The recent astroturfed flapdoodle over high school literature courses got me to thinking about Huckleberry Finn. I actually think that very few high school English teachers are equipped to teach the book.
I hope I don't need to tell you that the protagonist and narrator is a teenage white boy helping a slave to escape. The problem teaching it today is that it depicts its setting realistically. The escaped slave, Jim, is illiterate, superstitious, and has little knowledge of the world. He is given a couple of opportunities to speak for himself but the main viewpoint is Huck's. There is no question but that we are to see the slaveholding society and culture as malevolent, but it is impossible to avoid its viewpoint. A particular difficulty is that the people speak they way they really did, which means they say The Word That is Not to be Spoken or Written continually. In fact, Jim's title is XXXXXX Jim, just as mine is Dr. Cervantes and yours might be Ms. Jones.
Putting this in context, and understanding it from a modern perspective, is difficult. I think African-American parents would likely be at least as concerned as white parents. Did Twain succeed in giving Jim his humanity and agency, or is Jim really just a prop for Huck's story? It probably should wait till college. I will also note that the narratives we have from enslaved people don't give us full insight into Jim, since obviously their authors were literate. There is almost as much distance between Jim and Frederick Douglass as there is between Jim and Mark Twain -- maybe even a little more since Samuel Clemens actually lived in that environment whereas Douglass, in Maryland, experienced a very different slave culture.
One possible corrective would be for someone to try retelling the story from Jim's point of view. As far as I know, if anyone has done this, it isn't widely known. That got me to thinking about Sally Hemmings. As I hope you also know, she was an enslaved woman who Thomas Jefferson started raping -- that's really the only word for it -- when she was 14 years old. She had several children by him, but he didn't free them until he died.
One might think someone would want to tell this story from her point of view but again, as far as I know nobody has done so, or it hasn't been published. The problem is that it is very difficult to imagine how she experienced this. Even for the descendants of enslaved people, the world would seem to me too distant. I've seen some discussions about this and people step around this very gingerly. It's easy to say something that seems reasonable, but which manages to offend some people.
Presumably he showed affection toward her. Did she secretly loathe his touch, or did she feel some gratitude? The relationship, his desire for her, presumably gave her some agency and advantages she wouldn't have had otherwise. She was after all the mother of his children, although it's not clear how he viewed them. Did he behave in some ways like a father, even though he literally owned them, as property, as he owned Sally? As we are reading the Bible, we see that men can feel affection for their concubines, but of course this is all written from a male point of view and we don't know what the concubines experienced, except that their status was even lower than that of wives.
Anyway, it would be interesting for someone to take this on. It would have to be a Black woman, certainly. William Styron may have done a credible job with The Confessions of Nat Turner, although some people question whether he even had a right to try, let alone whether he succeeded. But this is even more complicated, and it would be impossible for a man to do it, and probably impossible for a white woman. Such slave narratives as we have, again, don't address comparable situations, even though they were commonplace, because nobody talked about it. Everybody knew, and everybody pretended not to.
5 comments:
This is some complex shit. Humans are animals, and there’s such an incredible gulf between most people’s actions and their awareness of their motivations. I really believe most lives are lived with minimal (if any) awareness. Think of the Crumbley mother, just apprehended in the basement of a building in Detroit. Does she have any idea whatsoever why she does anything she does?
By the same token, how could a man as educated as Thomas Jefferson NOT have known what he was doing to Sally, and why? Of course he knew. He wrote about the horror of slavery. And yet he was a tremendous proponent of it. That’s the dichotomy laid bare — in a single individual: cognitive dissonance. He knew exactly what he was doing — and decided not to think about it. His dick was stronger than his humanity. He talked a good talk but didn’t walk it at all. He lived a hypocritical life, a contradiction.
And if a person is illiterate, can they think circumspectively about these things in the first place? I believe they can. What about people who are “literate,” like Donald Shitler, who have no fucking clue why they do anything that they do?
My dearest Don, I think you narrowly missed the point about Jefferson. Simply, whatever philosophical bullshit he may have indulged, he was a rich man whose wealth depended on owning human beings. That's it. If you go past that point, you're overthinking things, about Jefferson and everyone else who's words don't match their actions.
Estemado Cervantes, I must compliment your courage and circumspection in writing this. As you said, many seemingly reasonable approaches to the subject are met with intense anger.
I don't recall ever saying anything about the founders and that particular word. Anyway, I will just say that Jefferson's hypocrisy, while not unusual, is important to notice because his personal failing was also the essential failing of the nation he helped to found. The hypocrisy was institutional, not just individual.
I guess my sardonic humor went unacknowledged, Cervantes. I used the word “floundering.” At any rate, yes. Jefferson was one of the founders and there were others from Virginia and the South who also owned other human beings, which was unconscionable to begin with. Jefferson and the other founders created a country started in genocide and based on slavery.
And yes, Cervantes, it continues to frustrate me that there are countless proletariat watching Fux or other counterfeit media outlets while your blog seems to attract perhaps 68.5 followers that we know of. There's a lot of stuff being written about here (and discussed) that needs to see an infinitely greater light of day. #@$*%!
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