I'll respond with two points:

1. If you find yourself defending HF against racism, may I suggest my 
essay "Was Huck Black?" It was published in the Mark Twain Journal, but 
should be available free at JSTOR at the moment (they extended their 
free articles offer this year). In that essay I take an entirely fresh 
approach to reading HF as a reflection of Quaker influences in Twain's 
structuring of the book. I cast an entirely new light (I think) on the 
junctions at the beginning of the book, the "go to Hell" turning point, 
and the Evasion Episodes. I'll spare everyone the details here.

2. As for those pesky Evasion Episodes, I find it striking that 
contemporary readers often praised them and that one early reviewer said 
explicitly that they could best be appreciated only by those who were 
familiar with the romantic literature that Twain was satirizing. I don't 
think many readers had a problem with them until the 20th century, 
starting with Hemingway (whose "praise" of HF has been consistently 
misconstrued and overstated), and that makes me wonder if later readers, 
who did not cut their teeth reading early 19th century adventure tales, 
didn't recognize what Twain was doing. For a fuller discussion of 
readers' evolving reactions to HF I'll again cite one of my essays, this 
time a chapter in Rasmussen's Critical Insights: Adventures of 
Huckleberry Finn (2017), where I survey three centuries of readers' 
responses to HF. I promise lots of surprises. Anyone teaching HF will 
find that book helpful whether they read my chapter or not. Here endeth 
the horn-tooting.

HF has its flaws, but so do many otherwise breath-taking gems. I'll end 
with a personal story about one of its flaws. When my granddaughter was 
about ten years old she asked to see my Twain library and we headed 
upstairs. She especially wanted to see a copy of HF. I showed her my 
shelf of first editions--pristine copies in original green cloth, blue 
cloth, 3/4 morocco, and sheep. "Why do you have so many copies?" she 
asked. I saw an opportunity to turn her into a bibliophile and took two 
copies off the shelf and explained that the copies first printed had 
flaws in the text, and pointed out in one copy the "with the was" error 
where Huck is setting up his fake murder scene. Then I showed her the 
same page in another copy where the text was corrected to "with the 
saw." She blinked, confused, and with the inarguable wisdom of a ten 
year old, asked "Why would anybody want a book with a mistake in it?"

Kevin
@
Mac Donnell Rare Books
9307 Glenlake Drive
Austin TX 78730
512-345-4139
Member: ABAA, ILAB, BSA

You can browse our books at:
www.macdonnellrarebooks.com


------ Original Message ------
From: "Larry Howe" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 3/28/2021 8:54:45 PM
Subject:

>Matt--
>
>Well said--that's quite a catechism to which "Yes" is the resounding answer.
>
>I agree that the ending needs to be understood in a larger context. But Scott's romanticism is one of those contexts.  Another context, and perhaps a larger one, is the defeat of Reconstruction.  When _HF_ is discussed as a response to slavery, a crucial point is obscured.  The novel may be set in the 1850s, but it was published in 1885, when slavery was no longer a vital issue.  The _legacy_ of slavery lived on, however.  Any reading of Tom's elaborate pageant to free Jim, whom Tom knows is already free, that does not address the post-Reconstruction rise of the Black Codes and Jim Crow discrimination in all its forms, ignores an important target of the novel's satire.
>
>Given the daunting challenge of the supplementary readings that Matt describes, I think secondary education students can be taught about Reconstruction without addressing the nuances of Scott's romanticism.  In fact, given the persistence of the racist assumptions that Stephen Railton raised at the outset of the thread, one might even conclude that it's probably more important for high school students to learn about Reconstruction and its aftermath than about the Civil War.  It's a more complex part of US history, but crucial to understand who we are.
>
>Best,
>
>--LH
>
>
>Larry Howe
>Professor Emeritus of English & Film Studies
>Department of Humanities
>Roosevelt University
>Editor, Studies in American Humor
>Past president, Mark Twain Circle of America
>
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Matthew Seybold <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2021 5:43 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject:
>
>[Sent by an External User]
>
>I think it is very important to discern between the following questions:
>
>1.) Did Samuel Clemens at any point in his life express racist views? (Yes.)
>2.) Do some of Mark Twain's published works present overt, cohesive cases
>for anti-racism? (Yes.)
>3.) Do some of Mark Twain's published works present harmful racial
>stereotypes? (Yes.)
>3.) Did Samuel Clemens sometimes remain silent on issues of racial
>discrimination, exploitation, and violence, demonstrating his white
>privilege and complicity? (Yes.)
>4.) Did Samuel Clemens sometimes speak up on issues of racial
>discrimination, exploitation, and violence, risking his reputation, his
>livelihood, and even personal harm, and by so doing contribute to
>meaningful reform? (Yes.)
>5.) Is the use of the N-word (or, for that matter, other BIPOC epithets) in
>a classroom, regardless of context, volatile? (Yes.)
>6.) Can *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn *be taught without a narrow focus
>on the N-word while also doing justice to the complex ways in which white
>supremacy and other systems of inequality are woven into the narrative?
>(Yes.)
>7.) Were Twain's works, and particularly the characters from *Tom Sawyer *
>and *Huckleberry Finn, *appropriated and canonized during the 20th-century
>expressly as part of exceptionlist (New Criticism), imperialist (Cold War),
>and white supremacist (Lost Cause) programs which sought to portray
>America's racial problems as already solved? (Yes.)
>8.) Do these propagandized versions of Twain's works only hang together
>when they are isolated from his broader corpus and the historical contexts
>in which he lived? (Yes.)
>9.) Has the habit of secondary school curriculums (and most college
>curriculums for that matter) been to teach these works in isolation from
>his broader corpus and the historical contexts in which he lived? (Yes.)
>
>I would like to add (and what follows will, I expect, provoke broader
>disagreement than any of my answers to the above questions) that I strongly
>disagree with the conventional interpretation of the ending of *Huckleberry
>Finn. *By conventional interpretation, I mean that which Prof. Railton
>glossed and which is famously essayed by Marx, Henry, Smiley, and Arac. As
>this interpretation goes, the return of Tom Sawyer's idyll, Huck's willing
>embrace of Tom's romantic imagination, the burlesquing of Jim's torment,
>and the trivialization of Jim's emancipation demonstrate Twain's laziness,
>a betrayal of the novel's foregoing chapters in both form and conceit, and
>a capitulation to racist readers.
>
>I think these critics fail to take seriously one of the most obvious
>aspects of this maligned section of the novel: it is a satire of Walter
>Scott. We know from Twain's eviscerations of Walter Scott, most
>famously in *Life
>On The Mississippi, *that there were few individuals upon whom he laid more
>blame for the romantic delusions of the antebellum South which sustained
>the idealization of the plantation economy, the "chivalry" of the
>slaveholders, that echo chamber of southern literature, the delusion of
>secessionism, and thus the brutality of the Civil War.
>
>*Adventures of Huckleberry Finn *is Twain's attempt to deal a final
>deathblow to the influence of Scott's romantic novels. The aesthetics of
>Southern utopia cannot survive what Huck sees from that tree in Orion
>County. The romance keels over alongside Buck Grangerford and his brothers.
>Via the senseless death of Buck, the bloated corpse of Pap, the murder of
>Old Boggs, the lynchings, the grievings, the tar-and-featherings, and, let
>us not forget, the drowning of *Walter Scott, *the reader witnesses the
>slow suffication of Clemen's antebellum nostalgia (still evident in *Tom
>Sawyer*) and the paralysis of Huck's romantic imagination.
>
>When the muse of that imagination, Tom Sawyer, reenters the novel, it is a
>macabre puppeteer. The final section of *Adventures of Huckleberry
>Finn *is *Weekend
>at Bernie's *with Walter Scott for the corpse.
>
>In St. Petersburg, Sawyer was a precocious purveyor of compelling fictions,
>the charismatic captain of a gang of ethical pirates. At the Phelps Farm,
>however, Tom's theatrics are as incomprehensible as they are inhumane. The
>Scottian romance cannot possibly survive what Twain has Tom do to it. It is
>not enough to drown Walter Scott after all the damage he has done to
>American culture. Twain feels obliged to parade the decaying corpse of
>Scott's sensational plots across the stage, so there can be no mistake:
>romance is dead.
>
>Twain is saying: I dare you to take Walter Scott seriously after THIS. And,
>so far as I can tell, we haven't.
>
>Now, to TEACH the ending in this fashion, students have to be introduced to
>a range of supplementary readings and contexts (Scott, Alger, southern
>literary magazines, *Life, *etc.), which probably isn't realistic in most
>secondary school classrooms. And you can certainly argue that Twain
>decapitating zombie Walter Scott had unintended consequences. But if that
>was the goal (and I believe it was), it's hard to call the ending a failure.
>
>*Matt Seybold, PhD*
>Assistant Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies
>Scholar-in-Residence, Center for Mark Twain Studies
>Editor, MarkTwainStudies.org
>Host, The American Vandal Podcast
><https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__marktwainstudies.com_the-2Damerican-2Dvandal-2Dpodcast_&d=DwIFaQ&c=a-IB_GMEfAZCNvTl5o6ZExYKmR-HZTqw1M_ZxQv8eiY&r=M7fe_5tVzFcSaDV_TGyMVieQKup7oSC-0rxoDyxcCJY&m=nJHspQ04Ot6OrqyMcQtFk1qZyXt5k-ip8Dd85OEE3KY&s=AVg7LVSNu5koAIKmmHied32A2p0dmPyt4VnKTv9RNaM&e= >
>
>Peterson Chapel Vestry, Cowles Hall
>[log in to unmask]
>MattSeybold.com
><https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.elmira.edu_&d=DwIFaQ&c=a-IB_GMEfAZCNvTl5o6ZExYKmR-HZTqw1M_ZxQv8eiY&r=M7fe_5tVzFcSaDV_TGyMVieQKup7oSC-0rxoDyxcCJY&m=nJHspQ04Ot6OrqyMcQtFk1qZyXt5k-ip8Dd85OEE3KY&s=bJYSyIiLz_3PU6DmGMD0leYJXAOLhBCuLRcsFMGLLag&e= >
>
>
>On Sun, Mar 28, 2021 at 11:26 AM Railton, Stephen F (sfr) <[log in to unmask]>
>wrote:
>
>>  Bob, Barbara and all -- I'm hoping to hear from others about this issue,
>>  and so won't say much here, except that I don't think we should take "what
>>  Sam Clemens said or thought or wrote but didn't publish" as the final
>>  authority on "what 'Mark Twain' meant and means to American culture" or to
>>  "what Huck Finn said and says to its readers over the generations,
>>  including the students and parents and others in the 21st century."   To me
>>  part of the story of racism and anti-racism in HF is what Sam Clemens did
>>  not let Mark Twain publish.
>>  It's amazing how tempting it is to want to go on defending my position!
>>  But what I am hoping for is a discussion, Steve
>>  ________________________________
>>  From: Mark Twain Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Robert H. HIRST <
>>[log in to unmask]>
>>  Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2021 10:48 AM
>>  To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
>>  Subject:
>>
>>  from SLC to Josephine and Karl the Gerhardts, 1 and 3 May 1883, UCCL 02380.
>>  Charles E. Porter was the black painter the Clemenses were supporting in
>>  Paris.
>>
>>  mr. porter has written to ask me to get some orders for him, as his money
>>  is nearly spent and he wants to remain some time longer in paris. this
>>  places me in a bothersome position; because, a long time ago, josephine
>>  intimated in one of her letters that porter had gone to the dogs or was on
>>  his way there. she gave no details, brought forward no facts. i meant to
>>  write her, then and there, and say that whenever one a flask of dynamite
>>  under a person’s character, he should always go into the details of the
>>  matter, and state exactly why he felt justified in doing that thing. i
>>  hav[e
>>  ]n’t answered porter; cannot answer him until i learn from you how he
>>  stands. tell me all you have heard against him, keep back nothing whatever.
>>  also tell me what part of the evidence rests upon trustworthy authority,
>>  and what part of it doubtful. i want to know everything about him, good and
>>  bad; for if he is worthy of help i want to turn out and see what can be
>>  done for him; and if he is not, i want to at least act with caution. at the
>>  same time i must remember, and you must also remember, that on every sin
>>  which a colored man commits, the just white man must make a considerable
>>  discount, because of the colored man’s antecedents. the heirs of slavery
>>  cannot with any sort of justice, be required to be as clear and straight
>>  and upright as the heirs of ancient freedom. and besides, whenever a
>>  colored man commits an unright action, upon his ̭heaḓ is the guilt of only
>>  about one tenth of it, and upon your heads and mine and the rest of the
>>  white race lie fairly and justly the other nine tenths of the guilt. so,
>>  when you have told me all there is to tell about porter, i shall doubtless
>>  judge his case charitably enough.
>>