Mark Twain's Alchemy

Scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin Argues That The Voice Of Huckleberry Finn Is Essentially African-american

June 20, 1993|By Reviewed by Charles Nicol, Professor of English at Indiana State University and author of many articles on Mark Twain.

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices

By Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Oxford, 256 pages, $23

`Huckleberry Finn" has often been called the greatest novel ever written by an American, but somebody always wants to take an ax to the tallest tree. Taught in the public schools as a children's book, studied in universities as literature and read by ordinary grown-ups for sheer pleasure, "Huckleberry Finn" also has been banished from some libraries and school reading lists. When the book was first published over a hundred years ago, the charges against it were bad grammar and low-life characters. Today it is accused of being racist, although it was an inspiration to black writers from Twain's contemporary Charles W. Chestnutt through Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison.

Because Twain's novel is still very much alive and kicking (and being kicked), Shelley Fisher Fishkin's carefully argued, scholarly "Was Huck Black?" has received much pre-publication publicity. And no wonder: it turns the charge of racism on its head.

In 1985 Fishkin discovered that Samuel Clemens had paid the Yale Law School tuition of an African-American student, Warner T. McGuinn, with whom he was acquainted only by mail; she then defended Clemens on national television against a certain John H. Wallace who claimed "Huckleberry Finn" was "racist trash" and tried to get it removed from the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax, Va.

Fishkin has continued looking into Clemens' life and sources. A friend of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, Clemens was a popular lecturer for blacks as well as whites and frequently contributed his time and money to local black charities. It is a pity that those people in Hartford, Conn., who recently protested naming a school after him had not read the portrait here of Clemens at home in Hartford in 1874, singing spirituals almost in a state of trance and then dancing a "break-down" to the astonishment of his wife and friends.

Clemens, who grew up on the river in the slave-holding state of Missouri, once wrote that Huck Finn was modeled after Tom Blankenship, son of the Hannibal town drunk. But, as stated by Clemens and others who knew him as a boy, African-Americans were among his constant childhood companions.

Huck tells his own story in his own words-the first child to do so in an American novel. And Huck's voice-honest, illiterate, thoughtful-is the music that makes "Huckleberry Finn" great. Ernest Hemingway said that all "modern American literature comes from" it; Ralph Ellison said, "No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it." But Huck's voice, Fishkin argues, is "black." And so we are faced with the proposition that modern American literature owes its very being to Clemens' integration of black and white sources.

Fishkin's most effective evidence is the little-known "Sociable Jimmy," an article that Twain published in The New York Times in 1874, two years before he published "Tom Sawyer" or began writing "Huckleberry Finn." The article purports to be an account of what an African-American busboy said to Twain while he was staying overnight at an inn, probably in Paris, Ill.

Describing Jimmy as "the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across," Twain wrote that he "listened as one who receives a revelation. I took down what he had to say, just as he said it-without altering a word or adding one." Fishkin notes that this is "the first piece of Twain published that is dominated by the voice of a child" as well as "one of Twain's first efforts to translate African-American speech into print."

Fishkin's discussion of the characteristics of African-Ameican folk speech is revealing though occasionally rather technical: one reads of serial verbs, reiterated conjunctions, adjectives for adverbs, etc. But all this scholarly refinement is justified when Fishkin places samples of Huck's speech next to that of "Sociable Jimmy," for Huck and Jimmy do sound much alike.

Fishkin describes a number of other African-Americans who impressed Clemens with their "signifying" social insights and colloquial speech-notably a young slave named Jerry who delighted the 15-year-old Clemens with his takeoffs on the preaching styles of local clergymen. She also touches upon other areas of interest, including the question of whether African-American authors were "empowered" by "Huckleberry Finn" to write of their own experiences in their own voices.

As for the book's title question, that is a shrewd overstatement on Fishkin's part. Twain's genius at using the vernacular voice comes from both black and white sources. As Fishkin notes, a traveler in the South a century ago observed that "the language of the lower class of whites is so much like that of the negroes that it is difficult to say where the English ends and the African begins."

Clearly Twain's ability to take a busboy named Jimmy, a teenage slave named Jerry and a white child named Tom Blankenship and transmute them into a white child named Huck Finn involved a measure of racial alchemy unparalleled in American letters.