Twain Involve Slavery in Huck

¶ … Twain involve slavery in Huck Finn despite the fact that he published it in 1885, twenty years after the end of the Civil War?

History is important in any society's culture and although there were many times when history was doomed to repeat itself, it also meant a reach source of information crucial to the development of any civilization. Mark Twain chose to set his novel Huckleberry Finn in a time when slavery has not been abolished yet, because he was aware that the Abolition of Slavery was only the beginning of a long and painful process of abolishing discrimination altogether against those who used to be slaves. He was a visionary, although in today's standards, he could be accused of using terms that were exactly meant to show the opposite of his anti-discrimination intentions. This would be the wrong way to judge any of his works since he was writing twenty years after the slavery had been abolished in the United States when those very terms were not yet burdened by all the negativity they carry today.

Huck Finn is a character that inspires the minds of children and adults alike all over the world and it will never cease to amaze those who will read or re-read it. Huck's way to self-development combines the ignorance of a young uneducated boy with his good nature and intelligence. The tests life puts him through will result in a person who will discover the good and the bad in the human nature and develop the ability to make the right decisions.

At the very beginning, the thoughts of the young boy who was bored to death by the educational attempts of the widow Douglas are revealing his own ignorance when it comes to the importance of knowing history in order to understand the present and prepare the future: "After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people" (Twain, 2). Huck was as blind at the teachings of dead people as the widow herself. They were both in the same darkness when it came to learn from the past, even though due to different reasons. On one hand, the child Huck was narrow minded in regard to the teachings from those who were no longer present because he never experienced the positive effects of such teachings in his young life. On the other, the widow Douglas was equally as narrow minded, but she was much more guilty of this ill understanding because she had lived much longer than Huck and had numerous opportunities to open her horizons as a result of her own experiences and judgment based on these and on the observation of those around her.

In one of Huck's drunken father's soliloquies, Twain succeeds to show the highly ironic situation that made people judge a person only according to his or her skin color, as if no other trace of humanity mattered. The man who used to drink himself to oblivion on a regular basis, the man who abused his only child, was condemning the society who could not sell a free "nigger" because of a stipulation of the law. The "nigger" involved in his consideration was "a free nigger there from Ohio -- a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat" (Twain, 37); "They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home" (idem). The white man who considered his white ancestry all it took to make him better than any black person, regardless of whatever qualities he or she may have had, is the very expression of a society that was gravely affected by the gangrene of slavery and would bear the scars of segregation for almost another century after the Abolition Act had been passed.

Twain's choice for the time setting of his novel proved to be well thought and pointed at those who were still blinded by the slightest shade of dark on the skin of their fellow countrymen. Mentalities never changed over night and twenty years were by far not enough for people to understand the wrong doing of those who thought they could use other people as their personal objects and nothing more. When people like Huck's father are raged by the idea that black men could vote is understandable to a certain degree. Their ignorance and ill nature makes them suitable for those who one might expect to think and act in the way extremists do. but, when people like the good widow Douglas have slaves of their own and see nothing wrong in it, then the causes that led to the whole phenomenon appear much more complicated and aggravated. Twain is trying to emphasize the role children and young people will play in what it will take to change people's hearts. Twain's genius is often revealed in what apparently is a small thing, like the time for prayer when the slaves are brought into their master's house to join the members of the family for prayer, or just the thoughts of a drunken man who blames the government for not letting him do his abhorrent actions and for not selling the free mulatter who was also a professor because there have not passed six months yet since he arrived in the state.