Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream.

Elaine and Harry Mensh. Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000. 167 pp. $29.95.

Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream is an earnest and well-meaning book that fails to add much that is new to the cultural conversation surrounding Mark Twain's famous novel. The book offers good intentions, fascinating asides and digressions, and competent plot summary, along with textual analysis often marred by unsupported conjecture.

The authors have read standard contemporary Twain criticism and standard contemporary historiography on Slavery, Reconstruction, and the Post-Reconstruction South. They juxtapose these two bodies of material ably enough, if not with great originality. No archival sources are consulted or acknowledged. Conjectural assumptions mar their analysis of what they call the historical "authenticity" of the text-assumptions on which they try to build an indictment of Twain's intentions when he created the character of Jim. To counter critics who argue that Jim is presented as intelligent and resourceful, the authors find various attitudes Jim has to be inauthentic and implausible, and conclude that his behavior gestures to minstrelsy rather than any recognizable historical reality. For example, discussing the debate between Jim and Huck about the Frenchman (an argument Jim actually wins), the authors claim that it is inconceivable that a slave in Jim's circumstances would not have known that different languages existe d. Their basis for saying this is (1) a reference Frederick Douglass made to words from African languages he heard in Maryland, and (2) their reminder that "Missouri, as part of the Louisiana territory, was under French control" during Jim's childhood. It simply does not follow, from either of these examples, that a slave in a small Missouri village would necessarily have heard foreign languages, or, in particular, French.

The authors tend to frame their rhetorical questions in such black-and-white, either-or terms that they often miss alternative responses that go beyond the reductive binaries they offer. Regarding the book's use of the term nigger, for example, they write, "the question ... is not whether Twain should have dispensed with the epithet (he could not have written the novel without it), but whether its ubiquitous use can be justified by one or another historicist or literary defense (as ante-bellum vernacular, as a synonym for 'slave,' as Twain's irony)." By way of contrast, one could argue that Twain used the term because it was integral to the project of presenting and indicting a racist society whose illegitimate racial hierarchy was embodied in the use of that word, because it was central to dramatizing the failure of everyone in that society (black and white) to challenge the legitimacy of the status quo and of the word that cemented and reinforced it.

The book reduces a number of complex gray areas to simplistic black and white, making the volume's title, ironically, more apt than the authors may have intended. The authors claim, for example, without any supporting evidence, that "a far greater proportion of [black commentators] are critical of Huck Finn's treatment of race than are white ones who deal with this question." Here, as elsewhere, the authors paint an essentialist cultural politics in debates about the book that pit black parents and critics against white parents and critics. But what about the many black critics and parents who have made an impassioned and eloquent case for the book's critique of racism? The roster includes David Bradley, Ralph Wiley, David Lionel Smith, James A. Miller, Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, Walter Mosley, and others, including Toni Morrison and

Ralph Ellison (both of whom the authors quote selectively when it serves their purposes, sometimes artificially cutting off quotes).

One comment of Ellison's would have been particularly useful to them-his reminder (in our 1991 interview) of how important it is to remember that we are seeing an adult black man through the eyes of a white child, not through the eyes of Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. How different would the book at hand have been had the authors kept Ellison's caveat in mind? Perhaps they might have entertained the idea that Huck, who undergoes no thoroughgoing intellectual transformation (i.e., never "casts off his racism"), is not the hero of the book. Perhaps they would have considered the possibility that Jim may be the hero of the novel, and that his alleged failings may be attributed not to Twain's lack of respect for him but to Huck's limited point of view.

In 1985, after I authenticated a letter from Twain written the year he published Huck Finn that contained a non-ironic condemnation of racism, I debated Dr. John Wallace on the CBS Morning News about his charge that Huckleberry Finn was "racist trash." After the short segment aired, a black cameraman in the studio came up to me. "I haven't read the book you were discussing, but I'm going to go read it now. But something puzzles me," he said. "Here we have a black man attacking it, and a white woman defending it, but as far as I can tell, this book makes white people look pretty bad."

I thought of that conversation as I finished Black, White & Huckleberry Finn. The authors write, "Neither Huck nor Mark Twain can tolerate, in imaginative terms, Jim freed." But what if the failure of imagination is not Twain's but America's? What if Twain is only the messenger, limning a society in which there is no freedom for a black man anywhere, in which whites will manage to deny it wherever he goes (and will go on doing so, in fact, for a century and beyond)? Calling that as he sees it is itself a potentially subversive and catalytic act. The power of Huckleberry Finn to engage Americans in debates about freedom and race so many years after it was written testifies to this fact.