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