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

When I was in Grade 2 I got so sick they thought I would die, my father sat by my bedside and read me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My father died last week.

It's a great book even if deeply flawed. Like all great children's literature, it achieves a transfiguration of the commonplace by taking a commonplace situation and projecting it into an exotic world. You think you're reading all about a boy and an adult floating down the Mississippi in order that both may escape—the boy from his violent, alcoholic father and the adult from a life of slavery. What you're actually reading is the story of a boy and his father, for that is who Jim really is. The notion that fatherhood is something like being a runaway slave is shocking and, for many, offensive but there it is. Children's literature cheats in this way all the time and this is really no different from the notion that there is a passageway to a magical world through the back of the closet.

Jim's life is a fiction and not a documentary account of slavery. Anyone who read this hoping to get a glimpse into what life was like before emancipation would be seriously misled. This is a book of fiction that doesn't even attempt to get history right. But it gets something right about what a son owes his father. 

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 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; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s 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, forever, 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.

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.