The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In the center of the island, Huck and Jim find a large cave on a hill. They manage to get their supplies into the cave before it rains that day, owing to Jim’s instinct about weather.

As the rising river recedes, Jim and Huck find it easy hunting on the island. They catch several bits of good raft material floating down the river and become bolder in exploring the surroundings. On the Illinois side of the river, they come upon a collapsed frame house and discover a naked dead man’s body inside. Upon closer inspection, Jim concludes that the man has been murdered but refuses to show Huck the body. They take many provisions from the house, including a variety of men’s and women’s clothes and a disembodied peg leg. Returning to the island, Huck asks Jim to lay down in the canoe, as the color of his skin is bound to elicit questions.

Jim stops Huck from talking more about the dead man they found, claiming it would bring bad luck. Together, they find $8 sewed into the clothing they gathered. Huck questions that their luck is bad, having found the money. He recalls a week before when he put a dead rattlesnake on Jim’s blanket while he was sleeping; its mate came and bit Jim on the foot, an injury from which it took him several days to recover. Jim warned him then that touching a rattlesnake skin was bad luck and asserts now that such bad luck comes in waves that cannot be offset by the finding of a little money.

The two get bored and decide to go into town. Huck dresses in girl clothes and disguises his face with a large bonnet. At night, Huck heads to Illinois and circles around a small shanty. The middle-aged woman inside the shanty is new to Huck, and isn’t likely to recognize him, so he knocks on her door, determined to learn news of the outside world.

Huck, dressed as a girl, announces himself as Sarah Williams. The woman in the shack invites him inside to eat. She is new to the area, in town to care for a sick relative. Her name is Judith Loftus.

The Huck Finn murder is well-known gossip, however, and she tells Huck that at first the rumors pointed to Jim having murdered Huck, and a $300 reward was placed on Jim’s head. pap commissioned Judge Thatcher for an advance of Huck’s money with which to go hunt Jim, then disappeared with the money. Now most people believe pap murdered Huck to claim the inheritance. Nevertheless, Jim is still a wanted man, and Judith suspects they’ll find him any day. In fact, she thinks Jackson Island is a likely place for a hideout, and she’s recently seen smoke coming from the island. She informs Huck that her husband is out just now, gathering men to go over there after midnight.

Huck longs to warn Jim, but Judith, seeing partially through Huck’s disguise, begins asking pointed questions. Soon, she declares her assumption that Huck is an abused runaway apprentice, a falsehood to which Huck is all too ready to agree. Before he leaves, she gives him a few pointers about disguising himself as a girl; “when you set out to thread a needle, don’t hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it” (68).

Huck returns to Jackson Island at 11:00 p.m. He starts a decoy fire, and he and Jim quickly set up a raft with their provisions before slipping away into the river’s shady recesses.

Sixteen miles down from the island, Jim and Huck ground their raft and watch the river traffic pass. They sleep during the day under cover of cottonwoods. At night, they fix the large raft with a wooden tent, a dirt-bottomed firepit, and a lantern to signal passing steamboats.

They travel south for several nights in quiet, dark country before passing St. Louis, “and it was like the whole world lit up” (71). Huck stops nightly for small provisions in local towns, purchasing some and occasionally stealing others. Jim and Huck debate the ethics of theft and decide to make a short list of things they won’t steal to ease their consciences, finally settling on indelectable crabapples and unripe persimmons.

Five nights below St. Louis, the two come across a wrecked riverboat. Huck is enthusiastic about exploring it, insisting that they may find treasure, but Jim is apprehensive. They carefully explore the wreck and hide when they hear low voices coming from the abandoned crew’s chambers. Someone named Jim Turner has been hogtied and is being interrogated by his associates, Bill and Jake Packard, at threat of a pistol.

Jim returns to the raft while Huck listens in. Bill and Jake debate whether to kill the treacherous Jim Turner. In private conference, they say they’ll leave him behind to be drowned when the tide washes the precarious steamboat wreck away, which they surmise will take a couple hours. Huck quickly returns to Jim and tells him about his plan to scuttle the murderers’ boat so they can’t commit to their plan, but Jim unhappily informs Huck that their own raft has broken loose and floated away.

Stuck on the wreck with the criminals, Huck and Jim now seek escape via the criminals’ skiff. After a close call, Jim and Huck abscond with the skiff, leaving the crew of three behind, potentially to drown. The skiff is full of stolen goods.

Miles downriver, they find their own raft. With their consciousnesses bothering them, Jim and Huck plan to go to the nearest town and have authorities rescue the stranded crew, but not before transferring the stolen goods to their own raft. Jim hides himself and the raft while Huck travels two miles to a riverboat. There, he tells the night watchman an elaborate story about a lost family stranded on the wreck. The night watchman is unmoved until Huck tells him that the family is prominent and wealthy, at which point he unmoors and tells Huck to inform the nearby village.

Soon after, however, Huck sees the wreck carried off by the current, with the riverboat chasing after it. By the morning, Huck catches up with Jim, sinks the skiff, and gets a little sleep.

Among the loot, Jim and Huck find good clothes and three boxes of fine cigars. Jim points out the danger he faced when the raft was lost—either drowning or being saved and enslaved by the authorities, a point Huck grants him. They talk about the nature of European royalty, and Jim questions the wisdom of the biblical King Solomon. He concludes that Solomon, having so many wives and children, would naturally devalue the life of a single child, especially the child he ordered to be chopped in half, per biblical attribution, to settle its paternity.

Their conversation turns to the revolution in France, the dauphin orphaned by the death of Louis the Sixteenth, and the nature of the French language, the existence of which Jim treats with extreme skepticism.

They plan to get to the city of Cairo, where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet. Once there, they intend to sell the raft and purchase steamboat passage into the Northeast free states.

A few days later, a thick fog envelops the river. Unable to find a strong towhead to wait out the fog, Huck’s canoe gets separated from the raft. They attempt a call and response to one another, but can’t get their bearings. They drift for hours down the river, eventually exhausting themselves. By the time they reconvene, they have drifted for miles.

Huck finds Jim asleep on the raft, his oar snapped in half. Huck decides to play a trick on Jim by convincing him there was never any fog, and that Huck was never gone at all. This nearly convinces the still-sleepy Jim, who interprets the fog incident as a dream of portent. However, upon discovering the broken oar and the river debris on the boat, Jim becomes cross with Huck, saying, “Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed” (92). Huck decides he won’t play any more tricks on Jim.

As Huck and Jim pass a large and well-appointed raft, they attempt to orient themselves toward Cairo. They stop at the first light they see, pretend to be inexperienced scowmen, and ask questions to find their direction.

Jim points out that for him, the difference between finding and not finding Cairo is the difference between slavery and freedom. He plans to find work in an abolitionist state and to save enough money to buy his wife and children out of slavery. Failing that, Jim plans to hire an abolitionist to steal them out of slavery. This triggers a bout of ethical consciousness in Huck, who retraces his confused moral teaching and concludes he is performing unethically by helping Jim “steal” himself away from Miss Watson. Huck softens when Jim tells him, “I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ been for Huck […] you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got now” (95).

Huck takes the canoe to investigate a light and runs into a pair of armed slavecatchers, who ask about the raft and who’s on it. After wrestling with his conscience, Huck cleverly convinces the slavecatchers that his smallpox-infected father is on the raft, at which point the slavecatchers hastily distance themselves, giving Huck a $20 gold piece each in their escape. Huck continues to rationalize his supposed bad behavior in helping Jim escape and decides that, in either case, he’d feel just as bad if he didn’t.

Significantly richer now, Huck and Jim figure they have enough to get transport and a new start in the free states. They pass a couple of towns but still find themselves disoriented. They hide the raft and take the canoe to shore to rest. They realize they must have passed Cairo in the fog. After a day of rest, they wake to realize their canoe is gone, which they take as further evidence of their continued bad luck on account of the snakeskin.

Worse still, they run into another fog, causing their raft to collide with a large riverboat. Jim and Huck barely escape with their lives, but the raft is destroyed. Huck loses sight of Jim and soon crawls to shore in front of a wooden cabin. He is immediately beset by a pack of dogs and freezes in fear for his life.