ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
school skipped, father a violent drunk, no education, no status, no power – check all of
that. And maybe even Tom’s taking such care as to bribe Huck into returning to “sivilization” as the condition of Huck’s being permitted to pretend to be the kind of outlaw he has actually become before being enticed by Tom to return isn’t enough of a
complication to give even a Mark Twain scholar pause before claiming that “nobody
much cares about what happens to” Huck, this also in spite of Mark Twain’s testimonial in his Autobiography to the charisma, and the consequent popularity, of Tom
Blackenship, “the only really independent person – boy or man – in the community,
and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest
of us. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents the prohibition trebled and
quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any
other boy’s” (59). Assuming this to be no stretcher, boys cared about the boy Huck is
modeled after. A lot.
And Huck “poor”? He is, of course, rich, as even anybody who might be totally ignorant of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is reminded by Huck’s alluding to it in the second paragraph of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; then later, in the event that this
little detail has been forgotten, it’s reinforced by the conspicuous plot device in chapter IV of having Huck improbably recognize his main vulnerability to his abusive father being legal and fiduciary rather than physical, and so he rushes headlong the instant he recognizes his father’s heel-print in the snow to Judge Thatcher to sequester
his fortune in trust. Six thousand dollars – six Jims at approximately the going rate in
the 1830s – or, perhaps more to the point here, enough to buy six Jims out of slavery –
six thousand dollars, enough money to buy the 1830s equivalent of six luxury automo