In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck not only makes up stories to dupe the dupes and undo the tricksters he meets along the river, he develops a style of resiliency and optimism, a readiness in the face of distress and even disaster that spells his survival as well as his moral development. He learns what the great improvisers in music learn: that improvisation at its best is not a trick but a style and process; it is a philosophical and aesthetic attitude with which to face the future ready to swing with others. Improvisation is swinging freely, with discipline and with love. In the end, that capacity for free but disciplined loving swing with others—at the heart of the blues—is what Huckleberry Finn is all about.

And in this new millennium, how wonderful for me, brown-skinned reader and inheritor of the legacy of the blues (as well as of the traditions of the American novel), to discover that my love for this music and, alas, yes, my love for this book—wrong notes and all—are linked, tied as tight as the strings of old Robert Johnson’s blues guitar.

 

 

Robert G. O‘Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirteen years; since 1999 he has been the Director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980) and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991), and the principle writer of Seeing Jazz (1997), the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on jazz painting and literature. He edited the collection of essays Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (2001) and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998), which was awarded an 1999 ASCAP—Deems Taylor award, and coedited History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1996). O’Meally wrote the script for the documentary film Lady Day and for the documentary accompanying the Smithsonian exhibit Duke Ellington: Beyond Category (1995), and he was nominated for a Grammy for his work as coproducer of the five-CD boxed set The Jazz Singers (1998). He lives in New York with his wife, Jacqui Malone, and their sons, Douglass and Gabriel.

Notice.

 

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

By Order of the Author Per G. G., Chief of Ordnance.v

 

 

Explanatory.

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

The Author.

CHAPTER 1

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers,w as I said before.

Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece, all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me;1 but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogsheadx again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers;y 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.

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me.