Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.
It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block.
Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences.
It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the novels of Charles Dickens: "With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire."
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Enough about the novel's many, many weaknesses. Let's move on to what makes Huck an interesting--and inspiring--character, which I believe largely stems from his adaptability. He adapts to the widow Douglas' house where he's put into starchy clothes and a schedule. He learns to "stand" school, even learning to read and write a little. He adapts to life on the river, where he can subsist in the bush to a level shocking to a modern. And when his father captures him and takes him to an isolated cabin in the woods, Huck again adapts, not minding things too much and even returning to his old habit of cussing, since his father didn't object to it like the widow Douglas did.
It's astounding to look back from the modern era at this level of flexibility and resilience. Today, people can't stand it if their room temperature is a few degrees too high or low, and they go ballistic if they find themselves behind someone driving a few miles per hour too slow.
Huck also knows his place: he knows he's not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he sure knows enough grandmother's wisdom to stay (mostly) out of trouble and thrive anywhere. He also shows us how many skills we've all lost in the modern hyperspecialized labor market. Back then an average young boy was a good shot, could fight, could easily throw dogs off his scent, could smoke a pipe, and knew the wilderness well enough to survive indefinitely on catfish, game, river turtles and wild raspberries.
What's less interesting about Huck as a character is when Twain uses him as a blunt and blatant mouthpiece for the author's social opinions. But this is altogether fitting and proper too: it's why every high school student has at least some level of exposure to this book.
[Readers, what follows are my notes and comments along with plot points of the novel. Feel free to skip it! There will be spoilers.]
Notes/plot points:
Note the epigraph at the beginning of the story: "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." See also the explanatory comment on the dialects used in the novel, including "backwoods South-Western dialect," "Missouri negro dialect" etc.
Chapter 1: Civilizing Huck : Miss Watson : Tom Sawyer Waits
3ff A nested story structure here where Huck himself refers to "Mr. Mark Twain," saying he "mainly he told the truth." "...mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before." The author ties things back to the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the money Huck and Tom found, which when put at interest, earned them a dollar a day apiece: "more than a body could tell what to do with"; on the widow Douglas wanting to "sivilize me"; on how Tom Sawyer persuaded Huck to go back and "be respectable" but Huck can't stand it: the widow makes him wear nice clothes, say grace before dinner, she won't let him smoke, people are telling what to do all the time. [This is a great metaphor for upper middle class corporate life today: you may have income and be "sivilized"... but somebody's always telling you what to do all the time, you can't just go barefoot and smoke your pipe whenever you want]. Huck lies awake in bed, unsettled and miserable, but then he hears a "meow" outside his window and it's Tom Sawyer waiting for him.
Chapter 2: The Boys Escape Jim : Tom Sawyer's Gang : Deep-laid Plans
9ff Huck and Tom try to sneak off into the woods, but they make a noise and "Miss Watson's big n*****, named Jim" hears them. [In today's era I have no idea how to write that, I guess I'll settle for asterisks?] Jim sits up and waits to hear who it is, but Huck and Tom freeze in place and don't make a move until Jim falls asleep. Note Huck's comments here on his nose itching, as well as itches on and several other places on his body, driving him nearly crazy.
Remember, no retrospective bigoteering!
10ff Tom wants to play a prank on Jim by tying him to a tree, [!] but Huck says it's too risky.
12 On page 12 of the novel you can find the n-word used at least seven times.
13ff Huck and Tom meet up with some of the other boys, they get on a little skiff and travel downriver to where the cave opens up along the riverbank; Tom talks about his "gang," his band of robbers; Huck admires Tom's "a real beautiful oath" that he wrote out for all the members to take; he got the ideas for it out of pirate books and robber books.
15ff They talk about "taking ransom" but nobody knows what the word "ransom" means; one of the boys asks "But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?" Tom replies "Why blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books?" See also Tom's appeal to authority here: "Don't you reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct thing to do? Do you reckon you can learn 'em anything?"
Chapter 3: A Good Going-over : Grace Triumphant : One of Tom Sawyer's Lies
18ff Huck struggles to behave; he's also confused by the idea of praying: "...if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow get back her silver snuff box that was stole?" [Interesting here how he goes into the woods to think about it, but then says, "At last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it anymore, but just let it go." Impressive how he very quickly gets to the final stage of grief and accepts things as they are.]
19 Discussion of Huck's father: that he beats him, that he was mistakenly thought to be found drowned.
20ff The group of boys all decide to quit the robber gang, "...we hadn't killed any people, but only just pretended." Tom wants to do a raid on what he claims to be a group of rich Spaniards and Arabs, all in a camp with their treasure and hundreds of of camels and elephants, but Huck is confused: the day of the raid it was just a Sunday school picnic of primary school children, and although the boys chased the children around, Huck never saw any camels or elephants or diamonds or anything. Tom tells him if he would read a book called Don Quixote you "would know without asking." Huck listens to Tom's storytelling and realizes that he has a tendency to tell lies [later in the novel we'll see Huck learn much more about using his imagination, even to the point of persuading Tom to do so when they rescue Jim.]
Chapter 4 Huck and the Judge : Superstition
24ff Huck is now going to school and he can spell, read and write a little; he learns to put up with school: "the longer I went the easier it got to be." He even starts to learn to get used to the widow's ways. But he spills salt--something that brings very bad luck--and then sees an unusual footprint in the snow near the widow's house, and Huck realizes his father is back in town. He quickly gives all of his money to Judge Thatcher. [We'll see that this is highly predictive thinking by Huck, on a few levels.]
26ff Huck asks Jim to use his hairball [!!] to divine where his father is going to stay, and what was he going to do; Huck pays Jim with a counterfeit quarter so that the hairball would speak to Jim, and Jim, "listening" to the hairball, tells him that his father doesn't yet know. And then that night, when Huck arrives to his bedroom, his father is sitting right there in his room!
Chapter 5 Huck's Father : The Fond Parent : Reform
29ff Huck is at first scared thinking of all the "tannings" he got from his father over the years, but then realizes he "warn't scared of him worth bothering about." His father is pale, wearing rags, his hat is caved in. He asks Huck if Huck thinks he's better than his father now that he can read and write and wears nice clothes. "I'll bet I'll take some o' these frills out o' you before I'm done with you. Why there ain't no end to your airs--they say you're rich." His father demands money, and Huck gives him his dollar, telling him that Judge Thatcher now has his money.
33ff Pap gets rip-roaring drunk, gets put in jail, and then the local judge, a new judge who doesn't know him, tries to convert him to temperance, but Pap just gets drunk again.
Chapter 6: He Went for Judge Thatcher : Huck Decided to Leave : Political Economy : Thrashing Around
35ff Pap takes Huck across the river to the Illinois side and keeps him under lock and key in an old cabin in the forest. And Huck actually starts to get used to this life, much like his old life, and discovers he kind of enjoys it all over again. "Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn't like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn't no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there take it all around. But by-and-by pap got too handy with his hick'ry and I couldn't stand it."
39ff Huck learns that there's a legal fight over both his custody and his money; he has mixed feelings going back to the widow's but doesn't want to be with his father either. Huck finds a broken saw inside the cabin in the woods, and starts cutting out an escape hole, presuming his father will get drunk when he returns so that Huck can slip away. The reader gets a sort of anti-mouthpiece scene here where Pap, drunk, begins complaining about the "govment," about black men voting, etc. [This scene is supposed to reflect the worst opinions of white society, it's supposed to lay bare this type of person's racism, etc., but Pap's monologue is self-parodying here, it's not particularly believable It's necessary not for the plot but to serve serves Twain's didactic needs.]
43ff Now Huck's father gets extremely drunk, becomes paranoid, and starts chasing Huck around the cabin with a knife; then he falls asleep and Huck, watching him, gets the gun and sits and waits for him to stir.
Chapter 7: Laying for Him : Locked in the Cabin : Sinking The Body : Resting
46 Huck had fallen asleep, but when his father asks him what he was doing with the gun, he makes an excuse. His father sends him out to check to see if there are fish on the lines for breakfast.
46 [Note this quote]: "I noticed some pieces of limbs and such things floating down, and sprinkling of bark; so I knowed the river had begun to rise. I reckon I would have great times now, if I was over at the town. The June rise used to be always luck for me; because as soon as that rise begins, here comes cord-wood floating down, and pieces of log rafts--sometimes a dozen logs together; so all you have to do is catch them and sell them to the wood yards and the sawmill."
47 Huck sees a canoe floating downstream, some fourteen feet long. "Thinks I, the old man will be glad when he sees this--she's worth ten dollars." Huck hides the canoe in the woods, thinking he might take it downstream a long ways; he tries to come up with a scheme to get away without anybody thinking of following him. His father then leaves for town to sell some driftwood, so Huck begins his plan: he saws out the rest of his escape hole in the cabin, he takes most of the supplies: the gun, the ammunition, coffee, sugar, a side of bacon, blankets, fish lines, matches, a big bag of cornmeal etc. He shoots a wild pig and spreads the pig's blood around the cabin to make it look like something had been dragged over the ground, and then hacks open the door from the outside with an axe. "I did wish Tom Sawyer was there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches." Huck pulls out some of his hair, and bloodies the axe, and sticks some of his hair on the back side of the axe, all to make it look like robbers came in and killed him, dragged his body to the river, and then went off towards a creek leading off in another direction.
51ff Huck goes out into the canoe and falls asleep; he wakes late in the night and hears someone paddling towards him; it turns out that it's his father, sober, and he passes close enough by Huck could reach out and touch him. Huck quickly sets off downstream, laying down in the canoe so that no one can see him. He makes for Jackson Island and hides his canoe in a place he knows.
I gotta get me a pipe.
Chapter 8: Sleeping in the Woods : Raising the Dead : Exploring the Island : Finding Jim : Jim's Escape : Signs : Balum
55ff Huck hears a cannon go off over the water; the town is searching for his body; the townsfolk also send loaves of bread downstream with quicksilver in them, "because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there." Huck doesn't want to start a fire and draw attention to himself, so he floats out into the river and picks up a loaf of baker's bread. A ferry boat comes by with his Pap, Judge Thatcher, Tom Sawyer and many other people from town looking for his body. They actually fired the cannon right near Huck and he almost goes deaf and blind with a noise and smoke. "If they'd a had some bullets in, I reckon they'd a got the corpse they was after."
57ff "I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would come a-hunting after me.
58 "When it was dark I set by my campfire smoking, and feeling pretty satisfied; but by-and-by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set on the bank and listened to the currents washing along, and counted the stars and drift-logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed; there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome; you can't stay so, you soon get over it."
58ff Huck goes looking for game on the island and stumbles onto a still-smoking campfire. He heads over to the Illinois side of the river in his canoe, but then hears the approach of horses and men, so he then returns to the island. He decides to find out who was on the island with him, and he sees a tall man sleeping by the campfire: it turns out to be Jim, Miss Watson's slave. Jim is terrified when he sees Huck; he drops to his knees, thinking Huck is a ghost.
63ff Huck tells Jim what happened back in the cabin, and Jim tells Huck "I run off." Jim learned he was about to be sold down in New Orleans, that Miss Watson could get $800 for him, and so he stole away around the same time news arrived that Huck was killed. "I 'uz powerful sorry you's killed Huck, but I ain't no mo, now."
65ff Jim explains to Huck what he did to escape, including going without eating for days, and Huck asks him "And so you ain't had no meat nor bread to eat all this time? Why didn't you get mud-turkles [mud turtles]?" [It's amazing how a regular barely educated kid can know all these things to eat and can survive in the bush just based on his natural "field knowledge."]
66ff Sort of a discontinuity here in the plot as Jim starts sharing all sorts of "signs" that he believes in, like bees wouldn't sting idiots. Huck thinks to himself: "...but I didn't believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me." [!!] Huck then asks Jim why all of his "signs" are about bad luck, aren't there any signs for good luck? Jim replies, "Mighty few--an' dey ain't no use to a body. What you want to know when good luck's a-comin' for?" want to keep it off?" But then he comes up with one good luck sign: having hairy arms and a hairy breast means you're going to be rich. Jim tells Huck a series of stories about how he was rich but then lost all his money multiple times. He also tells a story about a dream he had, telling him to give his money to another slave named Balum, who had told Jim that if you give money to the poor the Lord would give back a hundred times, but Jim had his doubts about this.
69 "I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, and I's wuth eight hundred dollars. I wish I had the money, I wouldn't want no mo'."
Chapter 9: The Cave : The Floating House
70ff Huck and Jim discover a cave on Jackson Island and decide to move their things to it; then the reader gets a fascinating description of a storm here from Huck's point of view: it really does give you a good idea of what a heavy-duty Midwest thunderstorm can be like.
71 "Jim, this is nice, I says. I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread."
72ff The river starts rising, they catch a section of a lumber raft, some 12 x 16 feet; then an entire frame house comes floating down the river, tilted over; they tie their canoe to it in the night and climb in an upstairs window, there's furniture in there, and a dead man shot in the back. They find all kinds of things in the house to take: a lantern, candles, a bed quilt, etc. They return with no one seeing them.
Chapter 10: The Find : Old Hank Bunker : In Disguise
76ff Huck plays a trick on Jim, killing a rattlesnake and putting it at the foot of Jim's blanket, "thinking there'd be some fun when Jim found him there." But the snake's mate was there and bit Jim, laying up for four days and nights. ["That all comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave a dead snake its mate always comes and curls around it."]
79 Amusing discussion here of different kinds of luck and different kinds of signs: "I've always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is one of the carelessest and foolishest things a body can do."
80ff Things get a little boring so Huck decides to disguise himself with the girl's clothes that they found in the floating house, and go over to town unrecognized to see what's going on. He finds a little shanty outside of town with a woman in it who Huck doesn't know [notable because Huck knows everyone in town], and so he figures he can ask her all he wants to know without anybody knowing about him asking.
Chapter 11: Huck and the Woman : The Search : Prevarication : Going to Goshen
82ff Huck asks the woman "Who done it?" She tells him "Some thinks old Finn done it himself" but shortly after people began to think Jim did it, since he ran off the night Huck Finn was killed. There's a $300 reward for Jim but also a $200 reward for pap, Huck's father, as some of the townsfolk suspect pap killed Huck to get at his money without having to bother with a lawsuit. Huck also learns that there is a search planned for Jackson's Island because smoke had been seen there, thus it was likely that Jim would be there. Huck learns, to his distress, that the woman's husband went to town to get an extra gun, and that he would join a group searching for Jim on the island that very night.
87ff The woman figures out that Huck is a boy and assumes that he's a runaway apprentice, she says she won't tell on him, Huck spins up a whole story about how he's bound to a mean old farmer in a in the country. The reader learns that knew he was a boy by the way he tried to thread a needle and how he threw something. "...don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it--that's the way a woman most always does; but a man always does t'other way." She sends Huck off, and he races back to the island to rouse Jim and take off.
91 "Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain't a minute to lose. They're after us!" They head to the raft push off downriver in the night.
Chapter 12: Slow Navigation : Borrowing Things : Boarding the Wreck : The Plotters : Hunting for the Boat
92ff Huck already has a plan: if a boat comes alongside their raft they would take the canoe and break for the Illinois shore; also Huck had set a decoy campfire in the last chapter before going to get Jim, which he knew would keep the men waiting there for Jim, possibly all night. [Huck is really thinking downfield here!] Huck and Jim pull off into some woods on the Illinois side of the river, wait until dark, and then Jim builds a sort of a wigwam shelter on the raft with planks built up above the raft floor so that everything would remain out of the reach of steamboat waves. They also pile up pile dirt onto the raft floor, enabling them to build a fire inside the wigwam.
93 Note the long paragraph here describing the etiquette of ships and steamboats on the river: on leaving a lantern on your boat so the steamboats won't run you over, how to stay out of other boats' ways, etc.
93ff They float downstream for a few days, traveling with the current up to four miles an hour, passing St. Louis; each night Huck would slip ashore and buy some meal or bacon for ten or fifteen cents and then he would also "lift a chicken." "Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don't want them yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway." Discussion here on taking watermelons or pumpkins or corn; Jim and Huck have an entire ethical discussion about whether these things are right or not; every so often they shoot a waterfowl for food too.
95 "Take it all around, we lived pretty high."
95ff A storm hits, they find themselves drifting towards a wrecked and listing steamboat. Huck wants to go aboard and see what's there but Jim is dead set against it at first. But Huck tells him that there's likely "seegars" on board because "steamboat captains is always rich." "Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for pie, he wouldn't... And wouldn't keep throw style into it?" [It's fun to see how the author calls out Tom Sawyer here, it's a sort of marketing reference to his prior book, and yet it also fits organically with the story] Jim grumbles but is convinced. They go on to the boat, they hear voices; Jim runs away, back to the raft, but Huck says to himself "Tom Sawyer wouldn't back out now; and so I won't either," and crawls up close to look in on the men; one man is tied up and two other men are standing over him, one of them pointing a pistol at him. The two men debate whether to kill the tied-up man, or just leave him on the ship since it's about to break up anyway, thus the man will drown.
100 Huck scrambles away to find Jim and get away, but he discovers to his horror that the raft has broken loose and floated away.
Chapter 13: Escaping from the Wreck : The Watchmen : Sinking
101 "We struck for the stern of the texas." [On a 19th-century Mississippi River steamboat, the "texas" was the largest cabin structure located on the top deck (the hurricane deck).]
101ff Huck and Jim realize they have to find a boat somewhere on the ship to get away from the bad guys; Jim is so terrified he can't even move, but Huck said "come on, if we get left on this wreck, we are in a fix, sure." [Jim may sense danger better than Huck, but Huck is the one who seems to have the needed courage and pluck whenever they get into a real situation.] They find a skiff on the steamboat and manage to get away after the men nearly discover them. Suddenly they also realize that the men are now stranded on the wreck along with the man they had tied up, and are in just as much danger of drowning. Huck feels terribly guilty about this and forms a plan to rescue them, but then a big [deus ex machina] storm suddenly comes up and makes any rescue impossible. Huck and Jim then go in search of their raft, which they manage to find. Also the skiff they are in contains all the plunder that the gang had stolen from the steamboat. [Another neat little deus ex machina that feels somewhat organic to the story, but also gives them all kinds of supplies that they can use later.]
103ff They come to another village downriver, and Huck attempts rouse a steamboat owner there to lead a rescue: Huck concocts a whole story, persuading the steamboat captain by telling him one of the victims is the niece of a wealthy steamship owner. But then the wreck comes downriver anyway, making it obvious that there were no survivors.
Chapter 14: A General Good Time : The Harem : French
108 Huck and Jim look over the things the gang had stolen, finding boots, blankets, clothes, three boxes of "seegars" and all sorts of other things.
"We hadn't ever been this rich before, in neither of our lives."
108ff Huck tells Jim all about kings and dukes; they talk about Solomon and his "million" wives, what a harem is, etc.; Jim's first reaction is what a terrible racket a harem would be with all the wives and children; they have a discussion about Solomon's "judgment" to cut a child in two; Jim understands the story on the literal level only, and Huck tries to explain to him that he's missing the point of the story, but Jim won't listen. And then Huck tells him about King Louis XVI and his little boy "the dolphin"; then they have a discussion about languages, Jim struggles conceptually to grapple with the idea of why people would speak French.
Chapter 15: Huck Loses the Raft : In the Fog : Huck Finds the Raft : Trash
115ff Huck and Jim head towards Cairo, Illinois where the Mississippi and Ohio River meet; they plan to sell the raft and take a steamboat up the Ohio into the free states to get Jim out of trouble. They try to tie the raft to some saplings along the river but the current pulls the raft away, Huck jumps into a canoe to paddle after it, but because there was a heavy fog he couldn't see anything. He calls out to Jim and they whoop back and forth to each other but they get separated. And then by total [and totally implausible] luck they find each other after all: Huck finds Jim exhausted and sleeping on the raft. Huck then decides to plays a mean trick on Jim, pretending that Jim had been dreaming, and Huck was never gone. He manages to persuade Jim, but then tricks him yet again by asking him why the raft was in such disarray. Jim then calls out Huck on this, telling Huck it makes him feel ashamed, and Huck feels terrible for it. "It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a n****r--but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way." [This scene feels forced and implausible, it's out of left field and it's waaaay over-the-top too didactic.]
Chapter 16: Expectation : A White Lie : Floating Currency : Running by Cairo : Swimming Ashore
123ff They work out how to know when they get to Cairo; Jim is fearful of missing it because they'd then be in the South; Huck is equally fearful on behalf of Jim, but he also has his own guilt about helping a fugitive slave escape to freedom, not to mention helping Miss Watson's slave escape, as he asks himself "What had poor Miss Watson done to you...?"
126ff Jim talks about his plans once he obtains his freedom: he plans to save up every cent and then go buy his wife from a slave owner nearby Miss Watson's home, and then go buy their children--or if the owner won't sell them he plans to have an abolitionist help him them steal them. Huck is horrified at the illegality of it all: he's upset enough knowing that he's helping Miss Watson's slave escape, but he's particularly disturbed with Jim "coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children--children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that had never done me no harm." [Again, as obviously justified as the underlying message may be, this part of the story feels forced, it feels like propaganda rammed down the reader's throat.] Jim tells Huck, gratefully, that he wouldn't have been free if it hadn't been for Huck and that Huck was "de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his promise to ole Jim."
127ff Huck heads off in the canoe to check and make sure the nearby town is Cairo, but he is approached on the water by men on a raft looking for escaped slaves; Huck protects Jim by pretending that it is his family on the raft, sick with smallpox; the men give him some advice on where to land, some twenty miles downriver, and even give him two $20 gold pieces, since they were afraid to a get anywhere near his raft. Huck has very mixed feelings here: he doesn't know if he feels guilty because he didn't give Jim up, or if he feels guilty because he wanted to give Jim up.
131ff Huck and Jim approach a town on the left bank of the river, and Huck asks a man if it's Cairo, and the man answers, "You must be a blame' fool." Huck and Jim are now worried they already passed Cairo by in the fog; they talk about what to do. They sleep, and then when they wake up the canoe is gone. They blame the snakeskin that Huck handled several chapters ago, and Twain throws in some foreshadowing here for good measure: "Anybody that don't believe yet, that it's foolishness to handle a snake-skin, after all that that snake-skin done for us, will believe it now, if they read on and see what more it done for us."
132ff Suddenly a steamboat comes right at their raft: the steamboat captain runs right at them despite their raft's warning lantern, ramming right into their raft. Jim and Huck dive off opposite sides of the raft; Huck stays deep under the water because he knew a thirty foot paddle wheel was going to pass over him in the water. When he surfaces there's no sign of Jim. Huck swims over to the shore and approaches a log cabin, but a pack of dogs run out at him, barking, "and I knowed better than to move another peg."
Chapter 17: An Evening Call : The Farm in Arkansaw : Interior Decorations : Stephen Dowling Bots : Poetical Effusions
[This chapter appears to mark the "dehisced incision" between the organic-feeling "good" part of the book, and the inorganic-feeling "bad" part of the book. Twain appears to be struggling with what to do with the story, and so he introduces a bunch of new characters, none of whom really fit--much like how Charles Dickens stuck Miss Mowcher into the middle of David Copperfield to help a flagging story "blaze up."]
135ff The owner of the house points of gun at Huck and has him come into the house real slow; they ask him if he knows the Shepherdsons; Huck tells them his name is "George Jackson" and tells a whole story about his life and his family--none of it true--and then the next morning he wakes up and "drat it all, I had forgot what my name was." He dares Buck, the family's youngest son, to spell his name out, which he does; Huck then does his best to make sure to remember.
140ff The family is wealthy, and Huck notes various markers of wealth from his perspective, including the fact that the family has a clock on the mantelpiece, their parlor doesn't have a bed in it; they have decorative items on the mantle (the material confuses Huck, as he sees ceramic fruits and thinks they are made of chalk. He also looks with interest but also some confusion at some of the drawings the family's daughter did before she died, he also peruses a scrapbook that contains some of the late daughter's poetry which Huck pronounces very good.
146ff Huck continues extolling life at the house, with good food and a friendly family; apparently he's already stayed here for a while, which doesn't seem to fit with the storyline! The plotting has become somewhat amateurish at this point in the book.
Chapter 18: Col. Grangerford : Aristocracy : Feuds : The Testament :Recovering the Raft : The Woodpile : Pork and Cabbage
148ff We learn about the family leader, Colonel Grangerford: wealthy, kind, people love being around him, but he was also could also be intimidating. His two older sons are tall and beautiful; everyone has a slave assigned to them as a butler, they have a huge estate of farmland; also three of the family's other sons have been killed by this time because of the long-running feud with the Shepherdson family.
150ff We also learn about the Shepherdsons, yet another "clan of aristocracy in the region." [Is this some sort of Hatfield-McCoy ripoff?] A scene here where Huck is with Buck in the woods, and one of the Shepherdsons comes through the same woods hunting; Buck tells Huck to hide, and then Buck shoots at the man, shooting off his hat. Huck asks Buck why he wanted to kill the man, and Buck tells him "on account of the feud." Huck asks, "What's a feud?" and Buck answers, "Why, where were you raised? Don't you know what a feud is?"
153 "'Well,' says Buck, 'a feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; and the other brothers, on both sides goes for one another; then the cousins chip in--and by-and-by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time.'" The feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons started thirty years ago, and Buck is foggy on the original reasons for it.
155ff The family daughter's Miss Sophia asks Huck to get her testament that she accidentally left at church; Huck gets it and a piece of paper falls out that says "Half-past two." Huck puts the paper back in the book, gives it to her, and she reads the paper, gives him a big hug and "turns mighty red the face." He asks her what the paper is about, and she asks him if he had read it and if he could read. Huck answers, "no, only coarse-hand." Sophia then tells him that the paper was just a bookmark.
156ff [Again a weird plot discontinuity error here as Huck has been with the Grangerford family long enough now that he has his own slave/attendent, just like the rest of the family] Huck's slave takes him to the river and shows him an open patch along the bank where Jim was! [Which is a weird, totally random and an artificial-feeling plot device.] We get some plot backfilling here as the reader (and Huck) learns that Jim didn't want anybody to pick him up and take him back into slavery, so he actually followed Huck the entire time after they got separated on the river, but he didn't answer when Huck called for him. The family's slaves had been bringing him food and had been looking after him all this time; Jim has also been working on repairing the raft: it turns out it wasn't destroyed in the collision with the steamboat but just damaged. Jim tells him, "en we's got a new lot o' stuff, too, in de place o' what 'us los'."
159ff Miss Sophia has run off to elope with a member of the Shepherdson family and there's about to be a war over it. Huck finds a hiding place to go watch the two families shoot at each other. Huck is so horrified by seeing all this he tells the reader he still dreams about it. Buck is killed in the conflict Huck is extremely upset about it. Huck then goes to find Jim and discovers the raft is gone: he calls out for Jim, who was hiding just a few feet away and he'd already started the raft down towards the river to get it ready to shove off because he was afraid that Huck had died in the combat between the families. "Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was so glad to see me." [Again, this plotting is several notches below the first third of the book: it's implausible, it is discontinuous, it requires too many deux ex machina devices... and the book is about to get even worse.]
Chapter 19: Tying Up Day-times : An Astronomical Theory : Running a Temperance : Revival : The Duke of Bridgewater : The Troubles of Royalty
[This chapter features two scammers scamming; it is still more Miss Mowcher-style writing.]
164ff Jim and Huck continue floating down the river, traveling during the night and tying up near a towhead during the day to stay out of sight. Description here of the vibe on the river and different things that Huck notices and describes.
167ff Huck finds a canoe and heads up a creek to try and find some will berries; suddenly two men are tearing out after him asking for him to save them because there were men and dogs chasing them; Huck explains to them how to throw the dogs off the scent before getting into canoe. One of the men is 70, the other about 30, both badly dressed, and they don't appear to even know each other. It turns out the younger man was selling some kind of snake oil cure to take tartar off the teeth, but it also took off the enamel, and "I staid about one night longer than I ought to." The older man was runnimg a temperance meeting scam: taking in donations but word got around that he drinks. He claims he was about to be tarred and feathered.
170ff The younger man gets weepy and tells the others that he is royalty, a Duke. "Jim's eyes bugged out when he heard that." The man claims his great-grandfather was the Duke of Bridgewater and fled to this country at the end of last century; he claims that he is the lineal son but the second son seized the title and estates. He tells them that "one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him he wanted done. Well, that was all easy, so we done it." Then the older man starts getting weepy and then claims to be "the late Dauphin... Yes, gentleman, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin' exiled, trampled-on and sufferin' rightful King of France." Jim and Huck felt bad for him too, and called him "Your Majesty," but then the Duke "kind of soured on him." Eventually the two men made up and agreed to be friends. [It feels like the author has really lost the plot here and he's really forcing things.]
176ff Huck figures it all out: "It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes, at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble... If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with this kind of people is to let them have their own way."
Chapter 20: Huck Explains : Laying Out a Campaign : Working the Camp-meeting A Pirate at the Camp-meeting: The Duke Has a Printer
178ff Interesting example here how Huck avoids lying, but manages to misdirect the king and the duke's questions as they ask whether Jim was a runaway slave: Huck answers their question with his own question: "Goodness sakes, would a runaway n***** run south?" Huck then spins up a whole yarn to explain that they're heading to New Orleans to live with his uncle Ben. The king and duke buy Huck's story, and the duke offers to come up with a ruse so the four of them can travel during the daytime.
181 The two men work on scenes from Romeo and Juliet, working on their parts; then they approach a small town along the river and the duke says he has an idea for how to run in daylight without being dangerous for Jim. The duke looks for a printing office while the king goes to a camp meeting being held at the town.
185ff Here's a whole midwest/south 19th century-era revival scene, parodied by Twain: "You couldn't make out what the preacher said, anymore, on account of the shouting and crying. Folks got up, everywheres in the crowd, and worked their way, just by main strength, to the mourners' bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the mourners have gotten up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung, and shouted, and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild."
186ff Suddenly the king runs up to the front, dressed as a pirate, and he tells a whole story about how he was converted, and how he's going to the Indian Ocean to convert all the pirates to the true path; and the people take up a collection for him, totally $87.75; the king also finds a three-gallon jug of whiskey on his way back through the woods. "The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day he'd ever put in in the missionarying line."
189ff In the meantime the duke had gone to the town's printing office, passing himself off at the new owner doing jobs for pay; and in the meantime he prints out a reward poster all about Jim, so that they can have a story that he had run away from New Orleans, and they had captured him to collect the reward. "Whenever we see anybody coming, we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we captured him up the river, and we're too poor to travel on a steamboat, so we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down to get the reward."
191 Jim tries to get the king to talk in French so that he could hear what it sounds like, but the king tells him that he'd been in this country so long that he'd forgotten it.
Chapter 21: Sword Exercise : Hamlet's Soliloquy : They Loafed Around Town : A Lazy Town : Old Boggs : Dead
192ff The duke and the king wake up massively hungover, but perk up after they swim in the river a little bit, and then return to practicing their Romeo and Juliet parts. The duke performs Hamlet's soliloquy for the group, butchering it, but doing the best he can from his memory.
196ff The group finds another town, a very poor one, that is having a circus, so the king and duke decide to offer their dramatic performances there. The duke prints up a handbill citing various totally exaggerating things, including claiming he had done Hamlet's soliloquy "300 consecutive nights in Paris!" Huck describes the town as having many loafers, "a mighty ornery lot." Also an amusing discussion here about chaw tobacco and etiquette--or the lack thereof--among the men: one of them will divide the tobacco by biting it and handing the piece back to the other person who lent it to him; in one scene here the one who gets it back says sarcastically "Here, gimme the chaw, and you take the plug."
201 Comments on how some of the houses in this town were sticking out over the water and ready to tumble in; Huck tells the reader: "Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the river and one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the rivers always gnawing at it."
202ff Old Boggs arrives to town, "He's the best-naturedest old fool in Arkansaw--never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober." He starts haranguing Sherburn, a well-dressed man inside a store; Sherburn steps outside and warns him to stop by 1:00pm; the people try to warn Boggs to stop, but Boggs keeps at it; then the man walks out into the street and shoots Boggs, as his daughter runs to him screaming. The people take him to the town drugstore where he dies. [Doesn't this scene sound like it belongs in a different book? Absolutely weird.] Suddenly the whole town is there pushing and shoving to get a look at Boggs' body. Huck slips away thinking there was going to be trouble. Soon there was a cry from everyone saying that Sherburn ought to be lynched.
Chapter 22: Sherburn : Attending the Circus : Intoxication in the Ring : The Thrilling Tragedy
207ff All the townsfolk swarm towards Sherburn's house, raging and yelling; it is a good old-fashioned mob. The mob reaches his house, and Sherburn steps out onto the roof with a double-barrel gun, calm and deliberate; he stares down the mob and starts mocking and haranguing them, calling them cowards. Basically he lectures them about the psychology of a mob, and how pitiful it is that the people there don't have courage except that which is "borrowed from their mass." [This is an interesting scene but, again, it has no place in this story at all, it belongs in a separate book of short stories.] He cocks his gone and the mob runs away.
209 Now the story moves on to the town's circus: Huck slips under the tent to get in for free and calls it "a real bully circus" with trick horse riding and clowns; then a drunk man becomes aggressive and demands to show that he can ride as well as any of the circus performers; the situation gets almost violent until the ringmaster gives a speech saying he would let him ride if he promised not to make any more trouble, and then the horse that he was on went wild and started dragging him around while the crowd laughed aquariusly. "It warn't funny to me, though; I was all of a tremble to see his danger." It turns out the man was part of the circus, playing a role.
212ff "Well, that night we had our show" [interesting how Huck frames it this way], but only twelve people showed up, just enough to pay expenses, and they laughed and mocked the performers and then left before the show was over. The Duke then concludes that people in Arkansas needed low comedy and so he put up a new handbill that says at the bottom "LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED." "There, if that don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw."
Chapter 23: Sold : Royal Comparisons : Jim Gets Home-sick
214ff This new, adult, play involves the king cavorting around the stage naked, with stripes painted on his body. It gets laughs, but then the show ends, and the crowd becomes angry: "Is that all?" Then someone in the audience stands up and shouts out basically, yes, we've been ripped off, but instead of being made into laughingstocks, let's sell the rest of this town on the show; everybody agrees. Thus on the second night the house was sold out all over again. Then, the king and duke tell Jim and Huck to float the raft down the river and hide it about two miles below the town. And on the third night the performance is sold out again, but the crowd is carrying rotten eggs and cabbages and such things. The duke, Huck and Jim race off to the raft without even going on stage. Huck thinks the king is going to get the worst of it, but it turns out he was already on the raft. "Well, how'd the old thing pan out this time, Duke?" [Now the reader learns for sure that these guys knew each other all along: this is a decent reveal for a piece of humor writing, even though these characters never fit with the story in the first place.]
218 "Them rapscallions took in four hundred and sixty-five dollars in that three nights. I never see money hauled in by the wagon load like that, before." Huck then tells Jim about all sorts of corrupt kings throughout history as he conflates 1001 Arabian Nights, King George, Henry VIII, the American Revolution and the Tea Party.
221ff Huck wakes to find Jim moaning to himself, feeling low and homesick; Huck muses aloud about how "he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for there'n." "He was a mighty good n*****, Jim was." Then Jim tells Huck a horrifying story: that he struck his daughter Elizabeth because he didn't obey her to close the door, but then realizes that she had become deaf and dumb from recently contracting scarlet fever, and she didn't obey him because she couldn't hear him. Jim tells Huck he will never forgive himself.
Chapter 24: Jim in Royal Robes : They Take a Passenger : Getting Information : Family Grief
223ff The duke hits on another idea so Jim won't have to remain tied up inside the wigwam while they're on land; he paints him blue so he looks very sick and writes on a shingle "Sick Arab."
224ff The king hatches a plan to dress well and arrive to the next town via steamboat; he takes Huck along with him in a canoe toward the ship and on the way they pick up a young man with a couple of carpet bags. The king tells him he's going up to see a friend on a farm upriver, and the young man asks if the king is Mr. Wilks, a man from England who was the brother of a deceased man Peter Wilks in a nearby town. The king pumps the young man for information and he explains everything about the Wilks family: the brother, Peter Wilks, who died, the brother who was supposed to arrive from England with his "deef and dumb" brother William Wilks. Suddenly the king, sensing a plan, tells Huck to go back and get the duke and bring him to the steamboaat. The king tells the duke the whole story, and then begins practicing talking like an Englishman, to pretend that they are Peter Wilk's brothers. Huck is so appalled by he plan he says "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race." [The book has become nearly unreadable, these stories do not feel organic at all; it feels like the book should have already wrapped up by now.]
Chapter 25: Is It Them? : Singing the "Doxologer" : Awful Square : Funeral Orgies : A Bad Investment
232ff They arrive to the town pretending to be Peter Wilks' wealthy British brothers, putting on a big show of grief at their brother's coffin which brings the whole town to tears. The king mentions all sorts of little facts and tidbits about the town and the family thanks to his conversations with the young man in the canoe. The will is read out, telling where six thousand dollars' worth of gold coins are hidden in the cellar; the duke and the King go down there with Huck and sift through the coins.
240ff Note the comedy scene here where the king talks about holding "funeral orgies" until the duke--who couldn't stand it any longer but is playing the role of the deaf and dumb brother--writes out on a piece of paper "obsequies, you old fool." The king plays it off by saying "Obsequies ain't used in England no more--it's gone out. We say orgies now, in England." Suddenly the town doctor, Abner Shackleford, laughs in his face, mocking his English accent and outing him as an imposter. But the crowd and Peter Wilks' daughters side with the king; the daughter gives him the $6,000 and says invested for me "and don't give us no receipt for it."
Chapter 26: A Pious King : The King's Clergy : She Asked His Pardon : Hiding in the Room : Huck Takes the Money
243ff One of the daughters, Joanna, who has a harelip, starts asking Huck all about England, and he traps himself in various untruths. He also almost calls her "Harelip" instead of her name. The older sister comes in and defends Huck, lecturing her sister for asking him all these questions and making him feel ashamed, Huck begins to really take to these three daughters, and he feels terrible that their money is going to be stolen from them by the king. He decides he's going to do something about it: "My mind's made up; I'll hive that money for them or bust."
250ff Huck hides in the king's room in the house and overhears the conversation between the king and duke; they're planning to sell off the property as well as take the money; the duke is appalled: the gold was enough, they didn't need to rob orphans of everything they had! The king persuades him: "as soon as it's found out 'at we didn't own it--which won't be long after we've slid--the sale won't be valid, and it'll all go back to the estate." They then hide the big bag of gold coins under the featherbed in their room
Chapter 27: The Funeral : Satisfying Curiosity : Suspicious of Huck : Quick Sales and Small Profits
253ff Huck attempts to hide the gold, but he's interrupted by one of the daughters coming down to cry in the middle of the night, so he is forced to quickly stow the gold inside the Peter Wilks' coffin; Huck thinks his plan has failed as the gold will likely be found when it comes time to screw on the coffin's lid before the burial.
256ff The funeral service begins the next day; some mixed attempts at humor writing here: a dog interrupts the Parson's eulogy, so the undertaker takes care of it, whacking the dog the silence him; the undertaker also "glides" around the room [this reminds me of Dickens' Great Expectations where one of the characters "slouches" everywhere]. The sermon runs very long, but after it's over the undertaker just seals up the coffin without looking in. Huck doesn't know absolutely for sure whether the gold is in the coffin or not, and he wishes he hadn't gotten himself involved.
258ff The king puts the house, the slaves, and all the property up for auction right away, within two days of the funeral, shocking the girls. Everyone was shocked even more when slave traders come along and buy up all the slaves right away, sending the sons to Memphis and the mother to New Orleans. The entire town saw it as scandalous to separate the mother and children this way. The duke became "powerful uneasy" in Huck's words.
259ff Auction day comes and the king and the duke start questioning Huck, asking whether he was in their room; Huck says no, but says he did see the slaves going into the room; the king and the duke then believe they've been played: the slaves had acted like they were sorry to be sent out of the region, but yet had stolen the gold! The king and duke believe here that they've been played by even better players.
Chapter 28: The Trip to England : "The Brute!" : Mary Jane Decides to Leave : Huck Parting with Mary Jane : Mumps : The Opposition Line
263ff Huck sees Mary Jane, one of Peter Wilks' daughters, very upset; Huck knows from eavesdropping on the king and duke that the sale of the slaves and the property will be voided once it's found out that they aren't the real heirs; he blurts out to Mary Jane that in two weeks the slaves will be back together; he then agonizes to himself about the pros and cons of telling the truth, reasoning that usually telling the truth is risky, but in this case it looks like it's actually safer than a lie; he closes and locks the door and tells her if you stay out of town for four days, the slaves will be back together again, but he warns her first. "Don't you holler. Just sit still, and take it like a man. I got to tell the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind, and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it." He tells her all about how the uncles are frauds and then tells her everything else, and then hatches a plan.
269ff Huck writes down on a piece of paper (for Mary Jane to read on the way out of town) that the money is in the coffin. Mary Jane tells Huck "I'll pray for you, too!" Huck thinks to himself "I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size." "I hain't seen her since, but I reckon I've thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me."
270ff Huck then runs into Susan, the harelipped daughter, and makes up a story about why Mary left town, and he gets trapped in a set of lies; but he manages to convince her to help propel his plan along by not sharing any specifics to the king or the duke.
273 "I judged I had done it pretty neat--I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not being brung up to it."
273ff The auction is held, nearly everything is sold, and then suddenly the true uncles of Peter Wilks show up to town.
Chapter 29: Contested Relationship : The King Explains the Loss : A Question of Handwriting : Digging Up the Corpse : Huck Escapes
275ff The real relatives arrive, but the duke and the king play it as if they are the frauds, not themselves. Huck kind of gets caught in the middle of the argument here, caught out lying about England to the point where the town lawyer Levi Bell tells Huck "I reckon you ain't used to lying."
281ff The lawyer has the king sign some documents, and then compares his signature to actual letters from Harvey Wilks: the handwriting doesn't match. Then the actual Peter Wilkes asks who knows what is tattooed on Peter Wilks' chest; there's a dispute about this too and then everyone decides to march all of the relatives over to the cemetery to dig up the corpse and look--and then there are rumblings to potentially lynch all four of the "relatives," the king, the duke and the two real realitives! "I was scared, now, I tell you." Huck tells the reader, "everything was going so different from what I had allowed for."
285ff The digging begins. Huck being held by the wrist by a big man; a thunderstorm begins, leading to a creepy scene where lightning lights up every face in the crowd, followed by sudden darkness. They open the coffin and find the big bag of gold right on his chest. The man holding Huck lets out a whoop, and goes to take a closer look, which gives Huck his chance to run off, and he finds his way to the raft and Jim. But Huck forgets about Jim's "Arab" costume, so when he sees him, he is so shocked falls overboard backwards. They push off in the raft; but then the king and the duke fire a gun at them; they are paddling toward them on a skiff.
Chapter 30: The King Went for Him : A Royal Row : Powerful Mellow
289ff The king angrily starts shaking Huck; the duke actually defends Huck here; then the duke and the king start arguing, blaming each other for taking the gold and hiding it in the coffin, while mourning the fact that they had put their own gold into the bag to even it up to 6,000 pieces "to make up the deffersit." Then they begin drinking, apologizing to each other and becoming friends all over again; once they pass out from drinking Huck tells Jim everything that happened.
Chapter 31: Ominous Plans : News from Jim : Old Recollections : A Sheep Story : Valuable Information
295ff The group then travels far enough south so that "the frauds" can work a new riverside village, but nothing the king and duck do earns them any money; and then they start quietly plotting something together, which makes Jim and Huck uneasy. While the king and the duke are in the village, Huck sees a chance to run away, but when he gets to the raft Jim is gone. Huck asks passing boy what happened and learns that someone sold him for $40 up front for the $200 reward out on him.
299ff [This is the "Huck has a crisis of conscience" scene, as he beats himself up for helping Jim escape]: Huck is appalled that someone sold Jim for "forty dirty dollars." "...it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face..." He decides to pray on it, but can't; then he decides to write a letter to Miss Watson about Jim's whereabouts and does, but then Huck crumples up the paper and says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." and tears up the letter.
303ff Huck heads into the town again and sees the duke, and learns that it was the king who sold Jim, using the fake $200 reward handbill they printed previously as evidence there was a reward for him, and then selling his "interest" in Jim's return for $40 up front, and then he spent the money, not even sharing it with the duke. [What follows here is either 1) Huck's character backsliding morally here in a highly implausible way, or 2) Huck manipulating the duke with 4-D chess moves in an equally implausible way.] Huck tells the duke that Jim is "his" property, and his "only property" and he begins to cry. The duke begins to tell him where to find Jim "A farmer by the name of Silas Ph--", but then changes his mind, and gives Huck a false name and false location and sends him off on a three-day walk. "That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for. I wanted to be left free to work my plans." [I guess it was the latter. Huck's character is intelligent, but not intelligent enough to play 4-D chess like this. The storyline has once again become non-credible to the point that it isn't all that readable.]
Chapter 32: Still and Sunday-like : Mistaken Identity : Up a Stump : In a Dilemma
307ff Huck heads off in the direction the duke sent him, but then doubles back towards Silas Phelps' farm, a small cotton plantation. Interesting descriptions here as Huck approaches Phelps' land: he hears the sounds of bugs in the air, and it make him feel lonesome; then he hears a spinning wheel going up and down, "and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead--for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world." [This is an interesting and arresting couple of pages; unfortunately it is not consistent with Huckleberry Finn's character.]
309ff Totally unbelievable plot points here, as Silas Phelps' wife, sees Huck and cries out to her children: "It's your cousin Tom!" [We will soon learn that this woman is Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally and her husband is Uncle Silas Phelps.]
313ff Silas arrives, and Aunt Sally plays a little trick on him, hiding Huck under the bed. She then pulls Huck out and says, "It's Tom Sawyer!" [I don't know about your reaction to this scene, but I laughed out loud at the ham-handedness of it. It's terrible. Note that if you read up at all on this plot twist, there are various literary apologias made for it, basically claiming that Mark Twain was attempting to satirize other 19th century novels' tendencies to rely on ridiculous coincidences like this for plotting (see for example 100% of Charles Dickens' novels). I guess this might be true: if it is, then this would be one of American literature's first "meta" moments.]
314 "Buy jings, I most slumped through the floor. But there warn't no time to swap knives...for it was like being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was." Huck at least knows enough about the Sawyer family to be able to tell them anything he needs to to play himself off as Tom; Huck is also concerned when he hears a steamboat on the river that maybe Tom Sawyer might actually arrive himself, so Huck makes an excuse that he has to go to town to fetch his baggage.
Chapter 33: A Nigger Stealer: Southern Hospitality : A Pretty Long Blessing : Tar and Feathers
316ff On his way to town Huck sees Tom Sawyer. Tom thinks Huck is a ghost: "I hain't ever done you no harm. You know that. So then, what you want to come back and ha'nt me for?" Huck tells Tom everything, and Tom thinks up a plan to cover for them both. They have a conversation about "old Miss Watson's Jim," and Tom tells Huck "I'll help you steal him!" Huck is deeply disappointed to hear this from Tom: "I couldn't believe it. Tom Sawyer a n***** stealer!"
320ff Tom puts his plan into action; he "arrives" at the Phelps' home pretending he's looking for the neighbor's house three miles down the road; he allows himself to be persuaded in for dinner; then he kisses Aunt Sally right on the mouth, and at her shock he says, "I thought you'd like it... they told me you would" [Tom is really good at imposing discomfort and not running from it, I see why the girls love him!] Then the "reveal" comes, as Tom refers to himself as "Sid Sawyer." Then Aunt Sally runs up to hug him with joy, but Tom says "No, not till you've asked me, first."
322 Huck remarks on how the food was enough for seven families "and all hot too," and that Uncle Silas gave "a pretty long blessing over it" but "it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the way I've seen them kind of interruptions do, lots of times."
322ff Tom and Huck hear news from Uncle Silas about Jim being nearby in town with the duke and the king; they slip out of the house that night and Tom fills Huck in on what how everything "was reckoned" back home: the reaction to Huck's "murder" and to Jim's escape, while Huck fills in Tom about his travels and the "rapscallion" king and duke. When they arrived to town they see two people being ridden on rails; they knew it was the king and the duke, and they're covered in tar and feathers. Huck feels sick about it. "I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals... It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another."
Chapter 34: A Hut by the Ash Hopper : Outrageous: Climbing the Lightning Rod : Troubled with Witches
325ff Tom realizes where Jim is; he recalls that someone was bringing food to a nearby hut, and at first they both assumed it was food for the dogs. But Tom notices that the "vittles" included watermelon, and they both know dogs don't eat watermelon. Once again, Huck is blown away by Tom: "It shows how a body can see and don't see at the same time... If I had Tom Sawyer's head, I wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in a circus, nor nothing I can think of." Huck formulates a plan, but Tom tells him that it's too simple, and tells him his own plan. Huck says, "I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine..."
328 Huck continues to wrestle with his disappointment that Tom would actually steal Jim out of slavery. "That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable, and well brung up and had a character to lose; and folks at home that had characters... And yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself ashamed, and his family ashamed, before everybody. I couldn't understand it, no way at all."
331ff They make friends with Nat, the slave who's responsible for bringing Jim food; Huck and Tom actually go in and see him, and there's a funny scene here where Jim shouts out when he sees Huck and Tom, but Tom manages to persuade Nat that nobody said anything or shouted anything. "What do you reckon's the matter with you, anyway? What made you think somebody sung out?" Nat blames it on witches.
Chapter 35: Escaping Properly : Dark Schemes : Discrimination in Stealing : A Deep Hole
334ff [This part of the book is absurdist on some level, and although it is diverting, it feels like it belongs in another novel. It also reminds the reader how The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is simply a more effective and better-built story, as The Adventures of Huck Finn is trying to do too much, its reach has far exceeded its grasp.] Tom keeps ruminating on his plans to free Jim, saying that it's too easy. "Well, we can't help it, we got to do the best we can with the materials we got." Huck and Tom have a whole debate about how to go about freeing Jim: Tom wants to do it with style but Huck raises objections and wants to simplify things; one of the key points of debate is undoing Jim's chain, which is looped around the leg of his bed. Huck notes that they could simply lift up the bed and slide the chain off the bed leg. Tom, exasperated, replies, "Hain't you ever read any books at all?" He's totally disappointed that there's no moat, or watchmen, or anything that makes this rescue attempt difficult at all. He even considers sawing off Jim's leg! [Note the references here to Casanova, Cellini and von der Trenck, all books/memoirs probably worth reading just for fun.]
341ff Tom is also deeply troubled that the digging will be too easy: you can't use pics and shovels, you have to use case-knives and it's supposed to take years! Eventually Tom "pretend" that it took 37 years.
Chapter 36: The Lightning Rod : His Level Best : A Bequest to Posterity A High Figure
344ff Reality sets in as the digging goes more slowly than expected, so Tom agrees also to dig with picks and "pretend" that they were using case-knives. Huck says "Now you're talking!"
347ff They break into the cabin and tell Jim their plans, also learning that Uncle Silas comes in every day to pray with Jim, and Aunt Sally comes to see if he's comfortable. Tom now has still more inspirations: "Now I know how to fix it. We'll send you some things by them." [Of course he says this while standing right there with Jim, and knowing they could easily get access to Jim themselves any time they wanted to.] Tom and Huck tell Jim all the things he has to do, including writing on a shirt in blood, take the things out of Uncle Silas' coat pockets that Tom and Huck put there, etc. "Jim couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and no better than him; so he was satisfied, and said he would do it all just as Tom said."
349ff Yet another stage in Tom's a scheme here, where he teaches Nat, the slave who brings Jim his food, how to make a "witch pie."
Chapter 37: The Last Shirt : Mooning Around : Sailing Orders : The Witch Pie
352ff Huck and Tom begin constructing the witch pie, putting all kinds of things in it. There's a brief controversy on where Uncle Silas is extra shirt disappeared to; Silas more or less takes the blame for it--or it could be the cow. Also one of the slaves reports that one of the sheets is missing, and also a brass candlestick is missing. And then Uncle Silas fishes a spoon out of his coat pocket, but reckons he put it in there without noticing.
355ff Tom notes that Silas did them a good turn (without knowing it) by taking responsibility for the spoon, so he and Huck do him a good turn back "without him knowing it" by stopping up the rat holes in the cellar, a chore Silas was going to do. Silas then comes down into the cellar, sees the work already done, and says, "I can't remember when I done it," and goes mumbling upstairs. Then Tom starts messing with Aunt Sally's head by counting spoons, taking spoons away, etc., so she would know how many spoons she had; they started doing the same thing with the bedsheets, taking them off the line, putting them back, until eventually she got so flummoxed by it that she didn't care how many sheets she had. "So we was all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon and the candles, by the help of the calf and the rats and the mixed-up counting..."
359ff Huck and TOm struggle mightily to make the witch pie, but discover that there is far too much "bedsheet rope" and even forty pies wouldn't be enough. Nat delivers the pie, Jim gets everything out of it, scratches some marks on a tin plate and throws it out of his window hole, following Tom's romantic escape plan rules.
Chapter 38: The Coat of Arms : A Skilled Superintendent : Unpleasant Glory : A Tearful Subject
361ff Huck narrates: "Jim allowed the inscription was going to be the toughest of all. That's the one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall. But we had to have it; Tom said we'd got to; there warn't no case of a state prisoner not scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms." Tom starts working out with the coat of arms will look like, including a motto: Maggiore fretta, minore atto. ["More hurry, less action"--somewhat ironic given how they're making the escape process take much longer than it should...]
364 They come up with the idea of using a grindstone to carve the "mournful inscriptions" as well as the coat of arms into rock; they actually get Jim out of the cabin so he can help carry it, Jim also ends up helping dig the hole bigger too, so it will fit into the cabin.
365ff Tom has other preposterous ideas, like having a rattlesnake in there in the cabin with Jim that he tames (they compromise on using garter snakes with buttons tied on their tails); also Tom suggests Jim play music for rats, as well as grow a flower in his dark cabin that he waters with his tears. Jim starts to get frustrated and can't handle all the responsibility of being a prisoner. Tom loses patience with him telling him "he was just loadened down with more gaudier chances than a prisoner ever had in the world to make a name for himself, and yet he didn't know enough to appreciate them, and they was just about wasted on him. So Jim he was sorry, and said he wouldn't behave so no more, and then me and Tom shoved for bed." [Again, this is absurd, and only to some extent diverting and readable; it is also hard to believe that just 200 pages ago Huck and Jim were floating down the Mississippi River in what feels like a totally separate novel.]
Chapter 39: Rats : Lively Bed-fellows : The Straw Dummy
369ff Huck and Tom then trap a bunch of rats, temporarily storing them under Aunt Sally's bed, but one of Sally's children sets the rats free and Aunt Sally "dusted us both with the hick'ry," so they then had to waste two more hours catching another batch of new rats, even though "the first haul was the pick of the flock." They capture a bunch of garter snakes too but they didn't properly seal up the bag so the snakes crawl out and freak out Aunt Sally all over again: "...you would think the house was afire." They put all these animals in Jim's cabin, including some spiders, to the point where there's hardly any room for Jim in there at all. "He said if he ever got out, this time, he would never be a prisoner again, not even for a salary."
373ff Continuing along in keeping with Tom's style, they write "nonnamous letters" to warn everyone that something is up, including:
Beware, Trouble is brewing. Keep a sharp lookout.
--Unknown Friend
375 "Next night, we stuck a picture which Tom drawed in blood, of a skull and crossbones, on the front door; and next night another one of a coffin, on the back door. I never see a family in such a sweat." All of this freaks out Aunt Sally still further. Finally Tom leaves a final, lengthy note, explaining that a group of cutthroats are going to steal Jim. The letter says that there will be a signal, made from a tin horn.
Chapter 40: Fishing : The Vigilance Committee : A Lively Run : Jim Advises a Doctor
377ff Huck and Tom think their plan is going swimmingly, but that night Aunt Sally sees Huck in the cellar [note is a multi-page description here of events leading up to Huck having buttered corn-pone hidden in his hat, melting down his head]. Aunt Sally has Huck wait in the sitting room--and there are some fifteen farmers there, each with a gun, all waiting for the "signal" Tom wrote about in the "nonnamous letter."
382ff [The story becomes genuinely farcical here] Tom, Huck and Jim are waiting in Jim's cabin as the men approach; they slip out, but Tom's pants catch on a nail, making some noise; suddenly the three of them are running off and bullets are whizzing by them; eventually they make for the raft. But Tom has a bullet in his calf: this actually fills him with pride about his "plan." Tom agrees to be taken to a doctor, but he demands that Jim and Huck blindfold the doctor and take away his chalk so he can't mark the raft. "It's the way they all do."
Chapter 41: The Doctor : Uncle Silas : Sister Hotchkiss : Aunt Sally in Trouble
387ff Huck goes to get the doctor, but the doctor was unwilling to ride in such a small canoe along with him, so the doctor takes the canoe by himself off to go an treat Tom; Huck falls asleep, then wakes up, then races around a corner and practically runs into Uncle Silas; everyone had been wondering where Huck and Tom ["Tom and Sid"] were.
390ff There's a new character "thrown on the fire" here: Mrs. Hotchkiss, who is essentially a mouthpiece for expressing all the characters' confusion about all the things in the cabin: the scrabblings, the rope ladder, the symbols written in blood on a shirt, the straw man, etc.
394ff There's still no report of Tom's whereabouts: Aunt Sally is grieving for him and staying awake at night watching the road.
Chapter 42: Tom Sawyer Wounded : The Doctor's Story : Tom Confesses : Aunt Polly Arrives : Hand Out Them Letters
397ff Finally, Tom arrives, carried on a mattress, along with the doctor and a group of people; Sally at first thinks he's dead. Jim is there too, and some of the men there want to hang Jim to show the other slaves to not run away; but then some others said that Jim's owner will turn up and make us pay for him, which cooled everyone off. Also the doctor sticks up for Jim, saying that he helped with the surgery, because Tom was out of his head with fever and wouldn't let the doctor come near him.
402ff Tom begins to recover; Huck wants to get together with him and figure out a story to explain everything, but Tom is sleeping. Aunt Sally comes to the room, and Tom wakes up and basically reveals the whole story about their whole plan to her. "And we done it elegant, too." He tells Aunt Sally everything. [The scene, this entire resolution of the plot, just doesn't work, it doesn't seem right.]
404ff Tom learns to his shock that Jim has been recaptured, and he sits up angrily and claims that Miss Watson died two months ago and set him free in her will; suddenly Aunt Polly walks in! [This plot element was preposterous and deeply disappointing. Twain is just phoning it in at this point.] Polly says Sid is Tom and Tom is Huck Finn, much to Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas's complete confusion. It turns out that Aunt Polly had written twice to tell Aunt Sally she was coming to visit, but Tom kept the letters in his luggage trunk.
Chapter the Last: Out of Bondage : Paying the Captive : Yours Truly, Huck Finn
408ff Huck can't believe that Tom made up a whole plan to set Jim free when he was already free before. Jim is cut loose from his chains, and Tom even gives him $40 for being such a good, patient prisoner; Jim then reminds Huck about how he has a hairy breast, which meant he would be rich one day.
409 Tom then suggests going on another "howling adventure" somewhere in Indian Territory; Huck worries that he doesn't have any money "to buy the outfit" because he assumes his pap got (and drank) all his money from Judge Thatcher; Tom tells Huck that the money's still there and your father hasn't been back, and then Jim says, "He ain't a comin' back no mo', Huck." Jim tells Huck that the dead man in the house that was floating down the river was actually Huck's father, Jim didn't want Huck to see him. Tom keeps the bullet from his leg on a chain around his neck.
409 "...and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I've been there before." [You can almost feel Twain's visceral relief at finishing this story and getting it off his plate once and for all. By now, after the story has devolved so severely, the reader feels about the same.]
Vocab:
pungle: to pay, contribute, or hand over money, often used with "up" or "down" (similar to "shell out" or "ante up")
texas: on a 19th-century Mississippi River steamboat, the "texas" was the largest cabin structure located on the top deck
tow-heads: a low alluvial island or sandbar within the Mississippi River densely covered with thick reeds, brush, or young cottonwood trees
fan-tods: informal expression used by Huck to describe a state of nervous uneasiness, the fidgets, jumpy jitters, or a mild fit of distress and irritability
galoot: an awkward, clumsy, foolish, or uncouth man
yaller-boys: gold coins
hive: to hide away or steal
pison: poison
To Read:
Baron Friedrich von der Trenck: The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck (2 vols)
Giacomo Casanova: Memoirs of Casanova/The Story of My Life
Benvenuto Cellini: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (trans. John Addington Symonds; link is to a free public domain copy for Kindle)