It was sunny and
warm when we pulled into the parking lot of the Country Grocer in Hannibal,
Missouri. Making our way home from Canada, we had detoured from the northern
route to avoid extreme weather in the Great Plains. Groggy from hours in the
car, it wasn’t until we had filled containers with fresh salad, berries and
cottage cheese, that we realized where we were. Christi bubbled up with
excitement that this was the very place that Mark Twain had grown up. Elated
with her realization and utterly disappointed with Becca for saying that she
had never read the book, Christi insisted that we all spend the remainder of
the trip listening to the new audio book in which Elijah Wood reads Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Quotes
by Mark Twain had colored our entire journey and we had begun to rediscover his
brilliance through our adult eyes. Contrasted with the childhood memory of his
adventure tails, we now connected with his social commentary, his sometimes
cynical way of calling attention to injustice, to the way in which ‘progress’
leaves so many disenfranchised. Thus, as we drove for the next twelve hours, we
fell in love again with the tail of Huckleberry and Jim as they float along the
Mississippi, Jim searching for his freedom from slavery. For Huckleberry, the discovery
of characters along the river is transformational but his introspective
discovery of his own potential for compassion was, for me, the most powerful. As
an educator I often seek stories that exemplify difficult concepts in a
meaningful way and I realized that Huckleberry’s internal dialogue perfectly
communicated the way in which we internalize society’s norms and with time,
society needn’t even shame and punish us, we do it all by ourselves! Perhaps,
the following passage was most powerful. It describes the point at which
Huckleberry and Jim think they are near the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi
where Jim may be able to get passage on a steamboat and make his way to the
free states. I could not listen to this passage without replacing ‘conscience’
with ‘society’s internalized norms’: [*please note that I transcribed this from
the audio book so please excuse any differences between this and the written
text.]
Jim
said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well,
I could tell you, it made me all over trembly and feverish too, to hear it, I
began to get it through my head that he was most free and who was to blame for
it? Why me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got
to troubling me so I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t stay still in one place. It
hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing, but
now it did and it stayed with me and scorched me more and more. I tried to make
out to myself that I weren’t to blame because I didn’t run Jim off from his
rightful owner, but it weren’t no use, conscience
up and says everytime, but you know he
was running for his freedom, you coulda paddled ashore and told somebody.
That was so. I couldn’t get around that, no way. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, what had poor Ms. Watson done to you that
you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single
word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean?
Why, she tried to learn you your book. She tried to learn you your manners. She
tried to be good to you everyway she knowed how. That’s what she done. I
got to feeling so mean and so miserable. I almost wished I was dead. I
fidgeted up and down the raft abusing myself to myself.
Perhaps the message
in this passage needs no commentary to gain evidence. And thus, perhaps I write
simply for my own freedom. Huckleberry, despite being less than poor,
imprisoned by an abusive father and outside the Norm in so many ways, has
internalized the values of the Norm. He had been taught that everything that is
‘right’ and ‘good’ included ownership of another person. By even considering
allowing himself to help a slave gain freedom, he was behaving counter to what
was right. So much so that he punishes himself to the point of wishing to be
dead.
This so acutely reminds us that
being in a place of privilege (Huckleberry is white and he is not a slave) and
acting for the freedom of someone outside of that place often feels so terrible
that one would rather be dead. In Huckleberry’s recounting that Ms. Watson,
“tried to be good to you in everyway she knowed how,” we are forced to consider
that a ‘good’ woman is also an oppressor [*Please check out the writings of
Peggy Macintosh for more sexy-minded consideration of this subject.]
Queer theory asks
us to notice that things that we now treat as simple facts (that slavery is
wrong), were / are not simple facts. Many, like Huckleberry, had to act outside
of society’s standards, they had to feel sometimes unbearable self shaming in
order to eventually allow this to be something that the Norm now considers a
simple fact. The more ways in which one aligns with the Norm, the more
punishment one may have to endure in order to truly act with compassion. That
is, living with compassion may mean living counter to everything that you have
been taught is ‘right’ and ‘good’. As it did for Huckleberry, it may get you
feeling allover ‘mean’ and ‘miserable’. Perhaps this is why, when we act in
such a way that we feel is benevolent, when our actions evoke in us a feeling
of self-congratulations, we may need to ask whether we are truly acting with
compassion. Instead, acting with true compassion is acting such that we somehow
free the person whom is the most controlled or owned by others, the person
whose very existence is evidence to the Norm that they have power, that they
have advantage, that they have it better than someone else. If one can say, “I
am just so sad for that person’s suffering,” than none of us are truly free.
Rachel Watson
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