Lawrence Howe, Mellon Postdoctoral Instructor, California Institute of Technology, published a letter in the New York Times (Sat. 7/25/92), responding to Shelley Fisher Fishkin and her thesis that a young African-American was the provenance for the voice of Huck Finn. The letter touches upon a range of issues of continuing concern for us and therefore, although I am aware most of you have read it already, I thought putting his text before the group might lend another focus to our discussion and enrich the L-TWAIN archive. The Times published Professor Howe's letter with a brief quotation from "Huckleberry Finn" appended, here omitted. To the Editor: As a Mark Twain scholar, I was pleased with the prominence you gave to a piece that Twain published in The Times in 1874, "Sociable Jimmy." The thesis of Prof. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, drawn from her reading of the piece, that a 10-year-old African-American boy was the source for the voice of Huckleberry Finn, provokes interesting questions, only some of which you touched on. While "Sociable Jimmy" has been known for some time, whether the boy it describes is actual or fictional has not to my knowledge been determined, which may or may not have bearing on the issue. A number of us have already noted the influence of African-American narrative techniques in Twain's work. For example, Twain appropriates the slave narrative's inversions of phrase and emphasis as the structure of "Life on the Mississippi." The episode on which Twain's Mississippi book pivots tells of his rebellion and escape from an abusive Mississippi pilot to whom his "master" had lent him as an apprentice. Describing his relief when exonerated for his insubordination, Twain claims, "I know how an emancipated slave feels; for I was an emancipated slave myself." "Huckleberry Finn," completed after "Life on the Mississippi," also adopts the device to make its ironic point about Huck's ostensible escape from cultural values. And in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," I have argued, Twain has written a miscegenation and murder mystery that elaborately parodies the detective genre and satirizes the racism of the genre's creator, Edgar Allan Poe. Such a parody not only makes a point of racial prejudice but also draws on the African-American narrative technique of signifying that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has highlighted in his investigation of African-American literature. Neither the inversions nor signifying parody are exclusive to black linguistic practice, but they are distinctive features of it. For Twain to have deployed them in texts that either place American race relations in the foreground or in which he identifies with the slave consciousness suggests the linkage between Twain's and African-American narrative techniques. None of this takes anything from Professor Fishkin's analysis. Indeed, if the most representative American boy in our literature was drawn from black identity, we have a new angle of vision, one with rich ideological significance. Indeed, it's as if Pudd'nhead Wilson's momentous discovery that the town aristocrat is a mulatto slave who was exchanged with the master's child in the cradle were coming true for Huck. I mention this connection because how we read this discovery is important, and the prospects call to mind the reaction of Wilson's townspeople to his discovery of the erstwhile aristocrat's legal status as a slave; they sell him down the river posthaste. The point of Professor Fishkin's discovery, in my view, is not that people who have objected to Huck's use of the word "nigger" are now effectively refuted, as Justin Kaplan suggests at the close of your article. I feel, as most Twain scholars do, that those who are sensitive to Huck's epithet for Jim have misinterpreted Twain's irony. But just as Huck's speech and views are not to be confused with Twain's, neither are they to be confused with those of an African-American boy on whom Twain may or nay [sic] not have based Huck's narrative voice. No, the point of this discovery is not for those of us who are sensitive about racism, but for those of us who are not. For Huck Finn is not only the most representative American boy in our liteature, he is also the character with whom American readers--American white readers--have most deeply identified. If we learn something new about Twain's model for Huck, will Americans still identify with him, or, like the townspeople in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," will they find new reasons to object to him and his book? Lawrence Howe California Institute of Technology Pasadena, Calif., July 8, 1992 Michael Joseph Rutgers University Libraries