I somehow donât remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.
The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate â if not directly state â that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasnât born with the innumerable advantages Huckâs white skin blessed him with.
Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his sonâs life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isnât better off with the aforementioned dad.
So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face â although in many ways different from each other â have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner thatâs closer to parity than âHuck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.â
(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)
Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality â and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like âweâve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons arenât that great this time of year, so we wonât steal those, and weâll count the fact that we donât steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.â
A cynical part of me wonders whether thatâs the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn â the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past societyâs arbitrariness and injustices isnât the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm⌠which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsiderâs perspective and form bonds of necessity â and, ultimately, empathy â with members of other widely despised segments of society.
Update: Crossed out âaunt,â because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finnâs aunt.
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