One of my favorite books is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. And my favorite part of that favorite book is Huck’s aborted attempt to repent and become a good boy. I am going to quote a good portion of it and draw a conclusion or two, in spite of this introductory warning by Mark Twain: “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.”
The incident occurs in chapter 31 – Huck’s friend Jim, the runaway slave, has been recaptured, and Huck ponders what to do now.
[Note: The novel is somewhat notorious for its liberal use of the ‘n’ word – set in the South in 1839, that shouldn’t be surprising. But, things being as they are in 2009, I’m going to use the slightly less offensive ‘Negro’ – although Huck himself would never have used such a high-falutin’ word.]
“The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grindin’ me, and the more wicked and low down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s Negro that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the look-out, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself, by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside me kept saying, ‘There was Sunday school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you, there, that people that acts as I’d been about that Negro goes to everlasting fire.’
It made me shiver. And I made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try to hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that Negro’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter – and then see if I can pray. Why it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
‘Miss Watson your runaway Negro Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward you send. – Huck Finn’
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking – thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no place to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim had in the world, and the only one he’d got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, for ever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell!’ – and tore it up.”
I hold this up as one literature’s greatest expressions of self-sacrificial love of one human being for another. It always reminds me of Paul’s lament in Romans 9:1-3, “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience testifies with me in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brethren…” What would you give up to save someone? This is the measure of love.
Twain in later years described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.” Of course, Huck doesn’t know his conscience is deformed – at least, not in the way Twain meant. Huck only knows his vision of what is right doesn’t match up with what everyone else tells him – but therein lies his salvation.
I don’t know if there is room in heaven for fictional characters, but if so you shouldn’t be surprised to see Huckleberry Finn there. He would certainly be shocked, though.
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