Huck and Jim
Of course. We are looking at a representation of Mark Twain’s famous characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The man is Jim Watson, escaping Missouri for the free territory of Illinois and Ohio. Huck is the novel’s namesake, a small-town Missouri boy running from his drunkard father who wants to kill him for a treasure found in a previous book. In the middle of the night, on Jackson’s Island, in the Mississippi River, Huck finds Jim hiding from slave-catchers who will either kill him or chain him to claim the $800 reward for his return (about $25,000 in today’s money). As told by Twain, Huck is escaping but looking for adventure and fun. He’s no angel. All during the book, we read of how he wrestles with his conscience, thinking that the legally and morally right thing to do is to return this piece of property to its rightful owner. By the story’s end, Huck deigns to let Jim go because, as he puts it, “I knowed he was white inside.” Thus, Huck is the hero of the book, Jim the cause of his heroism and redemption. We know that Huck will eventually have access to the money he found. We don’t know what happens to Jim: if he’ll be able to return to Missouri for his wife and two children, if he’s killed making his way back from Arkansas, where Huck steered him in order to seek adventure. …
The hysteria comes from Ray flipping the script. This is not Huck’s story any longer. It is Jim’s. Or whatever version of Jim’s story could be truly authored by a white sculptor.* Huck is depicted in the privileged precincts of the imagination, stooping to study something, lost in speculation, surrendering mindfulness to wonder and the luxury of marveling. Ray brilliantly reflects his callowness by obscuring his identity. It’s impossible to see his face without lying down on the floor. Or stooping over and peering up at it — which puts you in the exact same position as the figure you’re lost looking at, lost in aesthetic wonder. When you do get under Huck, you also notice that he has no pubic hair, another sign of youthfulness or innocence. …
Here Huck may be well-meaning and innocent, but he is still the racist who needs the black man more than he is needed. And we’re back to that white “old, hoary, monstrous, abstract fear” that the old codes will go away. As Baldwin writes, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
*i really appreciated them acknowledging the fact that though it presents itself as a critique, it is still made by a white sculptor.
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