"These Leather-Face People": Huck and the Moral Art of Lying

"THESE LEATHER-FACE PEOPLE": HUCK AND THE MORAL ART OF LYING John Bird* Late in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the Wilks funeral, Huck decides he must tell the truth for the first time in the book. He tells Mary Jane that the men she thinks are her English uncles are actually impostors and that she must go four miles into the country for the day to stay with some friends. She asks Huck why, and he answers: "Why, it's because you ain't one of these leather-face people. I don't want no better book than what your face is. A body can set down and read it off like coarse print. Do you reckon you can go and face your uncles, when they come to kiss you goodmorning . . . ."' In contrast to Mary Jane, Huck is "one of these leather-face people," and judging from the number of times he lies successfully, he is one of the most "leather-face people" who ever lived. Huckleberry Finn is full of other "leather-face people," but the other liars in the book get caught at it and are punished, either by members of their society or by some sort of "divine retribution." The King and the Duke are tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail; Tom Sawyer takes a rifle ball in the leg; Pap is murdered or drowns; the thieves on the Walter Scott drown in the broken-up wreck; even Jim, a relatively innocent liar, is bound, chained, and almost lynched. Huck's only punishment comes from Aunt Sally, whippings which he says "didn't amount to nothing," and her promise to "sivilize" him, which, as distasteful as it is to Huck, does not match the punishments meted out to the other "leather-face people." Huck's lies are so pervasive that, taken as a body, they form a thematic and structural unity that helps tie the novel together. By examining Huck's lies closely, one can see not only his highly ingenious method, and the progression of his lies as they get bigger and bigger, but also the moral framework that underpins the lying and provides part of the foundation of the novel. Indeed, Huck's lies also form an important part of the structure for the celebrated crisis of conscience in Chapter XXXI, the central moral passage of the novel. Probably no reader comes away from Huckleberry Finn without a great respect for Huck's ability to improvise complex lies to get out of tight situations. In an early review of the novel, Thomas Sergeant Perry notes Huck's "undying fertility of invention."2 According to Lionel Trill- *John Bird is an Assistant Professor of English at Converse College. 72John Bird ing, Huck "travels incognito, never telling the truth about himself and never twice telling the same lie, for he trusts no one and the lie comforts him even when it is not necessary."3 In Mark Twain's Humor, Pascal Covici points out that Huck "knows with an adult's knowledge that all the subtleties of the poker table are needed to cope with life, and he never tries the same bluff twice."4 And Henry Nash Smith, in his introduction to the Riverside edition of the novel, says that Huck and Jim "are fugitives from the law, living by their wits, and Huck has an easy way with watermelons and chickens, as well as a marked propensity for lying."5 With so many critics pointing out the pervasiveness of Huck's lying, it should be instructive to go beyond mere notice of its recurrence to an examination of the lies themselves and thus to see Huck's method, a method so perfectly conceived that it could almost be called an art form. Several characteristics are common to Huck's lies: his ability to deliver them as if they were the absolute truth, with a "leather-face" (which is obviously Huck's term for a "poker face"); his inclusion of at least a grain of truth in every lie; and his ability, when he is caught, to regroup himself, claim to tell the truth, and then lie...