Huckleberry Finn, Chapter XXXI

The four drift for days and days. They are now in the deep south, Spanish moss give the riverscape a haunted look. The Duke and King, finally a safe distance from their Wilks family debacle, go back back to their old bag of tricks, lectures on temperance, medicine, or fortune telling. Nothing works. Huck notes the two of them plotting something.

They land two miles below another small town and the King goes off to reconnoiter, telling the Duke and Huck to follow if he does not return by midday. He does not and they find him drunk in town. As the two con men are arguing, Huck races back to the raft ready to finally give them the slip but discovers Jim is gone. Huck runs through the woods yelling Jim's name over and over and, distraught, begins to cry.

Quickly coming to his senses, he sets out and meets a boy who tells him that the person he asks about was picked up as a runaway slave and is now in custody at the Silas Phelps farm two miles downstream. The King had gone to town with the fake runaway slave handbill that quoted the $200 reward and, saying he could not stay around to collect it himself, sold Jim's location for $40.

We have here reached the moral nadir of the book, where the combined actions of human refuse and a hideous social order allows for the legal selling of a companion for the cost of a weekend bender. Huck is finally at an utter loss. Better Jim is a slave at home, he thinks, as long as he'd got to be a slave than among strangers. The game is up. He resolves to write Tom Sawyer asking him to alert Miss Watson as to Jim's whereabouts.

Huck's thinking immediately goes along moral lines, and he reviews the punishment, social and divine, that awaits wicked, nigger-loving abolitionist thieves like him.

[...] 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 nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, 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 of me kept saying, "There was the 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 acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a 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 and 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.

Huck writes a terse note to Miss Watson directly, telling where to find Jim, and feels momentarily absolved. But then, in one of the most beautiful paragraphs in this beautiful book, he recalls life on the Mississippi with Jim.

[...] 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 places 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[....]

Then, in the novel's most celebrated passage, Huck chooses eternal damnation over giving up Jim, "All right, then, I'll go to hell", and tears up the note.

Note the quotation marks. This is the only part in the story where Huck speaks to himself aloud, where the voice separates itself from both the expression of his active interior monologue--what he recalls thinking--and the flow of his outward narration--what he says happened. It flags that point where Huck judges his action the most clearly, and acts the most decisively. After dark he takes the raft down river a couple miles to be closer to where Jim is being held.

Next morning he sets out and finds the Phelps place, only reconnoitering to go back later from the direction of town. He then heads into Pikeville where he finds the Duke putting up a poster for another Royal Nonesuch. He makes up a story about helping a farmer overnight, says now he can't find the raft or his slave Jim, his only possession in the world. The Duke admits that the King sold Jim--and drank up most of the money--and says he doesn't know where the raft is, that the two tried finding it to sleep on the night before (note the alcoholic audacity of this) and that it was gone.

The Duke tells Huck that Jim is being held by a farmer 40 miles inland (a mile for every dollar of Jim's betrayal), three days travel by foot, and bids him to start walking. Huck sets out in that direction until he's sure the Duke isn't watching him, then doubles back to the Phelps place.

Last week Chapts XXIX & XXX
Next week Chapt XXXII