Steve, It's always possible that a slave in Missouri might not have known that Illinois was a free state--but it would have been highly unlikely. You might consult any of the now-classic slave narratives/autobiographies of the American nineteenth century (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, even Booker T. Washington's UP FROM SLAVERY) for illustrations of how intricate and extensive lines of communication were among slaves in the 1800s. A character in Charles Chesnutt's story "The Goophered Grapevine" describes what he calls the "grapevine telegraph," a grass-roots antebellum system of communication that got information to slaves long before white Southerners received the same news. The upshot is that nineteenth-century American slaves were surprisingly well-informed despite widespread sociopolitical efforts to keep them uneducated and illiterate. In other words, Jim would have had to have known that Illinois was a free state (consider, for example, how much he reveals that he knows about his status in the novel). One last note on the matter of Jim escaping through Illinois: you might also consult the edition of HUCK FINN produced by The Mark Twain Project--one of the most respected scholarly institutions in the country. Their volume is edited by Walter Blair (a major figure in Mark Twain Studies since the 1930s) and Victor Fisher (who has been working with Twain Materials at UC-Berkeley for over thirty years). Blair and Fisher, in the minds of most academic literary critics, answer the question of Jim and Illinois rather definitively (see, for example, explanatory notes 54.9 and 99.2-8). Best, Joseph Csicsila Eastern Michigan University