The "Raftsmen's Passage," Huck's Crisis of Whiteness, and Huckleberry Finn in U.S. Literary History

PETER SCHMIDT The "Raftsmen's Passage," Huck's Crisis of Whiteness, and Huckleberry Finn in U.S. Literary History "Tell me some mo' histry, Huck." Mark Twain, working notes for Huckleberry Finn, C- 14 I OMMENTARY on the "raftsmen's passage" section of Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) usually centers on the conundrum of whether or not to include it as part of the text of the novel's chapter 16. Twain scholarship has reached no consensus on how the passage should be handled editorially, much less on the meaning of the passage for the novel as a whole. In many ways, the raftsmen's passage is a bit like Huck Finn himself, a kind of outcast child of the parental body of the book.1 The relative neglect of the raftsmen's passage in Huckleberry Finn commentary is surprising when we consider the traumatic heart of the episode. After the raftsmen's boasts and story-telling are finished, Huck is accidentally found hiding in a woodpile at the far edge of the raft at the edge of the firelight; he is roughly pulled from his hiding place and, while naked, intetrogated and threatened. He begins crying, though it is questionable whether Huck's tears are involuntary or a ploy for sympathy , and when made to identify himself he chooses the name of the murdered child in a ghost story that he has just overheard. The best interpreter of the passage, Peter G. Beidler, long ago suggested that Huck Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 36Peter Schmidt here is "unconsciously identifying with the dead child," part of a pattern throughout the novel that shows an attraction to death "as a release from the cruelty and suffering that is life—at least 'sivilized' life" (248). Readers may argue with equal plausibility, however, that Huck chooses the name strategically, hoping to get a laugh—which he does (273)· What has not been emphasized about the raftsmen's passage is that it brings to a climax Huck's crisis of racial identity caused by his identification with Jim's escape. Questioned by the raftsmen, Huck uses a phrase that appears to be black English, one he has just heard Jim use. Huck's retrospective narrative itself in this passage also appears to go out of its way to "color" Huck as either blue or black. In addition, Twain's scene echoes wording he used in his short story, "A True Story," published two years earlier, in 1874. That tale was narrated by a black character, "Aunt Rachel," based on a story from her own life told to the Clemenses in Elmira, New York, by their cook, Mary Ann Cord; Twain claimed that the words of the story were entirely hers, not his. Crucial elements of Cotd's tale are, in the raftsmen's passage, transposed into Huck's voice—an intertextual confluence that has also so fat gone unanalyzed . Of course, chapter 16 is perhaps most well known not for the raftsmen's episode but because in it Huck for the first time decides not just to trick or insult Jim but to betray him back to slavery, prompted in part because Jim articulates for the first time how much freedom means to him. But only by adding the raftsmen's passage back to its original place in chapter 16 (between the second and third paragraphs) can we make an important observation: Huck decides to turn Jim in immediately after those moments with the white raftsmen when—for the first time in the novel—Huck understands his own racial identity to be ambiguous. In general, when the issue of "race" in Huckleberry Finn is discussed the debate has focused on Twain's representation of Jim, or whites' racist language and behavior toward blacks, especially Huck's. But what if we were to atgue that "race" in the novel cannot properly be discussed without considering how a crisis in whiteness is at its center, embodied in a boy who occupies a precarious space on the boundaries of white identity? Toni Morrison suggested as much in Phying in...