RE: Fishkin's book. See also Newsweek 120 (20 July 1992): 3, 64-65. "Same Twain, Different Time" Quote in part: "...Despite the title of her forthcoming book, "Was Huck Black?", Fishkin doesn't mean that Huck is Jimmy in whiteface. She's well aware, in fact, that Twain said Huck was an exact portrait of a boyhood chum named Tom Blankenship, the son of the town drunk in Hannibal, Mo., but she's come up with a way to finesse that inconvenient fact: Twain doesn't tell us how Tom talked. If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, you'd never know it from last week's chorus of Eurekas. "It's what we've all been looking for," said David E. E. Sloane, University of New Haven English professor and president of the Mark Twain Circle of America. "It's like the missing link. This comes under the line of proof: now we know." Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard's W.E. B. DuBois professor of humanities, told the Times Fishkin had demonstrated "that it is the black American linguistic voice which forms the structuring principle of the great American novel, and that ain't bad." Novelist Toni Morrison, who has often called for recognition of an African-American strain in white as well as black American literature, welcomed Fishkins' "understanding of the integral part of black language and imagination had on Sam Clemens" (Twain's real name)> Justin Kaplan, Twain's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, was one of the few to betray discomfort, with the slenderness of Fishkin's evidence, but he have her an AA for effort: "I wish there'd been more proof. But she's certainly done the best with what she has." See also "The Week, July 5-11, 1992," Time, 20 July 1992, 18-19, "Was Huck Finn Black?" San Jose Mercury News, 9 July 1992, 6B, "Don't box Huck in" USA Today, 8 July 1992, 2A San Francisco Chronicle, 7 July 1992, D1, D2 "A Black 'Voice' for Huck"