COVID-Era Diary, Week Thirteen

It really does occasionally happen that the inner world and the outer one meet unexpectedly in the context of a book, or even a movie or a television show, that you undertook on a whim to read or to watch but which then turns out almost amazingly able to serve as a bridge between your inner self and events going on in the outside world. I suppose everybody has had experiences like that, at least now and then! (And I speak as someone who actually was in the middle of Barbara Tuchman’s 1985 The Zimmerman Telegram—a book about how our nation entered the First World War based on the fantasy-notion that Germany and Mexico were planning a joint invasion of the United States mainland—as our nation embarked in the post-9/11 months on a war in Iraq based on the fantasy-notion regarding Saddam Hussein’s vast stores of weapons of mass destruction.) And now that weird coincidence of book and front-page has revisited me as I’ve been reading daily about the massive demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the same time I’ve been immersed in Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest American novels, Huckleberry Finn is about a lot of different things. At the heart of the story, however, is the relationship between Huck, a free white lad in antebellum Missouri, and Jim, an enslaved adult. (Jim’s age is not made explicit in the book, but he is a married man with children—so clearly far older than fourteen-year-old Huck.) They are, to say the least, an unlikely pair. They don’t always get along. They are clearly living in parallel universes, the kind that allow them to open their eyes in the same direction at the same time and still see entirely different things. And yet they are depicted as each other’s true intimate, as two people bound to each other by ties of friendship so deep that they themselves are unable to stand back far enough fully to understand the role they play in each other’s lives.

That their relationship is at the core of the book is obvious, the precisely way to characterize it, however, dramatically less so. Some authors have seen their bond as essentially erotic, which is to say homoerotic. (The great proponent of this point of view was Leslie Fiedler, notably in his 1948 essay, “Come Back to the Raft, A’gin, Huck Honey!”). Others have convincingly written about Jim and Huck as father and son. (Click here for an especially convincing exposition of this line of interpretation by Heather M. Shrum.) And still others, legion in their own right, have taken Huck and Jim to represent white and black America in all the complicatedness of their intertwined and un-unravelable past and present.

As ever, I wear my own eyeglasses when I read. And it was in that mode that I found myself thinking of Huckleberry Finn as a kind of moral coming-of-age tale that has at its core a question I have written about many times in this space: the question of just how reasonable it is to expect people to transcend the moral givens of their day and to see clearly things that everybody else in the world sees entirely differently. Fiedler took note of the theme of nudity in the book—Jim and Huck are regularly depicted as taking their clothes off to sun themselves in the nude or to swim naked in the Mississippi—Fiedler saw in that a hint of their essential gayness. And I agree that their nakedness is a key point—but to me it suggests an entirely different way into the book, one that takes Huck and Jim as the American version of Adam and Eve.

The first couple too are depicted as romping around the garden unclothed until they finally eat of the fruit of the Tree of Moral Discernment and, suddenly aware of their nakedness, become ashamed and try to cover themselves up with kilts fashioned of fig leaves. That is a key moment in the saga too—because it reminds us that Adam and Eve were not created as babies, but as grown-ups possessed of the psyches and concomitant moral bearing of children. But then they do grow up. And, tragic though the story may be from one vantage point, theirs is also a story of positive and desirable growth. They get dressed. They figure out sex. Yes, being kicked out of paradise is depicted as punishment for the sin of eating the forbidden fruit. But it leads, not to agony, but to adulthood, to growth, to responsibility. If they want to eat, they’re going to have to grow their own food. If they want to have shelter, they’re going to have to figure out how to build at least some rudimentary kind of roofed structure.  And if they want the human race to endure, they’re going to have to figure out how to raise a family on their own. And that actually is what happens: the line in the Torah right after the one about their exile from Eden notes that, in the wake of their suddenly being thrust into adulthood, “Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived and eventually gave birth to their first son, to Cain.” And with that the games were on!

Huck too grows in the course of the story, and particularly in terms of his ability to see Jim not as a slave and not as a black Untermensch, but as a human being, as a friend, as (and this is key) as an equal. What’s interesting is that Huck is not depicted as disliking Jim even in the beginning of the book. Just the opposite is the case, in fact. But he is depicted as a child of his era and his place: in one place, he actually expresses surprise that black people can love their spouses and their children with the same level of commitment and passion that white people bring to those relationships. And when Huck learns that Jim is actually running away and trying to reach Illinois, the nearest non-slave state in which he could live as a free person, Huck is—at first—horrified that Jim is planning to commit what in pre-Civil-War Missouri was a serious crime.

But Huck grows in the course of the book. The turning point is the one mentioned above when he realizes the depth of emotion of which Jim is capable. And he slowly comes to see in his friend not just “Miss Watson’s big Negro” (and “Negro” is not the word he uses), but another human being. At one point, he perceives it to be his moral obligation to inform Miss Watson, who owns Jim (or rather owned him and whose will has already freed him, although Huck doesn’t know this yet)—to inform her that he knows where Jim is and can return him to his mistress. And then there is this moment of moral clarity in which he understands that the definition of morality has to do not with conforming to popularly-held attitudes but by resisting them. And so, holding his letter to Miss Watson in his hand, he steps over the line to adulthood: “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.” And with that, Huckleberry Finn becomes an adult.

I first read Huckleberry Finn when I was a teenager. It wasn’t taught in high school back then because the racial politics of the day made it unimaginable that a book the used the n-word more or less on every page be presented to schoolchildren in a positive light. (It probably still isn’t in most place.) Of course, that ban only made me more interested in reading the book, which I did. I don’t think I understood it fully back then, although I remember liking it very much. But I understand it now, and reading it in light of the events of these last weeks has been remarkable.

Like most of my readers, I’m sure, I was raised to have the greatest respect for the police in general and particularly for the individual policemen with whom I occasionally came into contact. And it is also true that I haven’t ever met a police officer who wasn’t courteous and friendly towards me. Like most of us, I have always been more than prepared to wave away any report of untoward activity on some specific officer’s part as the function of the obligation with which police officers are regularly faced to make split-second decisions that cannot wait for a period of prolonged moral rumination to conclude before action has to be taken. And, of course, I was raised watching dozens of television shows that featured police officers as heroes willing to put themselves in harm’s way regularly for the sake of making the public safe and secure.

I still think that the vast majority of police officers behave morally and bravely in the course of their careers. But I too have grown in these last weeks as I have found myself face to face not with one or two, but with too many examples of untoward police behavior towards black citizens for even someone as favorably pre-disposed to the police as myself simply to wave away as the random bad acts of a few bad apples. Clearly, we have a problem. And that problem needs to find a solution.

In the last few weeks, any number of possible reforms have been put forward. I don’t feel able, at least not yet, to determine which are realistic and which, unworkable or unfeasible. The idea of defunding or dismantling police departments, for example, would require that a clear alternative program to make secure and safe the citizenry be ready to be set in place instantly. But even less dramatic solutions are going to require an enormous amount of pre-planning, not to mention the willing buy-in of the actual men and women who serve in our nation’s police departments. What is clear to me now, however, is that there is a serious problem here that needs to be addressed and resolved. That that will happen eventually now seems clear to me as well. The nation’s sociologists, criminologists, police chiefs, and politicians will all have opinions about how best to address the issue once the daily demonstrations die down and, as our nation re-opens, people go back to work. But I just don’t see us returning to business as usual even after the George Floyd incident itself fades into history. I sense our nation at a real turning point…and one that will lead us to the creation of a finer and more just society. Huck grew up! And can and shall we all.