So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help somehow” (p. 70). To seal the deal that the man on the ferry will go to offer help (the stranded gangsters), Huck plays on the ferryman’s greed by claiming, as if incidentally, that Miss Hooker’s uncle is the fabulously wealthy Jim Hornback. Again, underneath Huck’s comedy of manipulation is an orphan’s tragic tale of a family mired and separated by forces beyond their control, a blues in the night on the river. And again there is the larger drama of the quest for freedom and democracy (our nation’s word for love) through quick and artful improvisation.

Like a blues musician, Huck creates in the moment. With fertile imagination, he solos. He fills the vivid breaks in the action with invented phrases, gestures, and disguises, songs of self and community in love and trouble, characters trying to piece things back together, trying to get home, and then again, perhaps better still, to get away, to break free. Sometimes, as a soloist, Huck overblows. For instance, in the scene where Huck pretends that Jim did not actually experience but only dreamed up the storm that left them separated, Huck’s invention is merely self-serving, the smarty stuff of Tom Sawyerism. When Jim sees the trick, his heartfelt words, containing a stinging rebuke, achieve a kind of blues cadence:

When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin’ for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos’ broke bekase you wuz los‘, en I didn’ k’yer no mo’ what become er me en de raf‘. En when I wake up en fine you back agin’, all safe en soun‘, de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss’ yo’ foot I’s so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ‘em ashamed (p. 80).

At its best, Huck’s language is the language of the blues: vigorous, ironical, understated, grainy with detail, swingingly playful. Like the blues-singer, Huck has little patience for sentimental language or the headlong, tearful action that goes with it. This novel’s ongoing parody of airy poems about dead relatives, etc., parallels the blues’ disdain for the easy tear, sentimentalism’s shallow parade of false feelings. Huck’s impatience with Tom Sawyer’s egocentric reliance on bookish precedents—even when he can’t say what some of the highfalutin’ words he uses actually mean—is also true to the blues, which favors not only the improviser over the set text but also language that is clear and unabashed. “While you’re steppin’ out someone else is steppin’ in,” says a blues song by Denise LaSalle—never mind all the Tom Sawyerist indirection and pretense. When real trouble haunts the book—the death of Huck’s new friend Buck, for example—Huck does not gush; instead, the situation itself is so eloquent that he can barely speak, there is nothing to say. In the spare diction of the blues, worlds of meaning erupt. These are the strange silences that Toni Morrison notices elsewhere in Huck: He loves Jim too much to make a speech about it. Like a true bluesman, Huck’s art is magnificently understated and full of stark but meaningful moments when there is nothing for words to say. His answer to Jim’s rebuke about Huck’s tricking of Jim after the storm had separated them is not direct; we only know that he was ashamed and that he crept back to apologize.

It is Ellison who directly connects Huck’s resolution, the line in the novel’s famous last sentence—“to light out for the Territory”—with the blues of Bessie Smith, who, in the “Workhouse Blues” also declares that she’s “goin’ to the Nation, goin’ to the Territor‘.” In his collection of essays called Going to the Territory,r Ellison says that in her song, Smith’s will to take off for the “Territory” beyond U.S. borders parallels the journeys of slaves and ex-slaves, and their children, toward the broader freedom and multiplied sense of possibility associated not only with the North but with the Western frontier and, more generally, with the uncharted frontiers of the future. Jim, of course, “lights out,” too. Indeed, Mark Twain’s master-stroke is connecting Jim’s quest for freedom from slavery with the nation’s effort to grow up, morally, as Huck is able to do as he lights out for a territory we hope will be more humane and freer for all.

Making this case about this novel as a sort of “Blues for Huckleberry” or “Huck and Jim’s Lonesome Raft Blues” does not depend on our straining to show that Huck is black. And yet it is intriguing to remember that, culturally speaking, all the boys and girls of that period (and of our own period) from all the towns like Huck’s home in Grant’s Landing, Missouri, whatever their specific racial bloodlines, known and unknown, were both black and white—as well as Native American.

Here Bernard De Voto’s reflections on Mark Twain’s own boyhood can help us understand Huck’s “blackness.” De Voto observes that in the world of Mark Twain’s boyhood,

black and white children grew up together.... They investigated all things together, exploring life. They hunted, swam, and fought together. ... So the days of Sam Clemens were spent among the blacks.