either inner crisis or canny improvisation. What is certain is that Huck’s interpretation of his actions is decidedly negative, using the language of spiritual crisis and failed white manliness. “I tried to brace up and out with it [to turn Jim in], but I warn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit” (83). Huck’s here is tragically more traumatic than Mark Twain’s simple opposition between health and corruption, Huck’s “sound heart” vs. his “deformed conscience.” In Twain’s formula, which aided the novel’s canonization as an icon of American literature in the 1950s, Huck’s conscience definitively “suffers defeat” and the “good” Huck wins out, though where this moral Gettysburg in the novel occurs Twain did not say. Despite Huck’s bouts of self-loathing, after his small-pox trick works Huck resolves in the future to “do whichever come handiest” (85). Huck’s commitment to Jim seems at least temporarily settled through the rest of chapter 16: Huck speaks of Jim’s plans to escape to freedom using the first-personal plural unselfconsciously and repeatedly. Perhaps because Huck has given up making a “show” for himself as a white person, he can temporarily be at peace with aligning his freedom-quest with Jim’s. If we have any doubts, we should consider Huck’s description of the steamboat that knocks them a steamboat heading upriver just like the one on which they had hoped to buy deck passage. The boat suggests not only the mouth of Hell as it usually appeared in illustrated Bibles such as Huck might have seen, but also as an industrial machine: “all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us” (87; cf. Robinson 197-98). There is no stronger image in Huckleberry Finn for the nightmarish world Huck fears will swallow him when his bond with Jim is broken. The Hell that actually engulfs Huck, though, comes from another, unexpected direction. portrait
primarily as one of several publications in which Twain paid tribute to the verbal skills and historical memory of particular black story-tellers and acknowledged their influence on his own art. For Fishkin, “[s]tories like Mary Ann Cord’s were central to the genesis of Huckleberry Finn” (89). What has not been noticed, however, is how the climax of the raftsmen’s passage directly echoes language used by Mary Ann Cord. Mary Ann Cord told Twain of being torn from her family on a slave auction block. She particularly emphasized the trauma of the loss of her youngest son: dey begin to sell my chil’en an’ take dem away, an’ I begin to cry; an’ de man say, “Shet up yo’ dam blubberin’,” an’ hit me on de mouf wid his han’. An’ when de las’ one was gone but my little Henry, I grab’ him clost up to my breas’ so, an’ I ris up an’ says, “You shan’t take him away,” I says; “I’ll kill de man dat teches him!” I says... (Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition, Vol. VII, Henry is sold, but later escapes slavery and journeys North to freedom, and after the war is reunited with his mother. Twain said his published story is an exact “copy” of the tale Cord told him in the summer of 1874, two years before Twain began Huckleberry Finn; what he published in a national magazine was “not in my words but her own,” testimony to “a shameful tale of wrong & hardship” and also “a curiously strong piece of literary work.” In discussing this tale, Fishkin stresses its general influence on Huckleberry Finn. That is, she sees it as one of the stimulants for Twain’s own new perspective in that novel on the world of his Missouri childhood—a world where Jim’s love of his family, the pain of slavery, and his determination to seek