Huckleberry Season

Sometimes I think I’ll just go reread a book because I just don’t remember it well and know it to be important literature. Sometimes I realize that there’s no way I ever read the book initially as I would have HAD to remember something, considering it was so vibrant.

This takes me to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I ‘re’read just the other week and came away with the strange sensation of being introduced to entirely new material. Now, I know I’ve read about Tom Sawyer. In the 5th grade we did a school play with the whitewashing scene. The same one my brother’s class did a few years earlier, so I already could practically quote it when it was supposed to be fresh. But I never went on to Huck’s adventures that year or any other until now.

Somehow I just lumped the two stories together. I didn’t add the frog jumping contest short story to the pile, which I know I only just read last year and found a bit nutty. But there does seem to be something nutty about these stories of kids and adults and culture and river that are at once familiar and entirely mystical. How could a grown man be like Jim? How could a young boy be like Huck? What changes in America have wrought those persons unbelievable?

And yet, isn’t it just like a child to run away from bad and not so bad just to be free? And wouldn’t a man in danger need more help and be more faithful than one who saw himself as autonomous? And doesn’t every other character we meet, whether capricious, conniving, gullible, dangerous or endearing, somehow keep us thinking that humanity may have new trappings, but is not too far removed from the low banks of the Mississippi?

The pleasant times Huck and Jim enjoy make me yearn to float alongside them, but the scrapes and storms and general uncertainty let me know that what baffles me would confuse anyone, and when I am at the end of the line, well, maybe a canoe will come along and keep me afloat. Huck and Jim extend measures of grace which are unparalleled by their main associates, creating the most unlikely heroes. These heroes, though, are ones I will not forget and hope to even reread for real!