It is distressing that Twain who, as John Baker says, consistently
shows a humanistic concern for African-Americans and other minorities,
has become a kind of standard of benightedness in what has become,
sadly enough, a kind of racial witch-hunt in American literature. It
is even more troubling when one considers the unquestioned presence on
high school and college syllabi of writers who (unlike Twain) apparently
held blacks in considerable disdain and yet who escape approbation because
they seldom or never introducted blacks into their writings.  I am
thinking here particularly of Hawthorne, whose works I love dearly, but
who was not the most enlightened individual one can find on this issue.

   When introducing a race-conscious work like _Huckleberry Finn_ into
my own syllabi, I will frequently begin with a few short works (for
example, "A True Story," "Corn Pone Opinions") that present, for the most
part, a positive image of blacks and an exploration of the white
misunderstanding of slaves.  This is the only way I have found to clear the
ground and start in a way that is both attentive to student sensibilities
and fair to Twain.  On the other hand, the idea of producing a kind of
mini-course in nineteenth century American cultural history in order to
excuse a single word seems to me terribly intrusive and does exactly what
Twain's detractor's do: it raises the word, a symbol (and a false symbol at
that), above the reality of Jim, and Huck's troubled but very honest
relation to him.

   I don't know, really, what other word to denote African-Americans
Twain's detractors would have expected him to put into the mouth of a
lower-class Southern white boy.  And given the horrific picture that Twain
presents of the river towns and farms elsewhere in _Huckleberry Finn_, I
doubt that he meant us to construe the episode of Tom Sawyer's fantastic
"rescue" of Jim at Uncle Silas's farm as anything other than a further
indictment of that society.  Twain, after all, was not in the business of
whitewashing the human race for the sake of some feel-good moral posturing
(something that, for some reason, comes all too easily to us moderns). Jim,
like all slaves, was powerless ashore; Huck lacked the will and maybe the
knowledge of how to stand up to the superficially cleverer and more
socially advantaged Tom Sawyer; Tom--like may children--acted out a
Romantic part with unintentional cruelty (the same kind of part that
Twain criticizes, in his remarks on Scott and the South elsewhere, as
responsible for the Civil War).  Further, more incredible and more painful
episodes than this "rescue" really happened during slavery, as anyone
who  has read through a volume or two of Rawick's "composite autobiography",
_The American Slave_ can attest.  To beat Twain over the head for telling
hard truths of this kind--and using the right  language to tell it--is
nothing short of perverse.

Robert Champ