Negro girls watched over his infancy. Negro boys shared his childhood. Negroes were a fountain of wisdom and terror and adventure. There was Sandy and the other slave boys who played bear with him. These and others preserved him sometimes from drowning. There was the bedridden old woman who had known Moses and had lost her health in the exodus from Egypt. There was Uncle Dan‘l who told the stories that Harris was to put in the mouth of Uncle Remus, and, while the fire died, revealed the awful world of ghosts. There were the Negroes with whom he roamed the woods, hunting coons and pigeons. There were the roustabouts of the steamboats, the field hands shouting calls over their hoes, and all the leisurely domestic servants of the town.... Olivia Langdon, whom he married, was to give him a principle for dealing justly with the human race. He ought, she said, to consider every man black until he was proved white.s

De Voto also tells of Mark Twain/Sam Clemens’s love of Negro spirituals. As an adult in Hartford, Connecticut, he would sometimes stand under the moonlit night, singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and delivering the song’s final “Glory, Hallelujah,” “with a great shout.” “Away back in the beginning—to my mind,” said Twain, the singing of blacks “made all other vocal music cheap... and it moves me more than any other music can.”t

While as far as we can tell, Twain never heard blues music as such, he heard the various American musics, including the Negro spirituals, that blended to become the blues. And there is a “nobody knows the trouble I see” as well as a “glory Hallelujah” shout in the blues. Both extremes of feeling find their way into this novel, Huckleberry Finn.

If Huckleberry Finn may be read as a blues narrative, with blues characters and plotlines, the book’s mode of composition by improvisation also is strongly suggestive of the blues. Manuscript evidence and letters from and to Twain indicate that he first conceived of Huckleberry Finn as an extension of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Huck had first made an appearance as Tom’s friend, dirt-poor but smart and natively good at heart. Twain decided that the new book would not bring Tom into adulthood, as Twain’s friend William Dean Howells had recommended, but instead would tell the story of this other boy, Huck, who had so much appeal that he had nearly taken over Tom’s own Adventures.

The decision to shape this new novel as a first-person narrative, a chronicle told in an everyday voice by a boy trying to cope with the trouble he sees, was brilliant and bluesy. It is also important that Twain did not first conceive the book as a weapon against slavery, or as even about slavery in any central way. In fact, Jim did not figure as a major character in the book’s early drafts; nor at first was there any indication that Twain intended to have Jim run away from slavery. Evidently Twain’s plan was to write a series of episodes satirizing American foibles and hypocrisies, particularly when it came to religious practices, as his model book The Adventures of Gil Blas (1749), by Alain René Le Sage had done. According to scholar Victor Doyno, “Twain initially considered having Huck escape from his father’s cabin to set off tramping across Illinois. Then the novel would have been a ‘road’ book, like Gil Blas’s, instead of a ‘river’ book. But when he [Twain] remembered the June rise in the river level, with logs and rafts coming from upriver, he soon had Huck spot a free-floating canoe, and that gave him the mechanism for Huck to travel down the river Twain knew so well.“u Twain brings Huck to Jackson’s Island, according to Doyno, without knowing what would happen next. Further, Twain ”may have been a bit puzzled by the Robinson Crusoe—like moment when Huck first discovers the campfire on Jackson’s Island because he did not yet know in his imagination who else was there. When he finally realized, after much sequential revision, that the person by the campfire was Jim, he was so excited—and, I think, happy—that he wrote ’I bet I was glad to see him!‘ in running script, lifting his pen off the page between words only four times (his habit when writing very rapidly) instead of the normal seven times. Placing Jim by the campfire was a crucial discovery/creation on the part of Twain’s imagination, because it gave Huck a companion who would give the book surprising new possibilities.“ Composing the book over a ten-year period, with one episode suggesting another, and with Jim’s leap for freedom challenging Huck to be more than an adventurous picaro or vehicle for incidental satire—he had to face the implications of loving Jim and identifying with his goal—gradually Mark Twain shaped the novel into Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as we have it today. Huck became a moral hero hotly engaged in a battle between what Twain called ”a sound heart and a deformed conscience.”

There is a sense in which all novels, and perhaps all works of art, are improvised. Still, Huckleberry Finn strikes me as a special case because when it began one of the two main characters hardly existed, and the most significant part of the plotline was not yet imagined at all by the writer. Starting and stopping, improvising over ten years, Twain found out what the book was about. In the process he seems to have discovered that improvising on the blues is the American mode.