(np) Jim's locutions and more stuff

[alice wellintown]

> 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.

Twain famously said that a sound heart defeated a deformed conscience.
How rare is that? Perty darn rare. Twain's Huck, like the chimney
sweep who comforts the chimney sweep in Blake's songs, moves from
innocence to experience and still does good by doing what is wrong
though the "wages are the same."

And, you make an excellent point here about history, for it is
important to set the story in two contexts, the time and place of the
story (its setting) and the time and place of its authorship and
publication. Between the two is the civil war. The readers of HF would
side with Huck. But Twain, ever the American, must challenge his
readers by making the decision not one that is motivated by religious
zeal or social convention or on any moral grounds that civilizing has
instilled in the lad, but by the absence of these. It is lovely to
live on a raft. That mighty river that Melville would sail his
confidence men down and question charity and grace and all the virtues
that flooded the main-line through the heart of America, has banks,
and on these and beyond are civil blood makes civil hands unclean. Not
to mention the deformed conscience. And, as you note here, it is the
voices, the language of Huck, primarily, but of Jim and all the
others, that carries that raft down river.