Reversing the Curse: Slavery, Child Abuse, and Huckleberry Finn

When Jim, the runaway slave in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, finds a dead body on a house floating down the Mississippi, he recognizes the dead man as Huck’s father, but does not reveal his identity to Huck. Instead, Jim warns Huck to stay away from the body and not look at it, and he then covers the body with rags to make sure that Huck does not see it:

“De man ain’t asleep—he’s dead. You hold still—I’ll go en see.”

  He went, and bent down and looked, and says:

  “It’s a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He’s been shot in de back. I reck’n he’s ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan’ look at his face—it’s too gashly.”

  I didn’t look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he needn’t done it; I didn’t want to see him.¹

Critical interpretations of Jim’s actions in this scene have centered around two possible motivations: either the paternalistic Jim simply wants to protect the young Huck from the emotional trauma of seeing his dead father, or the calculating fugitive Jim wants to prevent Huck—the only white “cover” that Jim has in his flight from slavery—from returning home and thus diminishing his chances for successful escape.² After all, Huck has faked his own death and fled in a desperate bid to escape his father’s abuse and exploitation. With Pap dead and a considerable fortune in the bank, what would stop the orphaned Huck from simply returning to town and leaving Jim to pursue his freedom alone—or, worse, from returning to town and reporting Jim’s whereabouts to his owner, Miss Watson?

However, the ramifications of the scene on the floating house extend well beyond the arenas of plot utility and character motivations. As Robert Sattelmeyer has pointed out, Jim’s actions on the floating house closely parallel the biblical story of Noah and his sons in Genesis 9: 18–27—the infamous story of the Curse of Ham.³ This passage had been used to justify the enslavement of black people by European empires since the fifteenth century and in North America since at least the late-seventeenth century,⁴ but was particularly widely manipulated for that purpose in the nineteenth-century U.S.⁵

The story of the Curse of Ham follows the more familiar biblical story of the flood and the ark. The world has grown so corrupt since the fall of Adam and Eve that Noah and his family are the only righteous and God-fearing human beings remaining. In view of such near-universal depravity, God decides to destroy the world with a flood and start over, but only after instructing Noah to build the ark and use it to preserve human and animal life. In this way Noah becomes the new Adam, the sole patriarch of the postdiluvian world. After the floodwaters recede and Noah has planted vineyards, he overindulges and passes out—drunken and naked—in his tent. His oldest son, Ham, walks into his father’s tent and sees him; he then tells his younger brothers about the scandalous sight. In the ultimate act of filial deference, Shem and Japheth then walk backwards into the tent, carrying a blanket, and cover their father’s naked body without looking at it. After Noah wakes and discovers how his sons have behaved, he curses Ham’s offspring to perpetual servitude:

The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled. Noah was the first tiller of the soil. He planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and became drunk, and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took...