Deliriously Happy (13 page)

I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn't walk like a girl… I took notice, and done better.

Of course, all Huck's prancing goes for nought; the woman he visits quickly sees “Sarah Williams” for the confused young boy he is (Huck doesn't “throw like a girl”). In the published novel, the episode ends here, a mere burlesque; but as the manuscript makes clear, Twain fully intended Huck's “walk on the wild side” to have more psychosexual import.
¹⁴

In the manuscript, the woman's husband arrives home before Huck can make his escape. Despite Huck's and the woman's protestations, the man insists on escorting “Sarah” home “on account of he said he wouldn't be able to sleep knowing such an innocent thing as me was wandering in them dark evil woods un-protected.” In the passage that follows, Huck learns an important lesson about gender bending and indeed about life.

We walked into the woods a ways and he kept trying to talk me up: where'd I get the perty dress? did I have a beau? did I have any older brothers? But I didn't answer exactly, just tittered and giggled, so as to not be discovered again
.

About a half mile in, I turned to the man and I says, all girlish:

“Thank you very kindly, sir, I can make my own way from here. You've taken me far enough already.”

“Yep,” the man said, looking round
.

“Reckon we is gone far enough, alrighty.”

Then the man, as casual as can be, plucked off his hat and dropped it to the ground. He says:

“Sarah Williams, would y'bend over an' pick up my hat fer me, like a good girl? I hain't got the back for it.”

I smelt a lie, but I saw he had a gun, and so I bent over, as womanlike as I could
.

I can't rightly say what happened next, or leastwise I won't. But I will say this man weren't near as clever as his missus: a lucky thing, too, seeing as he would've killed me if he figured out I warn't no girl. But he didn't, maybe since I squawked and carried on just like a girl would, though that weren't hard on account of it hurt so much. It made me wonder, though, why do womenfolk have any business to do with us men atall? I know if I was ever a girl it'd take a good sight more than some old gold band to get me to cleave unto my husband, no matter what any Good Book had to say about the thing
.

Well, the man finished up his cleaving soon enough, and left me there to find my own way home. He weren't worried about my innocence no more, I reckon
.

Again, it is unclear why Twain allowed this passage to be dropped from the final publication.
¹⁵
But whatever the reason, it is unfortunate, as this episode proves to be an important turning point in Huck's life: it is the moment Huck realizes he must throw off the girlish frills of his youth and become a man.

EPISODE THREE: HUCK'S “DREAM”

Much has been made previously of the “Raftsmen's Passage,”
¹⁶
a fifteen-page episode which appears in the 1876
Finn
manuscript (between the second and third paragraphs of chapter XVI), but which was deleted prior to final publication after being used to pad out
Life on the Mississippi
, a book written to cover Twain's losses from an ill-considered attempt to mount “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” as an “All-Singin', All Jumpin'” traveling minstrel show. But while it can be argued that this Raftsmen's Passage, in which Huck observes some raftsmen, is an insignificant event in Huck's development, as well as tedious in the extreme, the same certainly cannot be said of the recently discovered “Dream Sequence,” deleted from the previous chapter (chapter XV) for quite different reasons.

Chapter XV begins:

We judged that three more nights would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.

Well, the second night…

Clearly something is missing here: namely, the first night. It must be remembered that Twain was being paid a then-astounding seventeen cents a word by
Sire
, and it was certainly not in his character to pass up an unnecessary narrative opportunity.
¹⁷
And in point of fact, he did not:

There weren't much to do in that first night but smoke and talk, which is what we was doing when Jim said why didn't we make a party of it and suck on pap's jug some? I said I didn't think that was a good idea, on account of we wasn't sick or pained, but Jim says:

“Wud's de harm in it, Huck? A man doan' need no caws t'be feelin' good. Ain't you a man like yo' pap, Huck?”

I didn't want to argue him none on
that
point, so I tipped the jug and swallered once. That was plenty. The stuff burnt so bad I thought maybe I had set it afire with my pipe by accident and that there was smoke apouring out of my ears and eyes. Jim decided this was the funniest sight he'd ever seen, and laughed so hard he fell over sideways; I would've cussed him out if I could've talked at all, but instead took another swig of my medicine, like a man
.

Well, by and by it didn't so much burn as make me feel all warm inside, and I got the sudden urge to lay back on the raft and look up at the sky. It was such a clear night and there was a sight more stars than usual, and friskier, too. This got me to thinking. I says:

“Jim, Jim—hey, Jim—do you think they's niggers up in heaven?”

Jim puzzled over this for a moment, and then he said:

“I reck'n dey is, Huck, I do reck'n so. De man, wun't he be wantin' his nigger up dah wid him in hivven? or it wun't right' be hivven now, wud it?”

I said I reckoned he was correct about that, that was smart thinking. But then I thought: Jim being a runaway nigger, how was he ever going to get into heaven? Just the thought of being dead and not having Jim to talk to me made me so lonesome I wanted to cry, but I must of fell asleep instead
.

I had this powerful horrible dream then. I dreamed I had gone down to the bad place, and there was all over demons and witches and burnt runaway niggers, and I was crying on account I didn't know what I had done to be there. Then I was in this tiny room, more like the inside of a stove than a room, and this demon come walking toward me. It was pap,
red as the devil himself
!

Pap was grabbing at this big spikey tail he had, and was swinging it over his head when, by witch magic, it turned into a terrible spitting snake. He was grinning just like he did that one night and kept coming at me, asking wouldn't I like to touch his snake? I said, no thank you just the same.
¹⁸
He said, my, didn't I have the dandy manners, maybe he should learn me some other manners about respecting my elders and doing what they say, and he kept coming on, and just when his snake was about to bite me, I woke up in a thick sweat
.

I felt sick. My heart was beating like a jackrabbit; my face was redhot and my body all ashiver, and I didn't know what to do. I tried to sit up quick but something held me flat. I looked down, and there was ol' Jim, bending over them parts of me that Judge Thatcher said was so private and sacred even I had no business with them, and all of a sudden it made final and horrible sense to me: Jim was a night vampyre coming to suck out my immortal soul!

I tried to escape his niggery fangs, but it was too late. I felt a jerking all down my back and an awful itch in my belly and my soul started shooting out of me like a steamboat whistle; the devil Jim was laughing like a banshee and sucking it all up! I felt my body go all tingly and then I reckon I must of passed out from the fright
.

I didn't wake up the next morning until near about

eight o'clock, and Jim was there sitting next to me, swabbing my brow with a soaked rag. He says:

“Easy dah, easy, chile. It's jis' dem bad whisky dreams is all. You be 'right en fine; I reck'n you gwyne get t' likin' it, too, you en'thin' like yo' pap. Y'suh; you is a man now, Huck.”

Is this the smoking “naked sword” of which Fiedler wrote, or was the whole episode, as Jim claims, just an adolescent wet dream? Any suggestion of the latter is dispelled the very next night, when Huck and Jim are separated for many hours in a dense fog. In the published work, Huck describes feeling “dismal and lonesome,” and when finally reunited with Jim, Jim exclaims:

Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck?… It's too good for true, honey, it's too good for true. Lemme look at you, chile, lemme feel o' you…

Huck, however, cannot resist playing a boyish prank on Jim, pretending the entire separation has been a dream.
¹⁹
This precipitates what is probably the most famous lovers' tiff in literary history:

“… En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot
²⁰
I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie…”

Then he got up slow, and walked to the wigwam, and went in there, without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot
²¹
to get him to take it
²²
back.

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.

Clearly, then, the lost Dream Sequence is an integral, some might say crucial, event in Huck's coming-of-age. But if so, why was it omitted? Sadly, the fault may lie with this very magazine. A search behind our files has turned up the following undated letter written to Twain by editor Schuyler Livingston Newburyport Schenk, probably between late summer or early fall 1876.

Dear Sam
,

Thank you for sending along the most recent installment of “A Boy and His Boy,” but I am afraid we are going to have to pass on this one. I know we asked you to “spice it up a bit,” but some of us here felt that perhaps you stepped over the line separating spice from perversion. I am sorry to disappoint you
.

I do, however, have one suggestion, and please feel free to disregard it if it is not in keeping with what you intended for this piece. We thought that perhaps this sequence would work better, and be more palatable to our readers, if Nigger Jim were instead a Negress Jemima. It is our feeling that if you made the switch now, very few readers would notice, and you could revise the earlier installments accordingly should you ever wish to put this together as a book
.

Please let me know what you think
.

All the best
.

Twain immediately broke off correspondence with
Sire
and put the manuscript aside for nearly two years. Unable to write, he traveled to Europe, where he struck up a friendship with a Viennese medical intern named Sigmund Freud. A series of long conversations with the young physician apparently freed Twain of his writer's block, and he returned to America, eager to “finish that damnable book, and make it Huck's, not my own.”
²³

Of course, by that time he was well behind in his deadlines for
Sire
,
²⁴
and was compelled to write the last twenty-eight chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
over a concentrated two-week period,
²⁵
giving the latter half of the book that “dashed-off” quality about which many critics have rightly complained.