Scott Holmes has twice now addressed the problem of "stealing" Jim
in _Huckleberry Finn_, which I agree is a fairly thorny problem in
the novel.  I can think of several approaches to it.

The first, and least appealing, is that Twain is deliberately
skewering the moral implications of his novel--the consequence of his
warning to the reader not to try to find a moral in the book.  This
early warning is usually taken as a piece of irony, but I think Twain
is always on guard lest he make Huck seem too good, too moral.  Moreover,
I doubt if Twain had any intention of turning his novel into an
anti-slavery tract--a tactic that would have been outdated in the mid-
1880's, even if he had desired to do so.  Rather it is the story, it
seems to me, about a boy's discovery of the limitations of his world,
of which the association with Jim is a crucial part--but still only a part.

The second has to do with Twain's view of the psychology of boys.  Twain
often mentioned the "good boy" and the "bad boy" as distinct types in his
writings.  As all readers know, he much preferred the latter because he
saw in him energy, enterprise, and a capacity for the heroic in later life.
He disliked the good boy precisely because he saw in him weakness,
hypocrisy, and a willingness to accept and even represent the status quo--
scarcely the mark of the active, inventive and imaginative individuals
Twain admired.  But there is a caveat.  Twain also sees the possibilities
of the "bad boy" as embryonic only and subject to many influences.  As a
determinist, he believes that to a great extent fate or circumstance decide
the direction in life an individual will take.  Although he doesn't seem
to have worked through this philosophy in the detail it receives in the
later
"What is Man?", his instinctive feeling about the matter is well
communicated in the remark about Tom Sawyer that the boy will grow up to
be president if they don't hang him first.

Huck likewise is in a state of moral formation and heavily subject to
circumstance.  He has, essentially, a good heart, and we see him act on
it often.  He does not, however, always do what we would like.  He
sometimes appears to us as a person of moral responsibility, as when he
refuses to turn Jim over to the slave-catchers though believing that this
means he will burn in hell.  But such an act does not constitute a
principle--not yet.  Huck will still act in an immature way, simply because
he is still immature.  It seems to me that the critics who fault Huck
for his compliance with Tom's escape plan expect him to be, presto, fully
cognizant of all his acts because he has acted noble previously.  This is
not, however, the way human beings behave, even those older and more aware
than Huck.

The appearance of Tom Sawyer, an acquaintance from before Huck's experiences
on the river (and an admired acquaintance at that) is, for Huck, a step
back into the world of St. Petersburg, a world familiar to him.  And after
his recent escapades, a familiar face must certainly seem reassuring.
Furthermore, Tom is perhaps the quintessential bad boy in Twain; and I think
we
should consider Tom's actions at the farm in light of that fact.  In _Tom
Sawyer_, Twain clearly intends for us to admire Tom's ingenuity and
leadership
qualities, even when--as in the famous dosing the cat and whitewashing the
fence episodes--the moral implications are not very admirable. As with Huck,
Twain shows Tom again and again meeting situations in which he must make
decisions about how he will act and according to what dictates.  Some of
Tom's actions are admirable, others are not.  Twain leaves the decision
about which are which to the reader's own moral sense.  But, again, as in
Huck's case, he also trusts the reader to realize that the bad boy has not
yet fully developed such a sense, that he is--to an extent--much like the
narrator of "The Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" who has killed
his conscience and feels free to act on his desires.  Killing one's
conscience is a pipe-dream (at least for a man of Twain's sensitive
conscience)
and there lies behind it, I believe, the desire to recover one's innocense,
the lost Eden in which all that one does is right.  Tom and Huck are
both innocents still and have as yet only a dim idea of the burden
conscience
imposes.  The state of innocense, consequently, does not preclude cruelty
(MT is not William Blake).

Third, I think that Twain must have had aesthetic as well as moral
considerations in mind and that the stealing of Jim episode is designed
for the purposes of artistic form and consistency.  Throughout the book,
I hope the readers of this note will agree, enclosed structures represent
some form of imprisonment, and Twain makes it clear that liberation from
these prisons--as a mental process and a physical action--is always
difficult.

One of the ways he establishes this idea is through parallelism, one of
his favorite novelistic devices.  Parallelism in this book allows Twain
to create certain important affinities between Jim and Huck.  For
instance, in his flight from Pap, Huck seems to have been freed by the
river; and it is perfectly right, artistically, that Jim should find
Pap dead in a destroyed house (symbol of confinement) floating downstream.
It is also right that Jim keeps this fact a secret from Huck--whatever his
motives for doing so--for it continues the process of internal liberation
that will eventually lead Huck to "light out for the territories" rather
than endure the stifling boredom he had experienced under the tutelage of
widow Douglas and Miss Watson (an experience, once again, expressed
in terms of household confinement).  This secret is very close to another
one that Twain is also keeping from the reader, the fact that Miss Watson
freed Jim shortly after his departure.  We shouldn't, however, conclude
that the whole voyage down the river has been a huge folly.  Jim's
escape to freedom parallels Huck's in that it is a preparation for the
dangers
of freedom (by no means a blessing without negative consequences) and the
building of confidence in others to help overcome those dangers.

Finally, if we juxtapose Jim's captivity on the farm with Huck's captivity
in Pap's shed, which I think we are meant to do, we see that they are not
so far apart.  First, both Huck and Jim are confined becuase they are seen
as valuable properties.  Second, Huck must put up with the crazy
shenanigans of his father--the old man beats Huck and suffers dreadfully
from
the d.t.'s--just as Jim must put up with Tom Sawyer's crazy escape plans.
Third, both Huck and Jim play characteristic roles while in confinement;
they appear passive.  As the folks from the 60's would say, they "go with
the
flow" like the river itself.  Indeed, it seems to me that if there is any
lesson to be drawn from the book, it is that freedom is not a one-time thing
and that not only is attaining it difficult but keeping it is even more so--
for freedman and slave.  Life, Twain seems to be telling us, is a series
of captures, confinements and escapes, and one is free only to the extent
that he (or she) manages to elude capture.

Fourth, as I said in my original note, I think it is a very definite
possibility that the "stealing" of Jim is an instance of Twain's further
savaging of the riverside communities along the Mississippi and, by
extention of the South, especially in its attitude toward slavery.  As
Twain shows in the Colonel Sherburn episode, human beings in the aggregate
are not very appealing and can be easily cowed by the appearance of a
strong individual.  In an area where slavery is an institution, this
perception must be doubly strong in the minds of the inhabitants. Slavery
demands not only the forced acquiescence of blacks but the tacit
acquiescence of whites, whether they own slaves or not.  The notion of
the dominance of the few and the submission of the many pervades eveHuck
finds h
imself in a social sector of the society.  Thus, whe  Huck finds himself in
a social situation
in whcih this notion is the norm and in which he feels himself obligated,
he has little power of resistance.  The notion is given sanction by people
who are feeding him, who seem to care for and value him.  It is very
different from his situtation on the river, where he has only his own
better feelings to rely on and where he knows that the men looking for
Jim's are his enemies as well as Jim's.

This power of society to blunt our better feelings, to turn even good
individuals into sheep, is a major theme in Twain; and it is nowhere better
illustrated than in this novel, in which all social relationships are
expressed in terms of power, of dominance and submission eluded only by
wiliness and plans for eventual flight.

This has been a long note, but I thought that Mr. Holmes--if he has not
taken off for the summer--might find it interesting, that others might
respond with their own views about the meaning of that famous (or should
I say, infamous) scene if I spelled out some of my own at length.

Cheers,

Bob Champ