Huck Finn Chapters 15-17

Huck plays a trick on Jim which backfires on him. Then Huck realizes he needs to apologize, and here’s something significant: “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a slave; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward neither.”

Huck is realizing that society has certain rules, but those rules aren’t necessarily “right.” For example, no white person would ever “stoop so low” as to apologize to a slave, but Huck realizes that is what’s required, because Jim is his friend.

This is one of many times when Huck will do something counter to society, and not feel sorry about it, because he doesn’t realize it, but he has a stronger moral sense of right and wrong than anyone else around him.

That conscience causes him problems when he thinks about if he did the right thing by traveling with Jim, who did something very wrong to Miss Watson who never did anything wrong to him. (Never mind that slavery was morally wrong–this society had already justified that behavior, so owning slaves never is an issue they debate in their minds anymore.)

They’re trying to reach Cairo, where they can take another river up to reach freedom for Jim. On the map below, you can see where the Ohio river meets the Mississippi. The shaded states are free ones, and if they can see where Cairo is, turn up that river, they might be free.

Then Huck hears why Jim wants to be free: he wants to buy his wife, then their two children, unless he couldn’t get them, then he’d find someone to steal them. Huck struggles with this concept–children that “belong” to another man–how could Jim think this way? The nerve, wanting his own family!

Until the runaway slave hunters come looking for him. Then Huck begins to think differently and comes up with yet another good story to get them to back off their raft–his “father” has COVID-19! I mean, smallpox! Well, naturally they’ll stay away from Huck and whoever else is on there.

And they even give Huck some money–$20 which is about $600: generous! (And little do they know they gave this money to a runaway slave. Ha.)

Of the incident Huck says, “I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right” especially when he thinks about doing the “right” thing and knowing it would make him feel awful if he’d turned in Jim.

GUYS! THEY MADE A MOVIE! Way back in the 1990s, and I can’t find a good version to share with all of you, but I did find some scenes (this is how I spend my Saturday nights. I can’t even blame it on the virus. My life really is this dull.).
Here’s this movie’s version of the scene above:

He’s warring with himself about the morally right thing vs. society’s “right thing.” Ideally, they’d be the same, but they aren’t.

And then they have all kinds of bad luck from that rattlesnake skin. They lose the canoe, and then they lose their raft. They lose everything.

Huck makes it to shore and wanders off to meet the Grangerfords (he’s leaving the freedom of the river, and even assumes a different name to be able to cope with society again). The Grangerfords seem like a nice family, except for the ghoulish drawings made by the daughter who could have been Emily Dickinson’s twin artist (had anyone at the time known about Emily Dickinson–she was writing, but anonymously).

Once again Huck is struck by the fantods (best word in the world) from this girl, who he says, “I reckoned with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.” Her last drawing before she died had so many different arms in different positions that it looks “spidery” to him (spiders again!).

So this is where Huck is staying for a little while, but the Grangerfords aren’t entirely nice as they seem. Remember Romeo and Juliet? Keep that plot in mind as you read the next chapters!

Here are some good insights I stole some years ago and now can’t find the citation for:

When Huck acts like Tom Sawyer, trouble follows, but when he acts like himself—when he seeks to interpret and react to experience in a practical manner—things generally turn out fine.

In a number of instances in the novel, Jim protests when Huck formulates a foolish plan, but eventually gives in to the boy. Twain never explicitly explains Jim’s reasoning, but the implication is always there that Jim’s caution stems from his constant fear of being caught and returned to his former owner. After all, Huck, though a child, is a free, white child who could turn in Jim at any time and collect a large reward for doing so. Although this idea seems never to cross Huck’s mind, it lurks beneath the surface of Jim and Huck’s interactions and reminds us of the constant fear Jim lives with as an escaped slave.

READING ASSIGNMENT: Huck Finn Chapters 18-21 (And you’ll run into some Hamlet again. Well, sort of. You’ll see. You’ll weep–or laugh, who knows.)

READING QUESTIONS:

• 1.  Why do you think Twain include this adventure with the Grangerfords?
• 2. How do Jim and Huck meet the king and duke?
• 3.  Does Huck believe their story?
• 4.  Give two examples of the “cleverness” of the king and duke.

(Tomorrow we’ll do another poem, this time by Robert Frost.)