The N-Word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Reconsidered

Author(s): David E. E. Sloane

Source: The Mark Twain Annual , 2014, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2014), pp. 70-82
Published by: Penn State University Press

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 The N-Word in Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn Reconsidered

David E. E. Sloane

Abstract
The n-word in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a significant contribution
to Twain’s message, as digital analysis reveals, leading us to understand Twain’s
methods and targets as somewhat different from what many critics assume,
exposing the racism in otherwise “kind” people.

Keywords: digital analysis; racism; “nigger”; Huck Finn

Over two hundred uses of the word “nigger”—considered offensive by almost

every reader who encounters it—seems egregious by even Mark Twain’s stan-
dards. In fact, the word itself has been a flashpoint for opponents of Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn on both sides of the racial divide. Texts with substitute
words have been offered, pleasing few attackers and antagonizing many Twain
scholars. Some have argued that Twain has artistic reasons; others defend the
word on the ground of historical accuracy. I will take a third position, that the
best means into the seeming morass the n-word places before us is through
­statistical means. My study focuses on the density of the word in various n ­ otable
places in the text and relies on Kenneth Burke’s proposals concerning reader
expectation and satisfaction to explain the powerful effect Twain a­ ccomplished
with the word, and how it may have even contributed to the disaffection of
readers like Ernest Hemingway with the novel’s closure. Moreover, count-
ing word occurrences leads us to identify instances where we might see even
­stronger evidence for Twain’s application of the n-word to shame his readers
into repulsion at the insidious corrupting power of the problem it represents.
The edition used for my counting purposes is the Project Gutenberg
­electronic text. Moving the text into Microsoft Word provides a count of the base
word and provides automatic highlighting of each occurrence. The electronic

The mark twain annual, Vol. 12, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 count immediately verified a fact I had noticed in two previous h ­ and-countings
of the word using a highlighter and numbering each use—the popularly
accepted number of 217 is a canard based on a miscount. Word’s count turned
up the number 214, and two of those were found in the header words for
Chapter 33 in the index and in the list of illustrations. The word occurs in the
text of the novel 212 times, including one occurrence in the generic word for a
type of tobacco, “nigger-head,” one loafer is reputed to have returned in place
of “store tobacker.” Make the count 211. Such an obvious correction might
serve as a warning that consideration of such a key word has been less rigorous
than we might wish—a caution, at least. The words “slave/slavery” occur eleven
times, the last being the climactic assertion by the recovering Tom that Jim
“ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks this earth!” in Chapter 42.
The word “negro” actually appears once, in the author’s “Explanatory” note pre-
ceding the novel’s main text, referring to the rendering of dialects including
the “Pike County” and “Missouri negro dialect.” “African” appears late in the
novel to describe Tom Sawyer’s coded secret bloody writings during the eva-
sion. Actually, options in word choice abound.
A second canard is more justifiable, that Twain had to use the word because
it is historically accurate. The word had wide currency in the South in Twain’s
time, and other regions, both in 1845 and in 1885, its origins buried in the
clouded history of the African slave trade. It was still current in Durham, North
Carolina, when a local electrician reassured me, a green graduate ­student at
Duke University, not to worry about “Robert” rewiring the fuse box in my
slum rental because, “Robert’s a good nigger.” It is still current in 2014, but the
cultural landscape has shifted radically. Permissible in various layers of black
culture, particularly entertainment venues where its use is insulated by perfor-
mance conventions, the n-word retains power as a racist epithet in white speech,
although monologues like those of George Carlin have mocked the duplicity. In
the 1845–85 period, the word can be found in various comic works. It is com-
mon in jokes, used in some cases as a placeholder for other racial words or for a
class, but in some instances it is also clearly intended as an overtly racist epithet
with harsh overtones.
An alternate way of considering the word as a historical necessity is to briefly
compare one or two comparable novels. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a sen-
timentalized look at small-town boyhood, less harshly realistic in purpose, and
more comfortably couched in third-person speech. Would a fair approximation
be 211, or 100; perhaps 50? The number is nine. Four occur in Chapter 6 where
the boys discuss “spunkwater,” including a typical boy racist comment by Tom,

The N-Word in Huckleberry Finn Reconsidered 71

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 “But I never see a nigger that wouldn’t lie,” following a statement that all the boys
he knew were liars, as well. We might describe this as regional v­ erisimilitude,
perhaps. Tom is responding to Huck Finn, who sets the usage with the first two;
Tom re-echoes. Strategically, at the end of the novel, Injun Joe rages against his
whipping in the town square, “like a nigger,” establishing the hatred and emo-
tional force driving him toward a potential atrocity.
Tom uses the word once more in discussing events derived from ­superstition;
the other uses belong to Huck Finn. One is Huck’s dislike of the idea of having
only one name, like a king, or “like a nigger.” The last two, like the first four,
are tightly grouped in Huck’s statement in Chapter 28 about Ben Rogers’s pap’s
“nigger man, Uncle Jake.” Jake lets Huck sleep in the barn, but even more is
suggested in the whole passage which reveals Twain’s vision of Huck as vulgar
village outcast: “I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any
time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it. That’s a
mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me becuz I don’t ever act as if I was above
him. Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him. But you needn’t tell that.
A body’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as
a steady thing.” The intensifier “awful” is a clue to the author’s intent to make
Huck’s racial position clear to the reader. The cultural concept of a “good nig-
ger” has already been broached.
But were there other options really? The word “negro” appears four times.
In Chapter 1, Tom practices a peculiar birdlike warbling whistle, “acquired
from a negro.” “White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls,” in Chapter 2, gather
at the town pump, and Tom cannot talk to the young slave Jim, who speaks
in local dialect, to trade water-fetching for white-washing. A negro minstrel
show makes a sensation in Chapter 22. More noteworthy, the Welshman
in Chapter 30, in protecting the Widow Douglas following Huck’s terrified
intervention, refers to the guards at her house as “My three negro men.”
“Slave” appears twice, once in the “Preface” noting that certain superstitions
as recorded in the narrative were “prevalent among children and slaves in
the West at the period of this story” and again in the authorial voice as the
only footnote in the novel, asterisked to “Bull Harbison”: “[*If Mr. Harbison
owned a slave named Bull, Tom would have spoken of him as ‘Harbison’s
Bull,’ but a son or a dog of that name was ‘Bull Harbison.’]” This last note
appears one page before one of the “n-word” uses, an interesting juxtaposi-
tion that seems to indicate Twain’s interest in the social etymology involved
in the point we are examining. Both are outside the text of the novel itself.
Twain is playing with us.

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 John Townsend Trowbidge, a competitor of Twain’s, also preceded Twain
in writing antislavery novels developing the human side of slavery’s victims.
Cudjo’s Cave, when published in 1864, was a major frontal attack on s­ outhern
culture and the cynical figures driving it. One notable episode describes a
­villainous drunken redneck excoriating “niggers” and threatening to drive
them out of the country. He falls into a barrel of whiskey and is seriously
injured, a scene close enough to pap Finn’s “Call this a gov’ment” speech to be
worthy of consideration as a source. In Trowbridge’s novel, the n-word occurs
41 times. An ignorant slave, “Toby,” uses the word “niggah” four times, giving
us a total of 45 matches. However, for the word “negro,” there are 123 matches,
and “African” appears nine times. “Slave” does not appear at all. Trowbridge’s
realism is like Twain’s. He deploys his vocabulary among different social types
and classes to serve the needs of plot and character. The use of the word serves
fictional ends. It might be that history dictates use, but the varied statistics of
the three works suggest that the driving force is not stolid historical fact, but
rather the author’s intent. The authors had options.
If Twain had options, our job is thus to explain why he decided to make the
word a dominant component of his text. With 211 occurrences, the average
would be about one per page. The “average” gives us a benchmark for our study
because, of course, they do not occur in an “average” placement. Some pages
are free, others have one, at most two, often in a phrase like “runaway nigger”
(the phrase “runaway slave” does not appear), but at crucial points, the concen-
tration of the language and the density of the “n-word” leads to the recognition
that Twain has used the word to create expectations in us as readers, to baffle
and frustrate us, and finally to bring both the novel’s action and the concentra-
tion of “n-words” to a climactic moment that hammers home a message late
in the novel that many readers, yearning for an optimistic outcome to Huck’s
personal growth, may not be glad to receive.
Relatively early in the numbers, Twain is fully obvious in his intentional use
of the “n-word.” The first appearance is an unmistakable signal flare. Huck in
narrating the typical events of the day at the Widow Douglas’s casually recounts
that, “by and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then ­everybody
was off to bed.” The usage is gratuitous. “Slaves” would have worked as well or
better, had Twain wished, but the offensive irony of the harsher word linked to
prayers would have been lost. Twain forces the incongruity of the racism with
religion. The most apparent issue for a literary critic is not the appropriateness
of the sarcasm but rather, in relation to this opening shot, what the comedian
will do to top it.

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 Another important appearance of the n-word is the forty-seventh, in the
sixteenth chapter, which is a fairly obvious use of an American historical docu-
ment. Responding to Jim’s increasing excitement as their raft approaches Cairo,
Illinois, and Jim’s escape to freedom, Huck, conscience stricken, dredges up
the “old saying,” “Give a nigger an inch, and he’ll take an ell.” Re-echoing the
opening linkage of religion and the n-word, Huck’s guilt now comes into play.
The added historical dimension in the employment of that particular saying
is that the saying was already old when it was reiterated by a Maryland slave-
owner named Auld, who prevented his wife from teaching a negro child to
read—Frederick Douglass. Douglass retells the incident in Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845. “Learning,” Auld
added, “would ruin the best nigger in the world,” who would at once become
unmanageable, a statement which Douglas said brought him to a new and spe-
cial realization that education was the source of the white man’s power over the
black man (Douglass, Chapter 4). It was a key moment in his quest for equality.
Twain knew Douglass; this recollection is neither accidental nor casual. This
targeted and explosive application of phraseology suggests to us that we should
expect as much from other uses of the n-word elsewhere.
Various patterns of usage come into play in the effect of the word, and they
are notable. A substantial number of uses appear in bursts of condensed text,
often seven to nine occurrences in a couple of paragraphs, or, at most, one or
two chapters, rather than more evenly dispersed. These clusters are regularly
followed by three, four, or five pages, or a chapter, in which the word does not
appear at all. Also, notable, the application of the word is lighter in the early
part of the novel, with only 50 of 211 uses in the first sixteen chapters. The
density increases substantially—dramatically—toward the end of the novel. In
the last 10 chapters of the 43 chapters, 87 uses appear. This is the area of the
novel sometimes described as “merely cheating,” and, as often as not I guess,
skimmed rather than read by many readers. Yet, if the word has the power to
insult, or causes a reader’s high expectations of Huck to be disappointed, this is
an area we would need to examine closely.
Aside from the lineal increase in density at the end of the book, another
­pattern involves the creation of a sort of domestic backdrop. The phrase
­“runaway nigger” tends to stand out as designating Jim. One of these initi-
ates the Judith Loftus meeting where the word itself shows up nine times in a
couple of paragraphs and then disappears for the rest of the sequence. “Nigger
woman” is added by Huck to domesticate his lie about Miss Hooker being
stranded on the Walter Scott, in Chapter 13, and “nigger cabin” and other

74 David E. E. Sloane

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 compounds are used to suggest the domesticity of the Phelps farm later. The
feeling, at least, seems intended to designate normal life. Perhaps this is what
we think of as the “realistic” portrait of the antebellum South. But, as else-
where, the ­influence is neither casual nor accidental. For example, when Mrs.
Grangerford yells for Betsy, Huck notes in parenthesis, “(this was a nigger
woman).” Realism is not generated by parenthetical comments; it controverts
such an insertion. A ­couple of times later in the same chapter Huck seems to
want to ­discriminate the slaves as “niggers,” heightening our racial sensitiv-
ity. Jim uses the word ­multiple times in the Grangerford episode, of course,
including designating Huck’s negro servant Jack as “a good nigger, en pooty
smart.” Huck also notices that old Mrs. Grangerford, despite the fact that each
member of the family had their own slave to wait on them from among the
more than one hundred on the plantation, “took care of [Emmiline’s] room
herself, though there was plenty of niggers, and she sewed there a good deal
and read her Bible there mostly.” Religion and the n-word again appear in
awkward relationship. If anything, though, the impact of the n-word is less
noticeable in this episode than later because of the intensity of the action,
following the intensity of the storm and the destruction of the raft by a steam-
boat with the violent feud and its terrible outcome. The interplay of the word
itself and the psychology of various characters creates ambiguities for us as
readers.
Reviewing other incidents where the n-word is noticeable provides clear
evidence of how it could serve for an intensifier to project race hatred. Pap
Finn’s “Call this a gov’ment” speech stands alone as an iconic representation of
the vicious redneck. As mentioned previously, J. T. Trowbridge had created a
similar character to pap in Cudjo’s Cave. Silas Ropes, in Trowbridge’s novel, is
every bit as psychopathic as pap and fully foreshadows him:

“Free niggers is a nuisance,” added Ropes, now very drunk, and very
much inclined to make a speech on a barrel which his friends rolled out
for him. “A nuisance!” he repeated, with a hiccough, steadying himself on
his rostrum by holding a branch of a tree. “And let me say to you, feller-
patriots, that one of the glorious fruits of secession is, that every free nig-
ger in the state will either be sold for a slave, or druv out, or hung up. . . .
To emphasize his declaration, he stamped with his foot; the head of the
cask flew in, and down went orator, cask, and all, in a fashion rendered all
the more ridiculous by the climax of oratory it illustrated. (Trowbridge,
Chapter 12)

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 Twain elaborates on this model by fronting the bigotry of the psychopath
with an antigovernment diatribe and personalizing it by following up with the
“mulatter” professor from Ohio. We count seven to nine uses within a page
and a half at that point, pounding home the point that racism, drunkenness,
inhumanity reaching psychopathology, and the poor-white outsider mar any
family feeling that Huck might appreciate, in addition to rejecting any values of
education or decency in a black person. Since the only previous burst of seven
uses was in Jim’s witch ride (Chapter 2), and a following burst of six occurs in
Misto Bradish’s “one-laigged nigger” who set up a bank (Chapter 8), the n-word
seems to be encompassing the idea that negroes are gullible, superstitious, and
comical, especially in financial matters, leavened only by Jim’s wistful remark
that if he had the $800 he wouldn’t want any more, we guess because he would
buy his wife and children’s freedom. Pap’s tirade deepens and adds a level of
fear and hatred to these comic dimensions. A lot more than mere “realism” is at
work in Chapters 2, 6, and 8.
Having layered the identity of negroes in this way, Twain heightens our
sensitivity to Jim as a negro in the philosophical arguments between Jim and
Huck in Chapters 14 and 15. Chapter 11 had nine uses in the discussion about
capturing the runaway with Mrs. Judith Loftus. The word does not appear in
Chapter 12, nor in 13 until Huck fabricates one of his special fictions about a
Mrs. Hooker and her “nigger woman,” who is lost in the river, which f­ oreshadows
the “No’m. Killed a nigger” joke in his following fiction about the steamboat
crash in Chapter 32. Chapter 14, however, leads off with one of Huck’s major
acknowledgments of respect for Jim when he says that Jim was most always right
and that “he had an uncommon level head for a nigger.” The last three words
are crucial in reminding us of the prejudice involved. The trailing ­qualifier
is a clever use of language structure, but Huck’s phrase is also n­ oteworthy by
its location in the larger text. Huck and Jim soon argue over Solomon and
whether Solomon was wise, Solomon’s wives, the value of half a child, and
why a Frenchman doesn’t speak like a man. All are burlesques—miniature car-
nivals—of definitions of humanity. The course of the argument drives Huck
to his greatest ad hominem shift. Solomon’s greatest judgment drives Jim to
question what good is “half a chile,” and the declaration that a man with fewer
children knows how to value them. Huck desperate, first explodes, “I never see
such a nigger,” and increasing in exasperation, that Jim was the “most down on
Solomon of any nigger I ever see.” The argument turning to why a Frenchman
doesn’t “talk like a man,” Huck finally gives up, venting his frustration at Jim’s
logic with the words, “You can’t teach a nigger to argue. So I quit.” Twain has

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 woven the n-word into the argument over what constitutes humanity. The
scene turns logic topsy-turvy, as Huck originally took the opposite position
concerning Jim. Twain links the n-word itself with the turning of social logic
into perverse judgment rather than reasoned assessment. The word is used to
place the definition of a human being under review symbolically just as the
points of the argument foreshadow the future in the inhumanity of Jim’s treat-
ment of his partially damaged daughter and the inhumane treatment of the
false dauphin who will be turned into a soldier plume.
Continuing in Chapters 15 and 16, the n-word takes us to one of the most
important milestones of the novel when Huck must revalue his relation to Jim as
a friend and human being. Huck mystifies Jim by denying their separation in the
fog and then humiliates him by enticing Jim into reinterpreting the real event as
a dream, thereby denying Jim’s previous social status among his peers as estab-
lished by the witch-ride in Chapter 2. For five pages, the storm and Huck’s lure
draw Jim out until Huck asserts his power through a logical argument, at which
he was previously defeated, and humiliates Jim with the evidence of the real
storm. Jim’s assertiveness, which labels Huck as “trash,” establishes the basis for
an even more remarkable rejection of his own behavior, again drawing on the
n-word for its social power: “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself
up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for
it afterwards, neither.” Realism has nothing to do with this placement, the word
could have been interjected anywhere. Here, Twain isolates it in the moment,
at the end of a language structure, but in the middle of a continuing strain of
rhetoric that permanently changes the racial relationship between the two.
Chapter 16 follows with seven uses of the n-word as Huck revolves in
his mind the great moral dilemma of helping Jim escape from Miss Watson.
He then must choose to lie for Jim’s sake as two slave-hunters approach the raft.
They use the n-word and “runaway nigger,” but Huck now makes his moral
leap, declaring that his “man” is “white.” The sequence ends pathetically, with
Jim himself declaring, “Po’ niggers can’t have no luck,” while the chapter grinds
on through the steamboat accident. This moral movement by Huck goes unre-
warded, leading only to his arrival at the Grangerford plantation.
From this point, uses scatter for a while. Notably in Chapter 23, Huck
­comments on Jim’s missing “Po’ little ‘Lizabeth” that “he was a mighty good
nigger, Jim was,” the universal southern phrase. At this point it has even been
used by Jim to praise a slave on the Grangerford plantation. Huck now uses it
in response to his own new understanding that Jim cared as much about his
people as white people cared about theirs. Jim then tells the story of beating

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 his child after her illness turned her deaf, highlighting the moment. The inter-
play between the n-word and the growth in Huck’s perception of humanity is
emerging as a constant in Twain’s presentation of the story.
Three more concentrations of the n-word call for our consideration
as the novel reaches the area of crucial turning points, and we will not be
disappointed to find them where we do—in the twenty-four uses in the
Chapters 26–28, where the duke and king manipulate the Wilkes girls and
sell off their slaves; in the eighteen uses in Chapter 31, where Huck decides
to go to hell; and in the twenty-nine uses in the evasion and its aftermath,
especially including the fifteen times the word appears in Chapter 42, relat-
ing primarily to the good doctor who nurses Tom with Jim’s help and secures
Jim’s recapture.
The Wilkes episode is extended, but applications are specialized. In disgust
with the frauds, Huck responds to the king and the duke’s blubbering pretense
to be relatives in Chapter 24 by concluding that “if ever I struck anything like
it, I’m a nigger.” Chapter 25 shows no uses, but in Chapter 26 through 28, the
harelip daughter questions Huck, and the king and the duke sell off the Wilkes
slaves. As Huck jockeys for position with the duke and the dauphin, the word
appears six times, then once or twice or three times in a couple of pages. After
Huck reassures Mary Jane about the slaves’ return, the n-word disappears for
another five pages.
Chapter 31 is the most flamboyant interjection of the word in the novel.
Here, Huck must make the greatest moral decision of his life, although not
unprecedented since Huck had decided to secure the safety of the Widow
Douglas from Injun Joe in the previous novel. Huck lays out the decision as
being between two things, social responsibility and his own inappropriate
behavior in supporting a “runaway nigger” (not “slave”). Huck recites immedi-
ate events and uses the n-word twice, pumping a young loafer for information.
He then begins his great “All right, then, I’ll go to Hell” soliloquy. In a measured
presentation, Huck lays out the social situation for himself using the n-word
six times. The word highlights the various social and personal dimensions that
create bigotry and discrimination. It then disappears, but soon explodes with
double strength when Huck encounters the duke and begins parrying with him
for information on the vanished Jim—twelve uses appear as they jockey for
position. As a marker of the dynamism of manipulation, the n-word is pyro-
technic. Jim’s fate becomes a sort of rhetorical flash mirrored in its light. Huck
has had to overcome the social power of the idea, but then must reemphasize it
as his own to maintain his disguise.

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 Huck proceeds on to the Phelps farm. The n-word is carefully ­domesticated
by Twain to establish the homey feel of the “mild” domestic slavery often
claimed by apologists, and referenced in Twain’s own memories of Hannibal.
Huck sees the log “nigger” cabins. He refers to a “nigger” woman and a “nigger”
girl. Four nondescript observations entrap us into a kind of complacency about
the southern setting, but it is a trap to establish the conditions for Huck’s great-
est racist deception—a great joke, as long as you are not the subject—when Aunt
Sally asks him if anyone was hurt in his fabricated story of a steamboat crash.
Huck responds with the ultimate covering response, “No’m, killed a nigger.”
Everything about the joke is carefully orchestrated, from the foreshadowing of
the incident in Huck’s fabrication after the Walter Scott to the careful application
of the n-word to local humanity. This is not a casual joke, but rather a climactic
one. Twain expands its power by having Aunt Sally run on, reinforcing that
sometimes “people” do get hurt. Sally runs on into more comedy about a steam-
boating injury where mortification and amputation affected a man who “turned
blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection.” Literary comedy,
as Twain uses it elsewhere, extends Aunt Sally’s chatter to reemphasize other
human beings. Of course, the duke and king had seen to it, previously, that Jim
was also disguised in blue paint, reinforcing the personal cross references in the
episode. After Huck’s explosive response, the n-word drops out of the chapter.
Tom Sawyer now reappears and initiates the endgame of the novel when
he agrees to join Huck in stealing the “runaway nigger,” thus becoming a “nig-
ger-stealer” himself, a powerful lowering of his status to Huck, as Huck points
out, adding further resonances to the application of the racist denominator.
The phrase is repeated multiple times. Following a flurry of appearances in
the action of Chapters 33 and 34, it will next appear only in scatterings for
several chapters, disappear for a few pages, then reappear in more scatterings,
following the overall action of Tom Sawyer’s “evasion.” From Huck’s steamboat
response in Chapter 32, the word appears eighty-one times, however, notably
denser than the earlier chapters, and a noteworthy clue to the vulgarization
and lowering implicit in the false evasion, in the yokels’ incomprehension, and
finally in the closing action resulting from Tom Sawyer’s wound.
Four passages now throw a comic light on Jim’s status, although the light
is as racially baleful as the lurid light thrown in the forest by Hester’s A in
Hawthorne’s novel. The first is the initial reuniting of Tom, Huck, and Jim
(Chapter 34). In order to maintain a disguise, Tom totally mystifies the slave
who is taking Jim food. The word in this sequence is used fifteen times in quick
succession, again closely associating superstition, race, and the imposition of

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 superiority. It also contains an astonishing sentence by Tom, also a false pro-
jection to disguise his covert intent, like Huck’s steamboat comment, but one
which, unlike Huck’s, seldom draws critical comment: “I wonder if Uncle
Silas is going to hang this nigger. If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful
enough to run away, I wouldn’t give him up, I’d hang him.” Interestingly, the
word “lynch” has only been used in relation to pap and Col. Sherburn. Why
is it not used here, where it would seem to be appropriate? My guess is that
Twain continues to discriminate carefully and does not want to confuse the
racial issue by connecting pap, Jim, and Sherburn with a heavily loaded, and
usually racial, concept. Otherwise, accounting for why Tom uses the milder,
less colorful word seems impossible. This burst progresses to a second echo in
Tom’s statement in Chapter 35, that Jim is a “nigger” and wouldn’t understand
the reasons for Tom’s doings, re-echoing the ad hominem shift in Huck’s earlier
dismissal of Jim. The third is Huck’s pragmatic notion about the stealing of a
“nigger” or a Sunday-school book, creating an appropriately racist triad. The
summit of these varied usages is reached in Chapter 38 with the travesty of a
chivalric crest embodying Tom’s conception of heraldic honors. A ­“runaway
nigger,” sable, with his bundle on a bar sinister, in imitation of the poster
­silhouettes for runaway bounties, is supported by the “gules” (read “gulls” or
stupid ones) representing Tom and Huck. It is one of the best laugh lines in
the novel, not because white readers are racists but rather because Twain has
brilliantly highlighted Tom’s own utter lack of insight into the travesty he has
created. The values implicit in the n-word are intensifying even as the action
diminishes Huck’s autonomy and infantilizes Jim. To my critical eye, it is no
wonder that readers like Hemingway and Doctorow, who have attacked the
ending of the novel, find this a frustrating debacle when they consider the emo-
tional power of Huck’s epic rise to a position of moral authority in response to
Jim’s human dignity earlier.
So we come finally to the n-word in Chapters 40–42, which provides the
crescendo for the symphonic development of this most racist of racial epithets.
The Phelps plantation is where, even by Tom’s estimation, “the people’s all so
kind and good.” Their goodness is now placed at issue by their crudity rather
than their cruelty, and Twain’s employment of the n-word is a crucial contribu-
tion to this effect. In Chapter 40, where Tom is wounded by a gunshot, the word
does not appear, although Huck reflects that he knew Jim was “white inside”
by his insistence on nursing Tom. In Chapter 41, the yokels talk about the eva-
sion wonderingly, and the style reverses. In their talk about Jim’s presumed
“African” writings they reuse the n-word frequently, reassuring themselves “the
nigger’s crazy—crazy’s Nebokoodneezer.” All of their talk is low, vulgar, and

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 dramatically stupid, but it also includes the idea of giving the “nigger” a lashing,
not a kind and gentle act, although also not a hanging, or a lynching. Perhaps
Twain forces into a reader’s subconscious the possibility that these people aren’t
so kind and nice after all. This is a preamble to the main show, which comes in
Chapter 42, at which Tom, delirious, is brought in by the good doctor, with Jim
in a calico dress, his hands tied behind him.
Twain now rolls his next and also largest wave of n-words at us—fifteen
uses in a couple of pages. Ten of them stand alone in the single soliloquy of
the doctor, who becomes Jim’s apologist! Pap only used the word seven times
in hatred, but this is the completion of that circle, reversing pap’s hatred into
advocacy and approval. Huck will commend the doctor immediately following
the speech. The doctor intervenes, although it appears that the posse’s abuse
of Jim may not escalate into a hanging for which the posse might have to pay
up. The doctor initiates his intervention for decent treatment of Jim by striking
the perfect note in terms of our previous discussion: “He ain’t a bad nigger.”
Remarkably, his concern then turns not to Jim but to himself, as Jim appeared
from hiding in response to the doctor’s verbalized thought that he needed help
to save Tom, “and out crawls this nigger . . . and says he’ll help,” a usage that
might even sound somewhat forced to a critical reader. The phrases continue,
“a runaway nigger and there I was!” and “the nigger might get away and then
I’d be to blame,” but he goes on to praise Jim: “And I never see a nigger that
was a better nuss or faithfuller,” with the language chunk “a nigger that was”
plainly forced into the rhetorical structure. Because Jim also seems to have
been worked mighty hard, “I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a
­nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars—and kind treatment, too.” The doc-
tor, ironically, accords Jim his highest dollar value yet, eclipsing the previous
bid of $800. Second, note the positive trend of the language, from “better” to
“faithfuller” to “kind treatment.” A powerful escalation of Jim’s standing would
seem to be announced, but the n-word denies it. The doctor uses the n-word
a couple more times until reaching his favorable conclusion: “He ain’t no bad
nigger gentleman.” The amazing fusillade of n-words draws to its end with the
reiteration of the South’s most notorious racist phrases marking both its ends
like sentinels.
Huck endorses the ethical professional man’s conclusion by noting that he,
like the people at the Phelps farm, is good and kind. Jim is locked up. Huck’s
assessment of the situation makes the contrast explicit as none of the chains are
taken off Jim, and the role of the “nigger” in this situation is significantly worse
thanks to his own friends than before his escape. Pap’s viciousness is advanced
in a symphonic progression to the “kind” practices of the Phelps farm, and even

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 the doctor had seen that Jim had been worked main hard lately—thanks to
Tom in the face of Huck’s ineffectual protests. The accounting, so dramati-
cally r­acist in its language, reveals the underlying condition of “sivilization”
that drives Huck to the territories. In kindness there is still no victory; the
­emotional tyranny of the word prevails, coloring profit motives, family life, and
even the healing art. Twain had found it so in his mother’s life, and so recorded
it in “Jane Lampton Clemens” reprinted in Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck and
Tom (48–52).
Twain’s manipulation of the n-word is not accidental, but rather is part of a
coherent plan to show racism as so integral and pervasive as to be inescapable.
As much as more optimistic and more chauvinistic readers, myself included,
would like to deny the ending of the novel, one of Twain’s primary motives
lies in its closing satire. No reader should feel comfortable under its onslaught,
but Twain is unlikely to concede the power of sarcasm when such a powerful
word provides him with a tool in a single word so adapted to exposing falsity
in humanity. Scholars naturally bridle at the word’s rejection by readers. Yet the
removal of the word from a text by Alan Gribben, as good a friend of Twain as
he is a scholar of Twain’s works, is active, not tacit, in its recognition that ene-
mies of the book have maintained leverage to prevent the book’s wider reading
in some southern areas by distorting the use of the word to demonstrate racism
and its consequences. The n-word will continue, unfortunately, to represent
the still active and oozing divide in American experience. At least, however,
as scholars who recognize its purposeful application, we can better highlight
Twain’s antagonism toward racism through the use of the word in his satire.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

1845. Repr., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu,
1993.
Trowbridge, John Townsend. Cudjo’s Cave. Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1864. Project Gutenberg
e-book ed. #31406.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hartford: American Publishing, 1885.
Project Gutenberg e-book ed. #76.
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1875. Repr., Hartford: American
Publishing, 1884. Project Gutenberg e-book #74.
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck and Tom. Edited by Walter Blair. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1969.

82 David E. E. Sloane

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