assumptions of democratic social mobility and meritocracy, as well as the town's entrenched aristocratic social strata. Finn's behavior is deliberately combative and offensive, but Huck's sudden elevation presents similar challenges against societal boundaries. Continual reminders of his lowly birth and “inconsistent” social position haunt his personal interactions. From Tom and the other white boys who jockey for position and social status often by tearing Huck down again, to the slaves who pitied and fed Huck when no one else would, to Jim, who skillfully negotiates Huck's uncertain social position, gaining a confidence and a friendship he could attain with no other white boy, Huck's friendships are indelibly marked by his abruptly altered, ambiguous, and—most important—tenuous social and class status.
Twain's own uncertainty regarding his change in class and social status, impelled both by his marriage to Olivia Langdon and his growing success as an author and national icon, marks his own friendships with African American men during the time he was writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His desire for this upwardly mobile change was matched only by his discomfort with aspects of it, tainted by his never-abating fear that he didn't really belong, or that others would perceive it that way. He was conscious that others saw him as “not refined at all.” While Grace King, the Southern novelist who visited the Clemens family in Hartford, for example, admired his “profoundly vigorous intellect,” she also went so far as to say that he “ate like a corn-field darkey.”3
While Twain chafed under such judgments, he was also openly impatient with the pretensions of “refined” society, tweaking them frequently and actively seeking comfort in the company of working men. The ambivalent feelings that mark Twain's own cross-racial and cross-class friendships of this era can elucidate some of the novel's troubling aspects, particularly the section of the book that many readers and scholars have termed a “flaw” or “failure,” the “evasion” sequence.4
Two African American men seem particularly important and influential in Twain's life during the years of the novel's composition and beyond: George Griffin, butler and man-of-all-work in the Clemens family's Hartford home, and John T. Lewis, an African American farmer, neighbor, and erstwhile tenant of the Crane family at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, who saved the lives of Clemens's sister-in-law, niece, and servant in 1877. As other scholars have argued,5 the influence of both men is strongly present in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from its reference to “G.G.” as the “Chief of Ordnance”6 in its opening salvo to the novel's end. While biographical events do not translate directly into literary creation or interpretation, Twain's complex and apparently contradictory interracial and inter-class relationships illuminate the underlying complexity and coherence of the evasion sequence and its pranks.
Play and a certain “boyish delight in each other's company” marked Twain's friendships with men, according to Peter Messent (92). These friendships were characterized less by intimacy and more by “companionship and commitment” or friendly “competition and conviviality” (22, 34). From the time he was a boy, Clemens was “given to pranks that could border on the mean-spirited” (Powers 14), and that could, on occasion, go almost “fatally awry” (33). In analyzing the dynamics of the “evasion,” we must give up the idea that Twain would have found the pranks and jokes themselves in any way appalling. Clemens retained his love of pranks and practical jokes almost to the end of his life, but drew the line at what he thought constituted a betrayal of friendship. William Dean Howells noted that a man “could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and maranatha” (68–69).7 As Messent also points out, any consideration of Clemens's friendships across racial lines would have to fully take into account how racial and social contexts affect their limits (17–19).
This insight applies more broadly to any examination of interracial and inter-class friendships of the era—and most certainly applies to an understanding of the complex friendships that young Huck Finn must negotiate.
“Competition and conviviality,” boyish pranks, “companionship,” and betrayal or “playing false” all take on new resonance when friendships cross class, race, and status lines. The inversions of the “evasion” sequence bring all these issues into sharp relief, and—far from flawed—the evasion becomes a test not only of the integrity of friendship and the limits of playing false, but of the underlying foundations of a democratic class mobility based on slavery and the tenuous and ambiguous freedom that followed. In both his personal life and in the resolution of his novel, these were the waters Mark Twain strove to negotiate.
Male Friendship Within the Domestic Circle
Ironically, it is, perhaps, the very “aristocratic” taint to American democracy that partly enabled Twain to feel comfortable seeking male friendship across race and class lines. White children of slave-owners quite frequently had playmates among the slave children, if there were any in the household, and slaves oversaw many aspects of their growth and development. Twain writes in his Autobiography about adult slaves on his uncle John Quarles's farm who were important in his youth and in the development of his appreciation for the power of language, such as “‘Aunt' Hannah,” whom he “visited daily, and looked upon with awe.” But especially pertinent to this discussion is “Uncle Dan'l,” whom Twain describes as his model for Jim—a “faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser,” a “middle-aged” man “whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter, whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile” (AMT 1.211). Twain's consciousness of the “subtle line” of color and condition” clearly influences his memories of Daniel. While he acknowledges Daniel's adulthood and the importance in his role as “an adviser,” Twain's genuine affection and praise are tempered by the limited and patronizing vision of a man who “served [him] well” in both actual fact and imagination (211). His portrayals of Sandy, a young boy and hired slave, the companion of a number of his boyhood adventures,8 are marked by a similar affection and trust, but with a less ambivalent sense of his superiority and patronage—they were comrades “and yet not comrades.”
The intimacy of these relationships, though, and especially his acceptance and awareness of the “lines” that marked but did not cancel them, extended Clemens's sense of what constituted both a family circle and appropriate though limited camaraderie and male friendship throughout his life. Clemens even argues that the influence of parents in a child's life is outweighed by “other developers” of character who “do more work,” aided by “opportunities more abundant”: siblings, close friends, and “servants” (“AFS” 5). That these interactions with slaves or servants were considered more “family” oriented or “domestic” means that they were partly exempt from the “restrictions on familiar social life” of which Twain wrote (“JLC” 85). He carried this transgressive attitude with him into his adult life, sometimes to the discomfiture of his wife and their social circle. And yet, unlike many white employers, Twain is also clearly aware of the often ambivalent ambiguity in these relationships across “the subtle line”—and their inherent conflicts of interest or perspective. What makes him almost unique in my experience is his willingness to expose and explore so many of his personal struggles and mistakes in negotiating those relationships, even as he exposes and explores them in his fiction; for me, this sometimes scathing honesty about the struggle is one of the most illuminating and perpetually relevant aspects of Twain's writing.
Both George Griffin and John T. Lewis were close enough to Clemens's domestic circle that he could not speak of them more specifically or openly in publications “without impropriety” (“AFS” 8), and he waited until after George's death to write at length about him, even privately.9 In 1903, however, Twain publicly claimed over thirty years of friendship with John T. Lewis. During a photo shoot that summer for the Ladies' Home Journal, several pictures were taken of Twain and Lewis together. One was chosen for publication, and Twain wrote the following description to accompany it:
John T. Lewis
Colored man, a slave before the war, friend of mine these many years —thirty-four, in fact. He was my father-in-law's coachman forty years ago; was many years farmer of Quarry Farm, & is still a neighbor. I have not known an honester man nor a more respectworthy one. Twenty-seven years ago, by the prompt & intelligent exercise of his courage, presence of mind & extraordinary strength, he saved the lives of relatives of mine whom a runaway horse was hurrying to destruction. Naturally I hold him in high and grateful regard.10
Twain pays close attention to some details here that reveal the depth of that regard. While he notes that Lewis once worked for Jervis Langdon, he also emphasizes that Lewis's connection to the family had evolved over the years, from servant to tenant to neighbor. Twain asserts, though, that Lewis remained a “friend” throughout, especially noting his courage, intelligence, strength, and impartial concern for others. Twain's careful inclusion and emphasis of Lewis's middle initial stem from an earlier act of friendship that almost went awry.
In 1886, Clemens had surprised Lewis by sending him the Century magazine so that Lewis could finish reading a serial he had started. Susan Crane wrote to Livy Clemens, expressing her wonder that Sam would know how much it would mean to Lewis, but also noting that Lewis was worried that the magazine was not truly intended for him and even wondered if he should return it, as it was addressed simply to “John Lewis,” omitting the “T.”11 In the caption copy, Clemens makes sure that he respects Lewis's wish regarding his name, even underlining it for emphasis, working to present Lewis to the public eye according to his own wishes.
However, the caption as it finally appears in the Journal did require a few minor copyediting changes and one major factual correction. Despite “thirty-four years” of friendship, Clemens had not known that Lewis had been born free. But Olivia Clemens knew—though she would have had far less interaction with a coachman, tenant farmer, and neighbor who mostly stayed out of doors, in the kitchen, or on the porch when he visited. She apparently was appalled that her dear “Youth” did not know, and made him feel it. He wrote to the editor that it would “save bloodshed to let Mrs. Clemens have a whack at it before it sees print.”12 While the reference to Olivia Clemens causing “bloodshed” impels laughter, clearly her criticism and her exposure of his ignorance of this fundamental fact about his professed long-time friend rankled. His affection and regard appear genuine, but so does his fundamental, careless error about his friend.
While Lewis was “about the first person whom Mark Twain asked for” each time he arrived in Elmira,13 Clemens seems to have shared an even closer relationship with George Griffin, long-time butler and man-of-all-work in the family's Hartford home. The unpublished “A Family Sketch,” ostensibly a tribute to Clemens's daughter Susy's memory, devotes more than a third of its private pages to Griffin, a man “as good as he was black—servant, in the matter of work, member of the family in the closer ties and larger enthusiasms of play” (“AFS” 7).14 While Clemens was certainly conscious of his status as an employer, he also admired George generally, but perhaps especially George's ability to turn any situation to his advantage, doing it with such good humor or cleverness that all offence was removed or smoothed over. Clemens himself maintained that George “was an accident. He came to wash some windows, and remained half a generation” (9), staying with the family for almost eighteen years. George was handsome, well built, shrewd, wise, polite, always good-natured, cheerful to gaiety, honest, religious, a cautious truth-speaker, devoted friend to the family, champion of its interests, a sort of idol to the children and a trial to Mrs. Clemens—not in all ways but in several. For he was as serenely and dispassionately slow about his work as he was thorough in parts of it; he was phenomenally forgetful; he would postpone work any time to join the children in their play if invited, and he was always being invited, for he was very strong, and always ready for service as horse, camel, elephant or any other kind of transportation required; he was fond of talking, and always willing to do it in the intervals of work—also willing to create the intervals; and finally, if a lie could be useful to Mrs. Clemens he would tell it. (“AFS” 9–10)
Though he clearly thought that George's commitment to the family was stronger than his desire to do the work he was hired to do, Clemens not only did not mind, he reveled in it.
Nor did he, in accord with the racial stereotypes of the day, see George's “defects” as somehow reflective of any innate tendencies toward laziness or lack of intelligence. On the contrary, he praised George for his abilities as a “peace-keeper” in the household and community, as an honest man who could be “trusted to any extent”—unless he was “protecting Mrs. Clemens or the family interests or furnishing information about a race horse to a person he was purposing to get a bet out of” (11). Mrs. Clemens was bothered by this propensity to lie, and Katy Leary tells of a time Mrs. Clemens actually fired George because of it; but George stayed on, telling her “I know you couldn't get along without me, so I thought I'd just stay right on anyway” (Lawton 86–87). And while George sometimes was “a trial” to Mrs. Clemens, so was Sam himself, and it must have been a relief and a joy for him to have a male companion to share in solidarity of feeling when their manly excesses or boyish enjoyment of the children's play exasperated Olivia Clemens. Further, Griffin was a leader in the community, temperate in his habits, “methodical, systematic, pains-taking, thorough,” financially astute, “smart and diligent,” and a family man (“AFS” 10–12, 16–17). Clemens says little about Griffin's own family, but what he does say is generally respectful, and, in particular, respectful of what appears to be Griffin's own circumspection (21); it is difficult to say, however, whether Clemens's reticence is solely out of respect for their privacy and Griffin's right to a family circle of his own, separate from the Clemens household, or whether it is more a white employer's desire to see his own family at the center of his black house servant's life—or, perhaps, a little of both. As the stories of George take over the manuscript, though, we can clearly see his importance to Clemens as a respected male friend, servant, and family member in a house full of females, and later, as a financially successful male friend who still cared deeply about Clemens's wife and daughters.
While we cannot disregard Twain's own claim that he modeled Jim after Daniel, an enslaved man remembered from his youth, Twain's adult friendships and domestic relations with Lewis and Griffin distinctly affect his portrayal of Jim. Twain's adult understanding of important aspects of manhood and identity—such as family, loyalty, privacy, strength, the impulse to protect, and the importance of self-definition—creates a rich subtext in the novel of which the youthful narrator remains only dimly aware. The author's adult reassessment of the “subtle line” of “color and condition,” the changes wrought to it by the passage of time and societal upheaval, along with an awareness of the “restrictions” that remain on intercourse between “the familiar social life of each class,” present an intertwined tapestry between and within racial and class relationships that cannot be easily or profitably separated. Playfulness within the domestic circle and within male friendships offered Twain a way to expose, express, and challenge some of the tensions that remain from the “aristocratic taint” of America's origins. Twain's clear and active embrace of these interracial and interclass friendships, coupled with his frustrated awareness of some of his own failures to negotiate their complex dynamics successfully within the broader societal framework, help us to plumb the depths—and limits—of the friendship that Jim and Huck—and Tom—are able to offer to one another. Further, Huck and Jim share domestic ties that Tom is excluded from, and perhaps oblivious to. By virtue of the Widow Douglas's expansion of her household—her unofficial adoption of the boy and her welcoming of her impoverished sister and her only slave—Huck and Jim find special opportunity for limited trust and common ground—impelled partly by their tenuous place in the household, in the domestic sphere, and in society at large.
Balancing Male Friendships That Challenge and Enforce the Status Quo
Twain himself played jokes on those to whom he felt equal, those with whom he was jockeying for position, or those whom he felt needed a lesson. What is notable about this sort of play in his friendship with George Griffin is its reciprocity and their mutual respect despite their clear awareness of the difference in their social position. Their interactions as Clemens recorded them in “A Family Sketch” are in many ways similar to Huck's early exchanges with
Jim, jockeying for position on Jackson's Island and beyond, and to competitive exchanges between Tom, Huck, and Jim, especially in the evasion. Clemens and Griffin pulled each other's chains fairly frequently, as when Clemens encouraged George on a course of honor, revenge, and murder that he clearly knew his employee wanted to be talked out of (“AFS” 18–19)—or when Griffin deflected Clemens's attempt to chastise him for leaving the Hartford house unlocked and unattended for six days while Griffin had been away himself, gambling on horse races in Rochester during the family's summer absence. Rather than defend himself in the face of his employer's justifiable anger and frustration, Griffin responds to the charge by chiding his employer for making him worry unnecessarily about the security of his own gambling winnings, which as it turned out were safely hidden under his mattress (20–21). Clemens does not record his own response to George's maneuver, but its outrageousness clearly appealed to him on some level, as Griffin remained in their employ and Clemens tells of the incident with relish.
He was a willing and gleeful fellow conspirator, too, in pranks George Griffin played on the Clemens children, keeping up his end to “enlarge” George's almost “occult” reputation with the girls (“AFS” 10–14). When George maintained that he had trained their cat to answer to four rings of the servants' bell, for example, the girls “marveled” and wanted a demonstration. They rang the requisite number, and “sure enough” the cat appeared. The girls, with their father's encouragement, tested other rings, but the cat appeared only when they rang four times. They were awestruck, and Clemens never mentioned the “humping plunge” of the cat's “entrance that was suggestive of assistance from behind,” willing that the girls should think George a “magician” (13–14). Clemens deeply enjoyed, too, the way George frequently “beguiled” Susy into believing that her earnest efforts to reform his gambling habits were succeeding: “If he made a particularly rich haul, we knew it by the ostentatious profundity of his sadness and depressions as he served at breakfast the next morning,—a trap set for Susy.” After her sincere and hopeful admonitions, Griffin would spring the trap, much to Clemens's obvious delight: “Yes, Miss Susy, I had hard luck—something was wrong, I can't make out what it was, but I hope and believe it will learn me. I only won eight hundred dollars” (15–16). This number resonates significantly with Jim's assessment of his own monetary value in a slave society (AHF 8.57); while for George it is an amount to use as a joke—as a substantial amount of winnings he can dismiss as a loss and “hard luck”—for Jim it is everything.
But while friendships across class, status, and racial lines involve a great deal of mutual effort, understanding, and accommodation, there are indications that Twain sometimes did not take into consideration the differences in the social and economic status between himself and his African American friends. Though later in life Twain claimed that he and John T. Lewis had been friends since soon after his marriage to Olivia Langdon, there is no concrete indication that in the early years Twain considered Lewis as anything more than a servant and tenant farmer who provided entertainment value in his religious disputations with the Cranes' cook, Mary Ann Cord—glorious battles that Twain egged on and watched with a glee that approached “spiritual gratification” (Paine 515). He knew that Lewis was strong, a bull of a man, but his closer relationship with Lewis, significantly, would wait until that crisis of 1877, when Lewis courageously stopped the runaway horse and carriage carrying Clemens's relatives. It was after that incident that Lewis became one of the first people Clemens sought out in Elmira, and they spent long hours in conversation each summer. Yet later in life, when Lewis was aged, infirm, and desperate,15 Twain showed both concern for his friend and a willingness to use Lewis as a tool in a prank on another friend: financier, Standard Oil executive, and quietly selective philanthropist Henry Huttleston Rogers.
Twain enlisted the anonymous financial assistance of Rogers and, in conjunction with Susan Crane and his daughter Jean, put together a small monthly pension for Lewis's relief. But while Twain was willing to put forth the effort to secure the pension for his friend, he was also willing to risk its loss in an elaborate and extended practical joke designed to keep Rogers wondering if Lewis even existed and, if so, whether his need was genuine. From the beginning, according to his own Autobiography, Clemens solicited Rogers's help in ways designed to raise his suspicions. After he told Rogers about Lewis and secured his promise of a monthly check, for example, Clemens told him to “make the check to my order” rather than directly to Lewis. Rogers at first refused, and Twain says that “it was only by tiring him out that at last I got him to draw” the checks in his name (ATM 2.173). Rogers contributed to the pension for a time, but discontinued his portion as a result of a complex sequence of pranks that undercut his belief in Lewis's very existence—including a spurious letter, clearly from Clemens but purporting to be from Lewis; an equally spurious telegram about Lewis; letters to Rogers and his wife from Clemens; and numerous offhand conversational jokes that heightened Rogers's suspicion that he was the victim of an elaborate hoax. Clemens knew the desperation of Lewis's need, but would not give up the joke even then, ever teasing and exacerbating the “many doubts” Rogers had about “that John T. Lewis.” But Clemens also enlisted the assistance of Rogers's wife Emilie and sent her copies of letters by Susan Crane attesting to Lewis's existence, to his genuine need, and to his gratitude in order to impel Rogers to reinstate the pension.16
If as late as 1903 Twain could play such practical jokes using a real person —a professed friend of thirty years duration—in real extremity as their mechanism, without regard to their relatively unequal social and economic status, then it seems plausible that he was at least as likely to do so in—shall we say—his less-restrained youth. The practical jokes in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a whole, and particularly those in the evasion sequence that disturb so many readers today, must take on a new resonance when seen in this light. This sense of “boyish delight” and playful “competition” are at the core of Twain's understanding of male friendships (Messent 92, 34), so long as they don't cross the line of what he considers betrayal (Howells 68–69). This acceptance of male pranks extends into the domestic sphere as well, as voiced by Aunt Sally: “I'd be willing to stand a thousand such jokes to have you here” (AHF 33.288). When Huck gets to the Phelps farm, he takes advantage of the mistress's mistake and initiates an impersonation, a trick on Silas and Sally Phelps, masquerading as their nephew Tom Sawyer, who has been expected for a visit. When Huck first meets the real Tom on the road, Tom is shocked by Huck's apparent rise from the grave. When Huck tries to reassure him that he is not a ghost, Tom says, “Don't you play nothing on me, because I wouldn't on you.” Huck pulls Tom into the inner circle about his disappearance from St. Petersburg, reassuring the boy that he “played it on them” (33.283, my emphasis)—not on his friend. But when Tom wants to know the details, Huck puts him off because he has more urgent business at hand: to free Jim and get away himself. Tom seems to accept this, and Huck assumes that he does, but as soon as Huck explains his current predicament Tom sees an opportunity to redress the balance, to pay Huck back for making Tom think he was dead all this time and for not e xplaining even now.
He withholds the vital information that Jim has in fact been freed, and so Huck is confounded by Tom's decision to go against the laws of society and God in helping him to free a runaway slave. That uncertainty keeps Huck as off-balance as Henry Rogers later would be, never sure where he stands with Tom, or whether Tom's conscience will ultimately overcome his love of “show” and force him into a betrayal of the plan. For Huck, the issue is Jim's freedom and his own safety: he still fears not only the King and the Duke at this point, but also his pap, whom he does not yet know is dead. For Tom, the issue is restoring his status vis-à-vis Huck. By withholding key information, Tom takes the upper hand, matching Huck's silence with his own—on a matter of far greater import to Huck. Thus Tom repays Huck for leaving him out of the loop and for whatever grief Huck's apparent murder had caused him; he guarantees Huck's acquiescence in whatever fun he can cook up; he redresses the balance disrupted by Huck's unofficial adoption by the widow who is more wealthy and of a higher station than Tom's family (Tom is an orphan, remember, being raised by one aunt, and his other has married a man who owns only two shirts [AHF 37.313])—and, finally, he overshadows the romance and glory of Huck's return from the dead with a fancy romance of his own. Tom needs the upper hand to feel secure, and he is perfectly willing to use Jim as a tool in his endeavors: what is Jim, to him? Huck, on the other hand, never feels secure, and is now, again, faced with balancing conflicting friendships that simultaneously challenge and reify racial, class, and social status hegemony.
Huck and Jim never have a chance to talk on their own, seeing each other only in the company of Tom, who (as any of the whites except Huck would) sees Jim only as a “nigger” (free or slave) and a tool. When the boys first meet Jim, in the company of Nat, his addled and enslaved jailer, Jim almost gives the game away. But Tom gains the upper hand again, by enlisting both Huck and Jim in a prank on Nat, convincing him that he is hearing things, that he is haunted. Jim plays along because he has little choice. Alone in unfamiliar territory, with a ten-foot chain on his leg, he apparently has made no headway in establishing a relationship with the blacks of the Phelps farm (as he did on the Grangerford plantation) and has thrown his lot and his hopes in with Silas17—buying the gentle man's confidence by revealing the Duke's and the King's scam. He plays along with Tom because he has to, and Huck plays along for similar reasons: they both need Tom's goodwill. With a word, he could get both of them hanged or tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, or worse. And Tom lets Jim know this, pointedly. His words in this scene are part of the game, but they also carry with them an explicit threat that cements Tom's status despite his youth, warning Jim, “If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn't give him up, I'd hang him” (AHF 34.297). While Tom does distract the jailer and whisper reassurance to Jim that their plan is to set him free, it becomes clear that to the boy there is little difference whether the man is free or enslaved. To Tom, it is one and the same.
Drawing New Lines: Danger, Limits, and “Gold-Leaf Distinctions”
Interestingly enough, around the time that Twain was writing Huckleberry Finn, he chose to tweak such racism as Tom reveals in this scene—using George Griffin as his own tool. In New York City to visit the editorial offices of the Century magazine, Twain “made George go up with [him],” offering up their companionship as a “new spectacle” for the whites there. Fully aware that George was growing “embarrassed” and uncomfortable under the white men's scrutiny and censorious looks, Twain blithely ups the ante, formally introducing “Mr. Griffin” to the three top editors and deferring to George's opinion on all matters, thoroughly discomfiting all but himself. As Twain put it, “I was there to make an impression” (“AFS” 20). George, like Jim in the fictional evasion, played along because he had little choice if he valued his employment and Clemens's friendship. Yet when the joke slipped over into new territory where it could actually become physically dangerous to George—a public New York City bar where class reticence might not hold white men's expressions of their “impressions” in check—he “politely excused himself and went his way” (“AFS” 22). Likewise, both Huck and Jim raise objections when Tom's games cross the line into immediate and physical danger, taming the worst of his proposed excesses. Jim even flatly lays down the law once, putting a clear limit on the value of the boys' help: “Marse Tom, I's willin' to tackle mos' anything ‘at ain't onreasonable, but ef you and Huck fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I's gwyne to leave, dat's shore” (38.325). Tom backs down a bit, but won't let Jim off, devising ever more “gaudy” but less physically dangerous plans, and reinforcing his earlier threat as he “most lost all patience” with Jim, warning him to be grateful “enough to appreciate them” (38.328). Jim takes the point, and apologizes, letting the white boy have his “spectacle” and make his “impression.”
When the boys are alone and Tom is ruminating on “authorities” to add “glory” to the escape, he announces aloud that there “ain't necessity enough” for actually sawing Jim's leg off. Huck expostulates, “Why, there ain't no necessity for it” and incredulously asks his friend why he would even think of such a thing. Tom regretfully surrenders the “romance” of his idea, but he attributes it to Jim's racial inadequacy. Jim simply can't be genuinely noble by European standards, according to Tom and his authorities, because “Jim's a nigger and wouldn't understand the reasons for it” (AHF 35.299–300), as if this were the only reason a man would object to sawing his own leg off. Huck, on the other hand, is practical and resolutely pragmatic in his mostly ineffectual objections to Tom's other plans, protesting against waste and excess trouble. Yet while he ends up caving in to most of Tom's romantic notions, his self-interest does not waver. Huck draws the line at activities likely to point straight to the boys as culprits, like tearing up their own sheets to make a useless ladder. Tom attempts to keep Huck in his place with insults that worked well in St. Petersburg, saying, “O shucks, Huck Finn, if I was as ignorant as you, I'd keep still.” But the dynamic between them has changed somewhat: while Huck acquiesces to Tom's authority, he also offers “advice,” suggesting that rather than drawing attention directly to themselves, he could “borrow” a sheet anonymously from the clothesline; Tom maintains the upper hand, yet he does not push his companion's patience too far, accepting Huck's suggestion without further argument (35.301). While still unequal, there is a new balance in their relationship.
Tom's relative security in his overall social status, however, enables him to maintain dominance in their relationship, despite the fact that Huck's adoptive guardian, the Widow Douglas, is at the top of St. Petersburg's aristocracy. And in some ways, Tom does have a clearer sense of the responsibilities of social status and class difference than Huck does. Though Tom won't let Huck get away with calling theft “borrowing” as his father always did, Tom tells Huck that “representing” a prisoner makes their small thefts righteous. And yet, when Huck sees the opportunity to steal a ripe watermelon from the slaves' private garden and “hog” it for himself, Tom forces Huck to pay them (35.303). Huck sees no point in such “gold-leaf distinctions,” and doesn't recognize how high his own status is in comparison to the slaves. Tom, however, recognizes that stealing small comforts and subsistence necessities from people who are enslaved cannot be justified. Tom's security in his status as a white boy and relative of the owners of the farm—and the slaves—enables him to recognize some aspects of noblesse oblige and paternalist class responsibility, even while he jockeys with Huck for authority and actively hides Jim's free status. Tom, in short, makes an effort to ensure fairness to the slaves with whom he shares a domestic, family-based connection. Huck, in contrast, feels only personal responsibility for his friend Jim. He has lived the bulk of his life as the object of charity from slaves and needing to steal for his subsistence before he had gone to live with the Widow Douglas. These experiences, coupled with her utter inability to protect him from his father, have left the boy with little belief in the security of his raised social status and unable to make such “gold-leaf distinctions,” even as these same experiences make it possible for him to value a personal friendship that crosses racial lines. In this complex dynamic, we can recognize some of the incongruities and complexities in Twain's own joke on Henry Rogers, using John T. Lewis as his tool, or in his visit to the Century's editorial offices with “Mr. Griffin” ostentatiously in tow.
Context Is Everything: The Limits of Friendship Within the Societal Framework While Huck thinks of Jim as a friend, he is also aware of Jim's status as property. And while he has come to understand, accept, and enjoy aspects of his own white privilege, Huck doesn't trust that status enough to make “gold-leaf distinctions” or to shun expediency. He is not concerned with maintaining a pretense or façade of social status; he simply wants the concrete and tangible benefits of that status:
I don't care shucks for the morality of it, nohow. When I start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sunday school book, I ain't no ways particular how it's done, so it's done. What I want is my nigger; or what I want is my watermelon; or what I want is my Sunday school book: and if a pick's the handiest thing, that's the thing I'm agoing to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sunday school book out with; and I don't give a dead rat what the authorities thinks about it, nuther. (36.307)
The hammer-blow repetition of the phrase “what I want” and his equation of “my nigger” with other objects clearly establishes Huck's general paradigm for his place in the world. While his focus on his own desires speaks partly of and from white privilege, it also reveals his tenuous position in society. He focuses on his own desires because no one else does. Not even Jim—and certainly not Tom. Huck here is not playing on Tom's prejudices or trying to win an argument. He is venting his frustrations and expressing his relief that Tom is going to be more reasonable, showing that he approves of Tom's decision to take the easier path and “let on” that they're digging for thirty-seven years and with case knives, but actually doing the work quickly with a proper tool. Huck knows that they disagreed on the watermelon, and he conceded to Tom's demands and superior social status, anonymously leaving money to pay for the stolen fruit. And while we know that to Tom, Jim is simply “a nigger,” he is not “my nigger,” as Huck asserts. Huck's disturbing expression does not seem to be one of ownership, but of relationship, an appellation that distinguishes Jim from the others—though it does objectify Jim, focusing on his importance to Huck rather than on his importance as a human being. Huck simply doesn't care about the other blacks on the farm—Jim is the only one with whom he has a personal relationship, a vested interest in. But his repeated use of the phrase, and his irritation, has an effect on the dynamics of his exchange with Tom, who would hear the phrase in this context as an expression of ownership. Rather than ignoring Huck or arguing with him, Tom agrees and uses the opportunity again to cement his own superior position: “It might answer for you to dig Jim out with a pick, without any letting-on, because you don't know no better; but it wouldn't for me, because I do know better” (36.307). As Chadwick-Joshua argues about an earlier scene, Twain ironically plays with the associations of the “stereotypical watermelon,” but in the end, the “dominant figure and the dominant culture dominate” (119). Tom here feels the need to remind Huck of his superiority because Huck's self-assertions of desire and privilege have challenged Tom's own, something he will not tolerate.
When the two boys are actually with Jim, the dynamics shift again. Tom cheerfully claims ascendancy, and neither Jim nor Huck can really challenge him for fear that he might give the whole thing away. When the boys first dig their way in to see Jim without Nat, the jailer, Jim gets down to business immediately, asking them to bring “a cold-chisel to cut the chain off of his leg with, right away” (36.309). He is quickly disillusioned by Tom, and Huck assures us that “Jim said it was all right,” but he omits Jim's actual response. When Tom suggests sending things in with his aunt and uncle when they come to check on Jim, however, Huck objects, even going so far as to say that “it's one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck.” Tom continues as though Huck hadn't even spoken, though, let alone offered an insult, showing both Jim and Huck who is boss here. After Huck's insult, Tom silences him by ignoring his words and talking exclusively to Jim as though Huck is not there, which cements his status. Tom is essentially giving orders to Jim, and in ignoring Huck, Tom is demonstrating his contempt, their unequal status—and more, he is doing it in front of Jim. This is not jockeying for position, this is humiliation: Huck is effectively crushed. But this has been his place in society for most of his life, and he remains grateful for Tom's attention.
To our twenty-first-century ears, these social strata resonate hollowly against the more fundamental levels of adults and children; Huck looked to Jim as an adult, and he looked to him as a friend and confidant or adviser. But slave society offers no place for a black man to be a man, to be an adult, and so Jim and Huck together become tools in Tom's game. Jim, seeing that Huck is still powerless against Tom, reluctantly agrees to the farce: Huck tells us that “Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him” (36.309). But even this effort to remind Huck that he, too, is “white folks” and “knowed better” falls on deaf ears. In front of an audience, and particularly one he regards as inferior, Tom will brook no interference from Huck, admit of no ambiguity or shift in their relationship, or any particular value in Huck's race or status. Being deflated like this in front of Jim seems to take the wind out of Huck's sails entirely, and he enters into most of the rest of Tom's games without complaint. In humiliating Huck, Tom effectively cements his own status and authority vis-à-vis both of them. Jim's acquiescence in this seems remarkable, especially when Tom's extended manipulations of Nat's fear of witches brings to mind Jim's own earlier adept use of Tom's pranks to raise his own status among the slaves of St. Petersburg and to rebel against the woman who owned him (Smith 109–10). Jim is said to be at that time, we must remember, “most ruined, for a servant” (AHF 2.8), claiming power and status in having met the devil and been ridden by witches, showing an intractability and strength that probably plays into Miss Watson's decision to sell him down the river. Unless Huck is willing to stand up to Tom, however, and stand beside Jim, the black man is shackled in the Deep South, in more ways than one. With the chain bolted to his leg, Jim finds it better to deal with, and to trust so far as he must, the devil he knows.
But Tom's broadening of the prank to include anonymous threatening letters that get the whole village up in arms—literally, with guns aplenty—raises the danger level again. Huck makes a feeble objection, but Tom doesn't even have to say a word; he just “looked disgusted,” and Huck immediately backs down, saying, “But I ain't going to make no complaint. Any way that suits you suits me” (39.332). Huck is completely cowed. And when Tom is shot, Jim, dressed absurdly in Aunt Sally's dress, makes what has seemed to many readers an absurd decision—to stay with the boys and call for a doctor. But this has gone beyond a boy's game, and Jim, who has shown himself repeatedly to be a compassionate man and a caregiver in his relations with the white boy, cannot leave Tom, perhaps to die. Further, compassion and self-interest are in tandem here. In unfamiliar, hostile territory and in drag, with a chain still dragging on his leg, Jim cannot afford to lose what little protection the white boys offer him. Huck has shown that he cannot stand up to Tom or his kind. If Tom dies and Jim was to be caught (and the odds were against a runaway who did not know the territory), the white adult antics would make the evasion look like the child's game it is.
Jim plays along, and he plays his decision so as to bind Huck as tightly to him as he can, for all the good it will do. Jim carefully chooses his words, aligning himself with Tom's status in Huck's eyes:
“Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz him dat 'uz bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, ‘Go on en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one'? Is dat like mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say that? You bet he wouldn't! Well den—is Jim gwyne to say it? No, sah—I doan' budge a step out'n dis place, 'dout a doctor, not ef it's forty year!” (40.340–41)
Jim appeals to Huck's near-hero worship of Tom, expressing the conviction that if the situation were reversed, Tom would sacrifice himself to save another. His next line is most telling, though, reminding Huck that if he could “bet” that
Tom Sawyer would behave that way, if he were a man, then Huck must know that it would be absurd to think that Jim, a man who has cared for him all along, would do any less. In this speech, Jim is reminding Huck of all that he owes him, reminding Huck that Jim has never put him down the way that Tom has, reminding Huck that he is a man of principle. In doing so, he confirms Huck's opinion of him, an opinion that finds voice in an expression that we in the twenty-first century find to be regrettable: “I knowed he was white inside.” But his next words are more specific, affirming his faith in Jim as a trusted friend and fellow human being, as Huck avers that “he reckoned [Jim]'d say what he did say” (40.341). The boy wants and needs Jim's adult confirmation about what is the right thing to do; Huck counts on Jim for the support that the boy himself could not give to the man during the evasion, in the face of Tom's power plays. Together, though, they overrule Tom's objections, Huck goes for the doctor, and Jim waits for his fate alongside the wounded boy.
Eventually, Tom's confession of his central trick—that Jim is actually free —seems to set all to right, yet it also reasserts Tom's status over both Huck and Jim. Tom reveals that he has flamboyantly repaid Huck for his staged death and his exclusion of his friend, reaffirming Tom's long-established social superiority. At the same time, Tom firmly establishes his privilege and status as a white boy who can with impunity play games with the life and freedom of a freed black man, and indeed, with the lives of the white adults in the community as well. As Peter Messent argues, Twain's fiction presents and accepts “social fragmentation and inequality and personal alienation as the unalterable ‘realities' of American life” (118). Huck seems able to accept this reassertion of the status quo easily, and may even be relieved by the revelation that his understanding of society's morals and mores are not so far off after all; remember, he was thoroughly puzzled and even horrified by Tom's decision to help free a runaway slave, an act considered both criminal and immoral. Huck, having imbibed the society's religious bases for slavery, was worried for Tom's very soul and concerned about his own responsibilities as Tom's friend.
Jim's reluctant revelation, though, that Huck's father has been dead almost since the beginning of their journey together and that he has lied to Huck throughout, withholding vital information from the boy in order to ensure his help and his company, rocks Huck's world. While it frees the boy from his omnipresent and overwhelming fear of his father's wrath, avarice, and vengeance, it also at least temporarily upends any fragile sense of equality and trust Jim and Huck share during their journey together. While some have argued that Jim's revelation shows that he cares about the boy's feelings, we cannot escape the fact that he has deliberately chosen to withhold that comfort—and not just for a short time, but for months. Though Twain remembers his “model” for Jim, “Uncle Dan'l,” as being without guile, clearly Jim is not. While Jim seems to genuinely care for the boy, his own needs in regard to his freedom, safety, and family have taken precedence throughout the novel.
Reeling from these double revelations, Huck will need time to sort out whether they are “offences” he can “account for” as simply coming “from human nature” or whether either Tom or Jim has “played him false” (Howells 68–69). Are these acceptable pranks that can be viewed as part of the “friendly competition” that marks the male friendship and “companionship” that Twain himself indulged in, or do they constitute fundamental betrayals answerable only by God? Understandably, our unreliable narrator omits his response to Jim's revelation, moving quickly into an abrupt and summary ending. Given the shifting power dynamics in this scene, even his decision to “light out for the Territory” acquires new resonance. Everything Huck has learned or thought he has learned about himself, society, integrity, safety, friendship, and community has been put to the test. And everywhere he looks, he is standing on uncertain ground.
Notes
1. References to the text of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn throughout are from the authoritative edition by the Mark Twain Project at The Bancroft Library. All references, except to notes, include chapter number followed by page number, or volume number followed by page number (e.g., 31.270, 1.211). Parenthetical references to Twain's own writings will appear as commonly used acronyms: AHF for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “AFS” for the “A Family Sketch” manuscript, “JLC” for “Jane Lampton Clemens,” etc.
2. Respecting the conventions of the novel itself and the conscious choice of its author, I do not capitalize “pap.” For Huck, this term is not truly a name, a proper noun, or an acknowledgment of a close family tie; it is, rather, virtually an epithet describing a relationship that is imposed by law and custom—unwanted and feared.
3. Letter, Grace King to Nina Ragan King, June 10, 1887 (Grace King Collection), quoted in Robert Bush, “Grace King and Mark Twain,” unpublished manuscript, collection of Steve Courtney, Hartford, Conn.
4. Even the earliest reviews of the novel took issue with the evasion sequence. T. S. Perry argues that Twain is at his best when revealing a “boy's heart,” and finds the novel's strength in the “evident truthfulness” in its portrayal of the “mind of the young scapegrace of a hero,” including his “perverted views regarding the unholiness of his actions” in rescuing Jim. Perry, though, finds the evasion sequence “artificial” and “somewhat forced,” stating that its “caricature of books of adventure leaves us cold” (171–72). Perry does find, though, that the book is “for the most part, a consistent whole.” While many have disagreed, some modern scholars have made cogent arguments for the evasion as a coherent part of the novel, illuminating its critique of racial relations in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction
America, among them Louis J. Budd (95–106), Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua (xix–xxi, 115–35), Shelley Fisher Fishkin (74), Christine MacLeod, and L. Moffitt Cecil. I find these arguments largely convincing, but believe that a consideration of the role of friendship and the context of class and status upheaval should also be considered. Michael J. Kiskis, for instance, argues that Huck's behavior is, from the beginning, consistent with his behavior during the “evasion.” He argues that Huck “will do what he can to survive, to get along,” and that his behavior always will be “reactive” rather than “proactive” (18). Kiskis also argues persuasively about Tom's condescension and his “deep ambivalence” toward Huck, focusing on the resulting pain he inflicts in order to impel Huck to knuckle under to him (25–26).
5. See, for example, Chadwick-Joshua 18–23, Pettit 105, and Wisbey 1. Fishkin also makes this argument, but adds Guy Cardwell's conclusions that Patrick McAleer, the Clemens family's coachman, is also a likely model for Jim, but corrects Cardwell's error in assuming that McAleer was black (86–88).
6. See note in The Mark Twain Library edition of the novel, discussing the likely possibilities for this reference. The most convincing evidence suggests that is it a “playful” and “private” reference to Griffin (376n. xxxi.title-6 NOTICE).
7. Howells here makes a slight change to 1 Corinthians 16.22, “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.” As anathema refers to a formal curse or violent dislike and Maranatha translates as “the Lord comes,” the apostle Paul is using the phrase as a curse—may the Lord strike such a man down. In doing so, Howells speaks to the depth of Clemens's feelings on the matter, seeing “playing false” in friendship as a damning betrayal avenged fully only by God's wrath.
8. Sandy, a young slave boy hired by the Clemens family in Hannibal, appears in several stories from Twain's Autobiography and in his essay commemorating his mother, “Jane Lampton Clemens.” Sandy was a witness to Clemens's mortification when young Sam's naked backstage rehearsal for his role as a bear was also observed by two young girls (ATM 1.155–56), but the young white boy was justified in his faith that Sandy would keep it secret. Another time, when Sandy's singing was driving young Sam to distraction and quite possibly to an abuse of his power, Jane Clemens reconciled him to the “noise” through her pity for the young “friendless child” and the loss of his mother (ATM 1.212; for a slightly different version, see “JLC” 88–89). Twain also writes that Sandy was the model for young Jim in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (ATM 1.212), a young slave in Aunt Polly's household. Eric Lott in his “Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow” mistakenly conflates the young boy Jim in that novel with the adult Jim from AHF and the later texts, but Twain makes the distinction clear and explicit.
9. While Twain's notebooks, letters, and autobiographical dictations contain numerous brief references to Griffin, he wrote of him at length in the unpublished “A Family Sketch.” There are signs in the manuscript that Twain was thinking forward to its eventual publication—notes in the margin about adding “A True Story” on the end, or about adding in John Jones's stories of the underground railroad in Elmira, and the runaway horse, for exam-ple—but the manuscript was unpublished during his lifetime. Access to a photocopy of the handwritten manuscript was kindly shared by Steve Courtney of the Mark Twain House in Hartford. The Mark Twain Papers at The Bancroft Library in Berkeley has acquired the manuscript; edited by Benjamin Griffin, A Family Sketch and Other Private Writings is forthcoming from the University of California Press in October 2014.
10. Letter, Samuel L. Clemens to Edward Bok, Editor, Ladies' Home Journal, July 17, 1903.
11. Letter, Susan Langdon Crane to Olivia Langdon Clemens, December 19, 1886, quoted in Wisbey 3.
12. Twain wrote to the editor, asking for the correction: “Please strike out the words about John T. Lewis which state that before the war he was a slave. Merely strike out—nothing need be inserted. I always supposed he had been a slave, but it turns out that this was a mistake” (Letter, Samuel L. Clemens to Edward Bok, July 18, 1903). It appears that Twain made similar mistakes about George Griffin, as the editors of Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1, aver that Griffin was born in Virginia, not Maryland as Twain claimed. This is provocative; however, the the details of the correction are not substantiated (583n.335.28–32).
13. “John T. Lewis” 4; also mentioned in the Ithaca Daily News, August 3, 1906, 7; and Wisbey 1.
14. Twain's valuation of race and goodness were unusual among whites of the period. Consider, for example, the description of John T. Lewis upon his death by the Ithaca Daily News: “He was a man of sterling worth and great courage and so good a citizen that his black skin could not hide his great heart” (August 3, 1906, 7).
15. By 1903, with a history of heart disease and “injuries which affected his spinal column,” Lewis was unable to work effectively and unable to afford to hire help. He died in 1906, at the age of seventy-one. See “John T. Lewis” and “Tale of the Dunkard Bible Gone Astray,” Elmira Telegram, December 13, 1903, 4.
16. Part of the story is told in letters from Clemens to Henry Rogers's wife Emilie. See letters 329 (December 25, 1902), 331 (January 2, 1903), and 333 (February 1, 1903), pp. 514–15, 517–18, Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, ed. Leary. A letter to Rogers's secretary, Katharine Harrison, about the check is also instructive (Letter 332, January 12, 1903, p. 517). Copies of the spurious note purporting to be from Lewis and the fake telegram about his “busted” life are reprinted on p. 516 of the same text. Clemens was still continuing the gag at the end of the year, writing to Rogers and enclosing a typescript of a letter from Susan Crane “all about the alleged John T. Lewis” (Letter 356, December 16–18, 1903, pp. 544–46; also 546n.3, which includes an excerpt from Mrs. Crane's letter). According to the Autobiography, vol. 2, when Twain gave Rogers a copy of one of the photos from the Ladies' Home Journal photo shoot with Lewis, Rogers framed it and hung it in his office with the label, “The Imaginary John T. Lewis” (August 11, 1906, p. 173). Even just a few weeks after Lewis's death, Twain's train of thought focuses on the joke as much as on the man.
17. While some modern critics have found fault with Jim's lack of efforts to gain solidarity with the slaves of the plantation, there is historical precedent. Solomon Northrup, when planning an escape, trusted only two other men born free, saying that it “was not safe to deposit so bold a secret with any” of those who'd been born slaves (Northrup 70). Later, on the Red River plantation where he was enslaved, Northrup did not trust any of the slaves with information about his identity or free past. They knew him only by his slave-name, Platt, and he entrusted his efforts to escape with two white men, one who betrayed him and another who helped to free him (Northrup 231–35, 263–98). Likewise, Lucy Delaney, a woman enslaved in Missouri, confirms that betrayal by other slaves was feared. She writes that her mother “did not dare” to discuss escape plans “with anyone for fear that they would sell her down the river, so I was her only confidante” (20). Henry Clay Bruce, also of Missouri, writes that a betrayed runaway would often find his betrayer and “punish him severely” (33–34). While many slaves could and did help one another, it was difficult, particularly for an outsider, to trust. The conditions of slavery impelled a certain amount of self-interest as well as community solidarity for survival. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it is notable that while Nat is presented as gullible and addled, he certainly is not trusting and is perfectly aware of his own self-interest. When Tom gives Nat a dime, for instance, Nat steps out into the light to test whether it is genuine (34.297).
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. “Jane Lampton Clemens” (1890). In Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians and Other Unfinished Stories, edited by Dahlia Armon, Paul Baender, Walter Blair, William M. Gibson, and Franklin R. Rogers, 82–92. The Mark Twain Library. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.
. Letters, July 17, and July 18, 1903; Samuel L. Clemens to Edward Bok, Editor, Ladies' Home Journal. Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, Small Library, University of Virginia. Reproduced by Steven Railton, “Sam Clemens as Mark Twain: Gallery of Photographs,” Mark Twain and His Times, n.d. http://twain.lib .virginia.edu/sc_as_mt/photos/03lhjcaption1.html
. Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909. Edited by Lewis Leary. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
Wisbey, Herbert A., Jr. “John T. Lewis, Mark Twain's Friend in Elmira.” Mark Twain Society Bulletin 7, no. 1 (1984): 1–5.