(np) Jim's locutions and more stuff

[Michael Bailey]

sure, let's have a snigger at the plight of Huck and Jim, it's so funny...

but in real life, a lot of lower class whites like Huck formed the KKK
and succumbed to Nixon's, and Reagan's, and Bush's southern
strategies.   True, Huck came into money but it's entangled in
legalism - who knows how he can get that back - basically he weighed
his prospects in society against helping his friend and made a rare
decision.

How rare?  Pretty darn rare.

For privileged kids like Tom Sawyer, it's all a game - concealing the
fact that Miss Watson died and freed Jim in her will, so as to allow
him to mastermind a rescue plot, is the same kind of cluelessness that
Lincoln displayed in opposing black suffrage, and using emancipation
as a military ploy.  Even many abolitionists drew a line of exclusion
somewhere short of equality.

...but on the balloon trip, Tom gets some good give-and-take with Huck
and Jim...anyway...

Justification for slavery was preached from the pulpit, and people listened.

I participated in a celebration of the reunification of the
Presbyterian Church in 1983 - the PC in the US (South) and the UPC in
the USA had been divided for over a century -- it took that long.  Now
the denomination is being torn again over, among other things,
acceptance of gay rights, some conservative congregations are breaking
away and forming new groupings - <sigh>

these are serious and heartbreaking matters, whereupon Huck Finn takes
a laudable moral stance based on more of a Rorty-type
non-foundationalism - which is also part of the point of the book,
imho...

anyway, on to Jim's speech patterns.
I am not old enough to remember Amos and Andy, but I did listen to
Jose Jimenez from bed as a little kid...

dialect humor is an interesting phenomenon

what other ones spring to mind?
cockney rhyming slang
Yiddish
Chinglish and Spanglish...

kids like Tom spent a lot of time - willingly or not - in classrooms
learning to talk a certain way

Huck's language is almost as different from Tom's as Jim's is...

ok, obviously this is not the forum for an extended consideration of
this, but cutting to the chase:

the peculiar institutions that led to the argot used by Jim are
painful to recollect.

Was Twain being racist in using this dialect?  personally, I don't
think so, although the lack of a character such as Frederick Douglass
or W.E.B. DuBois to speak received English is an authorial choice
(let's say they meet up with Douglass on a lecture tour, for
instance...)

was Twain's depiction of Jim's speech accurate?  this person thinks so
-- http://www.jserra.org/ourpages/auto/2009/9/4/43312140/Twains%20Rep%20of%20Negro%20Speech.pdf

Twain's use of a variety of dialects is evident in Huck's speech as
well, so it's not a strictly racial depiction

Many of the unique expressions are clever, too...
like, Mars for Master, sounds like "m'arse"...maybe that one's just me but...