I don't have a copy of Hemingway handy (please don't tell that to the Oak
Park gov't officials or they'll probably run me out of town), but I'll take
Peter's transcription to be accurate and concede that the article "the"
before "Nigger Jim" does suggest that he's using one or the other following
nouns as appositives.  However, punctuation allergies aside, to suggest that
the capitalization of the word "nigger" is a way of showing respect is a
stretch beyond the breaking point.  When a white person terms a black person
as "a nigger," the former ranks the latter in a social hierarchy for which
there is flatly no respect granted with or without capitalization.

My point about Hemingway is that his words had weight, which Jeffrey Miller
similarly asserts in a post that beat mine to the list, and that once he put
"Nigger Jim" on the page, it gained currency for many others who commented
subsequently.  The misreading to which I referred in my original remark is
his preposteous suggestion that readers should stop reading before the
Phelps farm sequence.  Doing so serves only one purpose: to maintain the
romantic hero-worship of Huck.  The cost of feeding that desire is failing
to confront and appreciate the more important criticism of
post-Reconstruction America represented in that final fifth of the
narrative.  That final sequence of that narrative isn't cheating, it makes
the book.  Stopping where Hemingway recommends is cheating--and I made the
same point to my son's high school English teacher who opted for the easy
way out because she wasn't prepared to address the novel's real complexity.

With regard to David Fears response to my query about Twain not referring to
white people by race--well, let me just say thanks for making my point.  The
litany of ethnic slurs you offered as examples could hardly be thought of as
simply descriptive; much like the term "nigger," they serve to subordinate
an individual in ways that are far from subtle.

LH