Huckleberry Finn, Chapters XXXIII & XXXIV

Sure enough, Tom Sawyer is on a wagon coming from the river. Huck hails him and after assuring Tom that he is not a ghost quickly explains his situation. Tom comes up with a plan that has Huck take his trunk back to the farm (which he will do too, leaving Uncle Silas to believe he has a hundred-dollar horse.) On hearing about Jim, Tom almost exclaims something then stops. After some consideration promises Huck he will help deliver Jim from bondage, which Huck cannot believe:

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard -- and I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn't believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger-stealer!

"Oh, shucks!" I says; "you're joking."

Back at the farm, Tom shows up on the wagon a half hour after Huck's return, and as his ride heads back to town, inquires if Silas is Archibald Nichols, in fact a neighbor who lives three miles away. No, says Silas, but stay for dinner before I take you over there. During dinner there's some tomfoolery (sorry) before Tom tells the amazed family that he is really his brother Sid, who begged to come with Tom to visit (one more plot device which hinges on the slow means of communication at the time.)

During dinner Huck and Tom unsuccessfully try to pick up a clue as to where Jim is being held until one of the children asks Silas if he and the two visitors can go to the show in town that night.

"No," says the old man, "I reckon there ain't going to be any; and you couldn't go if there was; because the runaway nigger told Burton and me all about that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the people; so I reckon they've drove the owdacious loafers out of town before this time."

So, those who betrayed Jim are fittingly betrayed by him. After the family retires for the night, the two boys sneak out of the house and head to town, Huck with the idea of warning his two tormentors. He is too late. Huck and Tom see the King and Duke covered in tar and feathers in the hands of a mob who are carrying them out of town astraddle poles. (A fitting end for kings?) And consider, given the time and place, and presuming first- and second-degree burns from the hot pitch, how long it would take to clean-up and recover from something like that--all the while homeless and begging for handouts. A cruel and unusual punishment, and Huck shows compassion for his two tormentors.

Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

And then, in another of Twain's fine psychological strokes, Huck tells us he feels bad for feeling guilty that he couldn't help the two scoundrels:

But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.

Upon reflection the two figure that Jim is being kept in a small padlocked cabin where they've seen a slave carrying a plate food entirely fit for a dog if not for a slice of watermelon along with it. They plan the best way to save the man. Huck suggests getting the canoe ready the next night, stealing the key to the padlock from Silas when he's asleep, dart to the raft and shove off, running nights as before.

Too simple, says Tom, and describes what they should do insead.

I see in a minute it was worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.

Reconnoitering the cabin they find a high window boarded up, easy to get Jim out of Huck says. Too easy, says Tom. Searching a leanto attached to the cabin, they find a dirt floor: Tom was joyful. He says:

"Now we're all right. We'll dig him out. It'll take about a week!"

At breakfast the next morning they find the slave bringing Jim's breakfast, and ask him if he's feeding a dog. Yes, the man answers, a curious one too. Want to see him?

In the cabin, Jim is delighted to recognize Huck and Tom, calling them by name. Silas's slave is astonished Jim knows them, but Tom, in what to me is the cruelest exchange in the book, easily convinces the simple and superstitious man that the words he heard Jim speak were instead the enchantment of witches, a trick Jim readily plays along with. Then Tom voices perhaps the most hateful lines in the book, though meant to conceal his plan, all the more awful for being something within the realm of common thinking for the time.

"I wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger. If I was to catch a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn't give him up, I'd hang him." And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to look at the dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers to Jim and says:

"Don't ever let on to know us. And if you hear any digging going on nights, it's us; we're going to set you free."

Early on I remarked on the sadism inside Tom Sawyer, a manipulative fabulist whom, if grown up, Twain would have likely despised. What is endearing in a boy can be hateful in a man, and--without giving too much away--I propose that we are to see the increasingly delusional and dangerous machinations of Tom in the chapters to come as a pointed criticism of a certain kind of deranged dreamer, a type which American culture has prized from Twain's day up to our own.

That said, the pointless, minstrel-show ridiculing of the Phelps family's slave in this chapter, albeit at Tom's cruel hands, really is Twain at his worst. We might best leave it by considering if the whole book had been filled with bilge very like, however artful, Huckleberry Finn would have been forgotten a century ago.

Previously Chapter XXXII
Next Week Chapter XXXV