more and more, until Huck decides to work out an escape plan. He finds
a saw and cuts a hole in the cabin wall, then covers it up to wait for
a chance to get out, while his father is away.
Soon after this, Pap comes back from town in a terrible mood. He
starts drinking and complaining about the courts, the widow, and a
number of other things. After a few drinks, he goes into a long speech
about the government. This speech is important in at least one way- it
shows how Twain felt about racial bigotry.
Pap complains about not getting justice from his government, when he
has had all the anxiety and expense of raising a son. We know,
however, that this isn’t true, that Pap has been about as bad a father
as anyone can imagine. We know that he isn’t the good citizen he
claims to be. And we know that his threat to leave the country is
laughable, considering what an undesirable character he is.
As he does with Huck, Twain is talking over Pap’s head to the
reader, and we know how Twain wants us to feel. The same thing is true
in the second part of Pap’s harangue, in which he berates the
government for allowing a black college professor to vote right
along with a white man like himself. Twain makes Pap look ridiculous
for suggesting that he is superior to the professor, simply because
he’s white.
Huck listens to all this, waiting for Pap to fall asleep so he can
slip out of the cabin. Unfortunately, Pap has a restless night and
never completely falls asleep. He has a nightmare, in which he
fights off the angel of death. Then he confuses Huck with the angel
and starts attacking him. When he finally falls asleep, Huck takes the
rifle from the wall and loads it. He sits there quietly, hoping his
father won’t attack him again.
CHAPTER 7
-
When Pap wakes up, he doesn’t remember anything about attacking Huck
as the angel of death, and he wants to know why Huck is asleep in a
chair with the rifle in his lap. Huck is afraid he won’t believe the
truth, so he says that somebody tried to break in during the night.
You remember that Huck gave away more than $6000 to avoid having
to tell a lie to his father. How can he lie so easily in this
situation? Later in the book, Huck himself will give you an answer
to that question. In the meantime, think about whether you see any
difference between the lie he refused to tell and this one.
While he’s out getting some fish for breakfast, Huck sees an
abandoned canoe drifting by. He wades out and gets the canoe and hides
it in the woods. An escape plan is beginning to form in his head. He’s
glad he lied to Pap about somebody trying to break in, because that
lie will help him in his plan.
After dinner, Pap goes to town to sell some logs. Huck is sure he
won’t be back until morning, which will give him plenty of time to put
his escape plan into effect.
Read the description of Huck’s escape carefully. It’s a pretty
elaborate plan, worked out to the smallest detail, obviously the
work of a bright kid. In the middle of his description, Huck says he
wishes Tom Sawyer were with him to “throw in the fancy touches.”
When you read it, you’ll see that this plan doesn’t need the kind of
fancy touches Tom would add. It’s complete as it is, and unlike
Tom’s make-believe adventures, this escape is the real thing.
The plan is intended to make everyone think Huck was murdered.
This is important to him, since he isn’t running away only from his
father. He’s running from Judge Thatcher, too, and the Widow
Douglas, and all the other people he knows. He’s determined to set out
on his own and to leave behind his whole life up until this night.
As long as no one is looking for a living Huck, he figures he can
stop anywhere he wants to take time to make further plans. He
decides on nearby Jackson’s Island as his temporary hideout. Then,
satisfied with the ways things are working, he lies down in the
canoe and falls asleep.
When he wakes up, he hears someone rowing toward his island, and
he soon discovers it’s Pap, coming back earlier than Huck expected. He
unhitches the canoe and floats downstream as quietly as possible.
Something happens at this point in the narration that you should pay
special attention to. It will happen again and again throughout the
book, and you’ll want to recognize it when it does.
What happens is that Huck describes what it’s like on the river.
It begins with “The sky looks ever so deep….” Whenever Huck talks
about living on the river, his tone of voice changes. His language
becomes gentler and less harsh than usual. Sometimes he becomes almost
poetic.
Imagine a friend talking to you about a date, or about sports, or
cars, or any subject you both have in common. Then suppose the
friend suddenly shifted to talking about a much-loved baby brother.
Think of the probable contrast in your friend’s language and tone of
voice.
Huck loves the Mississippi River the way most of us love people.
If you want to know how much Mark Twain loved the river, read Life
on the Mississippi some time. For now, you can get some idea of
Twain’s feeling by paying close attention to Huck’s descriptions,
beginning with the short, affectionate one we get in this chapter.
Huck gets to Jackson’s Island just before daybreak. He hides his
canoe in some willow branches, then lies down to take a nap before
breakfast.
CHAPTER 8
-
Huck wakes after daybreak “feeling rested and ruther comfortable and
satisfied.” He seems to have forgotten last night’s harrowing
experience, and he lies in the grass enjoying the sun, the trees,
and a couple of friendly-looking squirrels. He feels completely at
home.
He’s torn from this pleasant state by the sound of cannon fire. He
gets up to see a ferry boat moving toward the island. He knows it’s
filled with people searching the water for his dead body.
From a hiding place at the shore, Huck watches as the ferry comes so
close to the island that he can almost reach out and touch the
people on it. He sees his father, Tom Sawyer, the widow, the judge-
almost everybody he knows is on that ferry searching for him. He looks
into those familiar faces, and he doesn’t make a sound.
—————————————————————–
NOTE: If you ever considered running away from home when you were
young, you might want to think about this scene for a minute. A lot of
kids fantasize about doing it, and the fantasy often involves
grief-stricken relatives and friends. Fortunately, most people never
do run away from home, because they decide they need those relatives
and friends more than they need freedom.
Huck is hiding on the island, having successfully fooled everyone he
knows into thinking he’s dead. Now he comes face to face with all
those people. Imagine yourself in that situation. Most of us would
probably abandon the idea of running, and yell out, “Here I am! I’m
not really dead!”
That would seem to be the natural response if you were suddenly
confronted by everyone who’s close to you. But it isn’t Huck’s
response. He just crouches there silently, letting everyone in his
life float by.
can look at this incident in a number of ways. Maybe it shows
that Huck is so much in control of his emotions that he doesn’t do the
“natural” thing. Maybe it shows that none of these people really means
anything to him, in spite of what he’s told us. Or it might show
that he doesn’t understand how sorrowful some of those people are.
Since he doesn’t think much of himself, he’d find it hard to believe
that someone else thinks much of him.
All these interpretations are possible, as well as some others
that may occur to you. Even if you aren’t ready to interpret the
incident in one particular way, keep it in mind as you read on. You’ll
learn other things about Huck, and you may be able to interpret this
better later on.
—————————————————————–
Once the ferry is gone, Huck is overcome by loneliness. He listens
to the river and watches the stars for a while, then decides to go
to sleep. “There ain’t no better way to put in time when you are
lonesome,” he says. He sounds as though he’s had this problem before.
After three days on the island, Huck makes a terrifying discovery.
The remains of a campfire tell him that he isn’t alone. As
frightened as he is, he decides that he has to find out who the
other person is. After a long search, he finds himself back at the
campfire. This time there’s a man sleeping near it.
He waits quietly until the man wakes up and throws the blanket off
his face. When Huck sees that it’s Miss Watson’s slave, Jim, he
skips from his hiding place to say hello.
It takes him a while to convince Jim that he isn’t seeing a ghost.
He explains how he created the illusion that he was dead, and Jim says
it was a hoax worthy of Tom Sawyer himself. Then Huck asks Jim why
he’s on the island.
Jim first makes him promise not to tell anyone. When Huck
promises, Jim confesses that he has run away from Miss Watson.
Notice Huck’s shocked reaction to this news. Remember that he grew
up with people who believed that stealing a slave was as serious as
committing murder. A modern equivalent of a runaway slave might be
someone who murders a police officer.
Huck’s shock is an expression of this belief. He’s never heard
anyone question the institution of slavery, and he has every reason to
believe that Jim has done something terrible.
All of this makes the next part of the conversation interesting. Jim
reminds Huck that he promised not to tell. Without hesitating, Huck
says he’ll keep his word. He realizes that “people would call me a
low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum.” And he really
believes those people would be right. But he’ll keep his word. “I
ain’t a-going back there, anyways,” he explains.
Not turning Jim in is a monumental decision for Huck to make, even
though he makes it on the spot. This is not just a boy running away
from home. It’s someone who has decided to turn his back on everything
“home” stands for, even one of its most cherished beliefs.
The rest of the chapter includes three things you may find
interesting. First, Jim explains why he’s running away and how he
got to the island. Then he does what might qualify as a comedy
monologue on things that foreshadow bad luck.
The last part of the chapter might remind you of comedy teams in
which one person provides all the straight lines and the other does
all the jokes. Jim tells a long story about a time when he had some
money. The routine ends with a punch line that might give you a clue
to how Twain felt about slavery when he wrote this book.
CHAPTER 9
-
Neither Huck nor Jim has any intention of going back to the village;
so, without actually stating it, they’ve decided to be outcasts
together. This chapter shows them starting out on their new life.
Huck leads Jim to a cavern he found while he was exploring the
island. Jim convinces him that they should carry all their gear up
to this place because there are going to be heavy rains. Huck
doesn’t like having to do all that work, but he decides to go along.
Sure enough, the rain begins right after dinner. Huck gives
another of his “poetic” descriptions when he tells about the rain.
He seems to be perfectly satisfied with his new life.
It rains for so many days that the river floods. Huck and Jim take
the canoe out from time to time to see what they can find. On one of
their trips, they retrieve a 12 x 16-foot raft, well-built and sturdy.
They bring it back to the island for possible use later.
On another outing, they climb into the window of a two-story house
that’s floating by. In one room they find the body of a man who has
been shot in the back. Jim covers the man’s face to keep Huck from
seeing it. Jim’s behavior might be a little puzzling here, but it will
be explained later. He seems to be trying to keep Huck away from the
body. Huck, however, isn’t much interested in seeing it.
They ransack the house for equipment and supplies they may need.
Then they go back to the security of their island.
CHAPTER 10
-
The next morning Huck wonders aloud how the dead man was killed. Jim
says it would be bad luck to talk about it. He adds that unburied
corpses are more likely to haunt people than buried ones. That
sounds reasonable to Huck, so he drops the subject.
Most of this chapter is about bad luck and its causes. As you read
it, you should be able to detect Mark Twain in the background,
having a laugh over some of the superstitions he believed when he
was a boy.
Huck tells us that after he handled some snakeskin, Jim warned him
that bad luck was coming. Sure enough, three days later Jim is
bitten by a rattlesnake because of something Huck has done.
Even though Huck is directly responsible for what happens to Jim, he
counts this as the bad luck that Jim predicted. Twain is probably
making a small joke here about how superstitious people will go out of
their way to find things that make their superstitions seem true.
But he’s also setting us up for another joke on the same topic. Huck
tells us a story about Hank Bunker, who waited a full two years before
his bad luck finally showed up. The funniest part of the story is
the description of what happened to the man and how he was buried.
—————————————————————–
NOTE: The subject of good and bad luck comes up often in Huck’s
narration, and you might have suspected by now that it’s more than
simply a way for Twain to get some laughs. Jim’s attitude toward the
supernatural, for example, should tell you something about his
self-image and about his view of the world.
Maybe you remember a conversation the two had when they first met on
the island in Chapter 8. Huck asked Jim why he never talked about
signs of good luck, why he dwelt so much on bad omens. Jim’s
response was that, first, there are very few signs of good luck; and
second, that good luck wasn’t the sort of thing you had to know
about in advance.
To Jim, the world is an endlessly threatening place. Danger is
hiding behind every tree and under every rock. At any moment,
everything you have could be taken away from you by forces over
which you have no control.
If you can imagine growing up as a slave in 19th-century America,
you can understand how Jim could have developed such a view of life. A
slave had no status as a human being; he could be beaten or even
killed by a master; he was a piece of property who could be sold on
a whim, even if that meant permanent separation from his own family.
To someone who grew up under conditions like these, dark and
unexplained forces could become a part of everyday life. But how about
Huck? Does the same explanation hold true for him?
It’s true that Huck has had his share of hardship; you don’t have to
look any farther than Pap. To a kid, the unpredictable behavior of a
cruel, drunken father is no less frightening than the things a slave
had to worry about all the time.
That unwarranted and unpredictable cruelty could help to explain why
Huck has such a low opinion of himself. If his own father treats him
like a piece of dirt, he probably finds it easy to believe that he
is a piece of dirt. And if his own father could turn on him in an
instant and suddenly start beating him, Huck might find it easy to
believe that the world is filled with unexplained forces that could
ruin his life just as suddenly.
Still, there are at least two differences between Jim and Huck.
One is that Huck is white. No matter how badly he thinks of himself,
somewhere, deep inside, he knows that there’s at least a chance that
he could be a respectable person some day. For Jim, that would be
inconceivable.
A second difference is that Huck is a boy, on his way to becoming an
adult. He’s also inclined to examine ideas before accepting or
rejecting them. So he asks a lot of questions about the omens that Jim
believes with all his heart.
In most cases Huck ends up accepting what Jim tells him. But that
doesn’t mean he always will. He still has the potential of learning