Jan 13, 2022
Here is today’s quiz: What 19th century novel points the way to a lasting solution to the racial tensions afflicting America today?
If you said Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you’re wrong. As President Lincoln remarked, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s picture of slavery helped bring on the Civil War, but that’s about all. The correct answer is Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Sometimes called the first Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn is cast as a dialect narrative by a free-spirited boy escaping a vicious father and a repressive society in company with an escaped Black slave named Jim. The book recounts their picturesque and sometimes frightening adventures as they raft down the Mississippi in pursuit of what each hopes will be freedom.
More than just a colorful tale, the book paints a picture of slavery before the Civil War as filtered through the troubled conscience of an unlettered but perceptive youth who finds himself obliged to weigh lived experience against the self-righteous code of a society that approves ownership of some human beings by others.