Shared with Jim, even a sudden summer storm on the river strikes the boy as marvelous:

It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest—fst! it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

“Jim, this is nice,” I says. “I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread” (p. 47).

Sometimes what Jim and Huck share on the raft is loneliness. Huck’s poetic descriptions of their shared sense of the river’s soft blue lonely quality stay in the reader’s mind. “We would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along,” he says, “and by-and-by lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat, coughing along up stream.” And soon “there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness” (p. 109).

At the other end of the novel, in the bright, sunny back country where the Phelps family lives, Huck, alone again, is seized by desolation:

It was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny—the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all (p. 198).

Approaching the Phelps’s home, Huck “heard the dim hum of a spinning-wheel wailing along up and sinking along down again; and then I knowed for certain I wished I was dead—for that is the lonesomest sound in the whole world” (p. 199). Considering ways to thwart the villainy of the king and the duke, Huck “slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue” (p. 164).

Through the course of the novel, Huck has much to feel blue about. His mother is dead, and his father is a drunken back-country vagabond who beats Huck, imprisons him, and tries to steal his money. The women who take him in, Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson (“a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on”) offer Huckleberry a genteel home whose rules of tidiness and decorum are so tight-fitting that he cannot wait to get out the window. Up the river, comfortably housed church-going families are pathologically locked into a pattern of killing one another, children included, for reasons some (all?) of them cannot remember. Ruthless “humbugs and frauds,” in Huck’s phrase, swarm the land: The king and the duke use what they know of human greed and sentimentality to separate the townsfolk from their money; they force Huck (until he tricks the tricksters) to participate in their elaborate ruses. Bullies and cowardly lynch mobs produce another plague on communities along the river. And, poisoning everything, the region’s economy depends on the enslavement of African Americans and on the vigilance of white people in owning them, and then in capturing and returning runaways, should they break free. Pap Finn so resents a well-dressed free black citizen and voter, with his “gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane,” that he can’t cannot see why “this nigger” is not “put up at auction and sold” (pp. 27-28).

Not that Huckleberry is an abstract thinker—the poetry of his language is in its gritty specificity and its rhythm—or even advanced enough to oppose slavery as an institution. But he has learned that Jim is a man and a friend and a wise, guiding father-figure, one of Albert Murray’s brown-skin shade-tree uncles,o and that he, Huck, will do what it takes to help Jim escape slavery. Though the scene in which Huck decides that he will go to hell, if that’s what assisting Jim means, is more comic than tragic—for Huck already has made clear his preference for the exciting bad place over the dull good place trumpeted by Miss Watsonp—Huck has decided to take whatever risks may be associated with helping Jim. In this sense Huck is a “blues-hero,” an improviser in a world of trouble who optimistically faces a deadly project without a script. Remember that the blues is not just a confrontation with a world gone wrong; to that gone-wrongness, the blues answers that the instrumentalist-hero (and the community of blues people identifying with the artist’s expression) have just enough resiliency and power to keep on keeping on, whatever the changes in fortune.

Getting Jim free is not a simple business. One might say that Huck and Jim’s trip toward freedom is haunted by the blues. Along with the various efforts to recapture and sell Jim back down the river (including those of the duke and the king), consider chapter 15, in which Jim and Huck are separated by a swift current, and then seek each other through a thick wall of fog. As night falls, Huck paddles in a canoe after Jim and the raft, but the boy’s hands tremble as he hears what seem to be Jim’s answering whoops:

I whooped and listened. Away down there, somewheres, I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again. The next time it come, I see I warn’t heading for it but heading away to the right of it.