"Huck Finn" and Me

From the time I was old enough to take a bus by myself, there was nothing I liked to do better during my summer vacation than to take the 61B bus from my hometown of Swissvale to the main branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in Oakland, which was one of my favorite places.

As a child I was rarely alone. Wherever I went – home, school, church- there were lots of people there. I didn’t actually think to seek out solitude because it was a concept that was outside my experience. The quiet majesty of the library and the adjacent Carnegie Museum and Scaife Art Gallery filled me with a strange mixture of excitement and complete serenity. I would spend a couple of hours each time I visited, often wandering through the museum or the art gallery before returning to the library, which held more books than I could read in a lifetime.

Each visit I would choose nine books, which was the maximum number you could check out at a time. Finding the books was like a treasure hunt to me. I favored historical fiction and 800-page family sagas that started with two teenage sisters attending the party-of-the-season in turn-of-the-century Austria and ended about a century, two world wars and three generations later in Manhattan. I also liked stories written in the first person, as I liked to experience the story through the eyes of one particular individual, speaking in his or her own voice.

The summer I was 12 I picked up Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as one of my selections. The first thing that appealed to me about the book was not only that it was written in Huck’s voice, but that his voice was so strong and specific. Mark Twain wrote it so beautifully that as I was reading I almost forgot that Huck was a fictional character. It felt as though Huck was telling me his story.

I also immediately identified with Huckleberry Finn. On the surface, aside from the fact that we were roughly the same age, we had little in common. He was a motherless child with a drunken, abusive and mostly absently father living in a rural town in Missouri in the mid-1800’s. He was left on his own to fend for himself most of the time. I was living in a small blue collar town on the edge of Pittsburgh in the 1960’s, the third of four daughters of strict, loving, and oh-so-present parents. I was essentially never left unsupervised.

Huck was the ultimate outsider in his society, and I also always felt a little bit different – like I didn’t really fit in. In the beginning of the book, Huck had been taken in by Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, who were trying to “civilize” him, but he wasn’t responding very well to living among people. I knew what he was going through. I too spent much of my time wondering why people acted the way that they did, and trying to make sense of the rules of my society, some of which I didn’t understand, and others that I just couldn’t believe. As with Huck, the authority figures in my life insisted that I conform or face some pretty dire consequences. The threat of Hell was thrown around with reckless abandon for both of us.

At one point, Huck’s father abducts him and holds him captive. Huck escapes and is presumed dead. He happens upon Jim, Miss Watson’s slave, who has run away because Miss Watson was planning to sell him – a move that would take him away from his wife and children. Jim has a plan to travel to Illinois where he can obtain his freedom. Huck agrees to join him even though he knows, as removed as he is from his society, that running away from your owner is a very serious offense for a slave.

I, on the other hand, was more than eager to accompany Huck and Jim as they set out on that raft down the Mississippi River, which seemed like a wild and fantastic undertaking to me. Remember, my idea of an adventure was taking the bus by myself to Oakland or downtown Pittsburgh. On their travels they encounter a number of colorful characters, some good, some bad, but most of whom in the end either act foolishly, or badly.

The one constant in Huck’s adventures is the presence of Jim, a decent and moral man who cares about and for him, and a rare stable adult influence in his life. Nonetheless, Huck is convinced, because it is what he has been taught, that he is doing something terribly wrong by aiding and abetting a runaway slave. Huck decides to pray to God that Jim is recaptured and returned to Miss Watson. He tries, but he can’t find the words, and finally concludes that “You can’t pray a lie.”

“You can’t pray a lie.” I was awestruck by the essential truth in that statement. Huck couldn’t say a sincere prayer for Jim’s capture because he didn’t believe that Jim should be captured. At his core he wanted Jim to be free because he thought that Jim deserved to be free. Slavery may have been sanctioned by the society in which they lived, but Huck knew Jim as a man, not a slave. He is willing to suffer the consequences, even Hell, rather than betray his friend, and I admired his bravery. I realized then that the mores of any society are not irrefutable, and they can be wrong and immoral. I knew then that we each have a responsibility to be ethical and thoughtful individuals in this life, finding our own truth and moral direction.

In the end of the book, Jim is set free and Huck discovers that the father he was running from is dead. Huck decides to “set out for the territory ahead of the rest” – to make his own way in the world, rather than return to the Widow Douglas and try to fit into society.

I finished the book but Huckleberry Finn and I weren’t done with each other. I bought a paperback edition of the book that I read and reread so many times that I lost track, and I developed a life-long love affair with the works of Mark Twain. I dressed up as Huckleberry Finn for Halloween in the 9th grade (if I wasn’t an outsider before, I sure was after that). Twenty years after I first picked up the book, I chose the character of Huckleberry Finn as the topic of an annotated bibliography that I completed for a Methods of Research class in graduate school. In 2006, I had the privilege of playing the Widow Douglas in a local production of Big River, a musical version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Basically, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had a profound effect on me. Since reading it, I have believed wholeheartedly in the equality of all people, and learned to think for myself instead of blindly listening to, well, anyone. And I never again doubted the ability of a book to change a life.