Trash and Slavery in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldnât seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again, right away. But when he did get the thing straightened around, he looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and says:
âWhat do dey stanâ for? Iâs gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callinâ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mosâ broke bekase you wuz losâ, en I didnât kâyer no moâ what become er me en da rafâ. En when I wake up en fine you back aginâ, all safe en sounâ, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kissâ yoâ foot Iâs so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin âbout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey frenâs en makes âem ashamedâ (100).
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her book Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices, builds on the research of Richard Bridgman by not only acknowledging Huckâs speech pattern in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but also showing how Huckâs speech pattern matches the African American voice in Twainâs 1874 article âSociable Jimmy.â One element of Huckâs speech that both Bridgman and Fishkin identify is the repetition of words and phrases. In the above passage, in which Huck, after playing a prank on Jim, asks Jim to interpret the âleaves and rubbish on the raft, and the smashed oarâ (100), we see Huck repeat the word âtrash,â as he describes Jim working through his interpretation. Jim, then, makes a comparison between the broken things and rubbish on the raft and someone who puts dirt on the head of his friends and makes them ashamed. On the one hand, we can read Jimâs speech as an allusion to Huckâs socioeconomic position, his position as the poor white son of the town drunk, âwhite trash.â On the other hand, I think it is important to think of the things in this passage, in order to see Jimâs metaphor more clearly.
While most of âthese thingsâ (100), as Huck refers to them, are dirt, leaves, and rubbish, the one object that Huck calls attention to is the âsmashed oar.â The oar is important, particularly when looking at the raft as an instrument of escape, much like Whiteheadâs train in The Underground Railroad. The oar is not only the object used to steer the raft, but is also that which creates movement and the sound of movement throughout the novel (**). Therefore, it is an instrument that allows Jim and Huck to control the raft and only becomes trash when it is broken and cannot be used as it was intended. However, as we see in the hair-ball scene, trash and discarded things are often given symbolic meaning by Jim. He uses the hair-ball, which was taken from the âfourth stomach of an ox,â to do magic. According to Jim, âthere was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everythingâ (44-45). After receiving a counterfeit quarter from Huck and putting it under the hair-ball, Jim tells Huck his fortune. Thereâs value (not monetary / economic) in both the counterfeit quarter and the hair-ball, a supernatural value that allows Jim to impart a lesson to Huck. Much like the hair-ball, Jim assigns symbolic meaning and value to the âtrashâ on the raft and once again teaches Huck a lesson.
After Jimâs lesson, Huck says,
Then he got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kiss his foot to get him to take it back.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger - but I done it, and I warnât ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didnât do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldnât done that one if Iâd a knowed it would make him feel that way. (100)
The first paragraph of this passage allows us to see that Huck is willing to renounce his feelings of white superiority, or almost willing may be a better way to put it, seeing that Huck says he âcould almost kissâ Jimâs foot. Comparing Jimâs speech to Huckâs, we see a slight difference, in that Jim says, âI could a got down on my knees an kiss yo footâ (100). Both statements contain the hypothetical âcould,â but only Huckâs statement contains âalmost,â an indication that there is a rhetorical threshold that Huck is not willing to cross.Â
By contemplating his actions and how they affect Jim, Huck is humanizing Jim, who, up until this point, has simply been Miss Watsonâs property, a slave, an object used for labor in much the same way that the oar is an object of labor.Â
These connections between Huck, Jim, used objects of labor, trash, and the slave system are important when looking at the relationship between poor whites and antebellum / reconstruction blacks. Michael Eric Dyson discusses this relationship in his article âGiving Whiteness a Black Eye,â stating,
Despite their economic disadvantage, poor white workers appealed to the surplus value that their whiteness allowed them to accumulate in the political economy of race. Many poor workers invested their surplus valued whiteness into a fund of psychic protection against the perverse, impure meanings of blackness. They drew from their value-added whiteness to not only boost their self esteem but to assert their relative racial superiority by means of what may be termed a negative inculpability: Poor Whites derived pleasure and some cultural benefit by not being a nigger. (118)
Huck, even though he is at the bottom of the social ladder in need of culture and âsivilizing,â still feels superior to Jim and has to work up the humility to humble himself. However, even after Huck humbles himself to Jim, he still sees him as a piece of property, saying, âI tried to make out to myself that I warnât to blame, because I didnât run Jim off from his rightful ownerâ (101).
Huckâs father, Pap, also allows us to see this superiority of whiteness that poor whites held onto, in spite of their economic disadvantages. Pap, while talking to Huck about a free African American college professor from Ohio, states, âwhy, he wouldnât a give me the road if I hadnât shoved him out oâ the way. I says to the people why ainât this nigger put up at auction and sold?â (53).
Therefore, when Huck says, âAll right, then, Iâll go to hellâ (202), he is resisting this thinking of his father and a society that see Jim as an object for labor. However, as many critics have pointed out, the ending forces Jim back into the role of object, not an object of labor, though, an object that allows Tom and Huck to play out their adventure fantasy. Leo Marx states, âThis creature who bleeds ink and feels no pain is something less than human. He has been made over in the image of a flat stereotype: the submissive stage-Negro. These antics divest Him, as well as Huck, of much of his dignity and individualityâ (296).Â
Andrew Levy, in his book Huck Finnâs America points out that Mark Twain himself believed in the reinvention of history, stating, âIn his essays, he frequently found ways to argue that the sins and virtues of one era or country reinvent themselves in othersâ (xxiv). In this novel, we end where we began. In the last sentence, Huck states, âI been there beforeâ (265). Levy states, âWe misread Huck Finn, on matters of race and children especially, for the same reason we repeat the cultural and political schema of the Gilded Age - because the appealing idea that every generation is better off than the one before conceals our foreboding that we live in a land of echoesâ (xxiv).    Â