Huck Finn Messes with Mr. In-between

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

                                         Huck Finn

 

During the hot, confusing, and frustrating summer of 2020, individuals, families, schools and colleges, business organizations, and governments found themselves facing a range of unusual situations that required difficult and complicated decisions.

Many of these problems grew out of the public health crisis of  Covid-19. Here is an example as reported by Bloomberg News on August 21, 2020:  “College towns face a dilemma: They worry about the risk of bringing students back – and the economic devastation that awaits if they don’t.” In the  August 21 issue of  The Atlantic,  Jacob Stern wrote, “Californians face an impossible choice: Those who flee the wildfires’ risk infection from Covid-19.  Those who stay risk incineration.”

Here are other examples of public officials and citizens struggling with difficult decisions as they tried to navigate their way through the confusing choices brought on by Covid-19:

– Governors have been faced with the difficult choices often referred to as “pork chops or people:”  moving from lockdowns to opening businesses, or, attempting to “flatten the curve” by keeping them closed.

– School administers have struggled to make plans for opening the schools which make sense academically, and at the same time, protect the health of their students.

– Nursing home administers have been uncertain when or how to allow family members to enter their facilitlies to visit their families.

– And a newspaper headline on August 26: “Teens struggle to balance school, work amid outbreak.”

In-Between Problems

What these problems had in common is that they were “In-between” problems: People found themselves in situations where they were faced with essentially two choices, both of which could be equally desirable or undesirable, and realized that in order to move forward, they would have to choose one.

“In-between” problems are not new.  They have long been identified as among our most pressing and complicated challenges, often with ethical or moral dimensions.  They have been part of our lives long enough for us to have given them names.  We find ourselves, “Between a rock and hard place,” or, “Between the devil and the deep blue sea.”  Part of the difficulty of these decisions is that no matter how we decide, we often end up “damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” We would prefer avoiding these “In-between,” decisions, but soon discover that most of the time we have no choice:  we must decide.

In 2020, many of these “In-between decisions” were difficult because, rather than private decisions made in secret, leaving individuals with options about how much to share with others, they were public in nature, with most of the  discussions and arguments open for all to see.  And since the issues that were discussed, debated and eventually decided, included more than individual preferences and concerns but were issues that directly affected communities, organizations, institutions and societies, disagreements, conflicts, and controversies were quick to surface and often threatened to take over the process.  This made difficult decisions even more difficult, a complication that quickly  expanded to include all attempts to implement them.

Here are several more examples of In-between problems that people struggled with during the summer of 2020:

– A 16-year old disobeys his father and sneaks out and joins a Black Lives Matter protest.  There is no clear recipe for deciding between protesting injustice and obeying one’s father.

– Police departments all over the country are struggling to find a balance between teaching their officers to be compassionate problem solvers, and also respecting  police culture and traditions which stress the importance of being aggressive warriors.

– A headline in a Politico story on August 26, 2020 reads: “Trump’s trusted sidekick prepares to walk a MAGA tightrope,” an account of how Vice President Pence has attempted to manage the space  between the positions of President Trump, and the broader interests of the Republican Party.

Right vs. Right Choices

  In  How Good People Make Tough Choices, Rushford Kidder, calls these In-Between dilemmas   “Right vs. Right Problems,” situations in which positions on both sides of an argument can be seen as objectively “right.” He offers four examples where people can often be caught between two alternatives: Truth vs. loyalty; Individual vs. community; Short-term vs. long term; and Justice vs. Mercy.  There are times, writes Kidder, when individuals can argue the case for showing loyalty rather than telling the truth (and vice versa), where individuals should favor their own interests rather than those of the community (and vice versa), when short-term interests are superior to long-term ones (and vice versa), and where justice should prevail over mercy (and vice versa).  While these “Right vs. Right” situations are different in substance, they are similar in form: In each case, individuals attempting to make difficult  decisions find themselves “in between” two alternatives, each of which, under certain circumstances, can be the right one.

“Accentuate the Positive”

Frequently, when faced with complex and complicated moral and ethical decisions, we turn to religious advisors for advice. An example appeared over 80 years ago in Here Come the Waves, a movie starring Bing Crosby as Father Devine, a religious advisor played in blackface by Crosby. While guiding his flock toward righteous living, he issued this advice: “You’ve got to accentuate the positive,” he counseled, “Eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative.”  Good advice, of course, yet confusing, since in Right vs. Right situations, it is impossible to determine which of the alternatives should be accentuated and which one should be eliminated.  And not only should we accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, continued Father Devine, we should never, never “Mess with Mr. In-between,” which in the absence of additional information, we understand to mean not messing around in the space between the affirmative and the negative.

As it turns out, however, when it comes to Right vs. Right choices, “messing” with Mr. In-between is exactly what is called for. If people are to make the best possible choice between two alternatives, each making a claim to be “right,” they must become acquainted with the issues and positions on both sides. They must get down into the middle of the problem, examine the evidence and listen to the arguments on both sides, review carefully the differences between them, apply the rules of common sense, and finally, make an attempt to imagine the consequences of choosing one over the other. In other words, they must  “mess around with Mr. In-between” before choosing one side over the other.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain was not quite 50 when, in February, 1885, he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and, according to critic David Ulin, “changed American literature.”  The poet, T. S. Eliot, said that it was the only one of Twain’s books that could be called a masterpiece.  And as for Huck Finn, the central character in the novel, in the introduction to the 1950 Chanticleer Press edition, Eliot wrote, “…we come to see Huck himself in the end as…not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Hamlet and other great discoveries that man [sic] has made about himself.”  And while most authors write books that never seem to measure up to their aspirations,  Eliot wrote that “In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote a much greater book than he could have known that he was writing.”

Ernest Hemingway was equally effusive.  In the Green Hills of Africa, published in 1935, Hemingway wrote

All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.  American writing came from that.  There was nothing before.  There has been nothing as good since.

What was it about The Adventures  Huckleberry Finn that led Eliot, Hemingway among many others, to see it as one of the great American novels?  If you read the book when you were young, you probably enjoyed it as a story about the exciting adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a boy of 13 or 14 who was trying to escape from the tyranny of an abusive father, and Jim, a slave from Huck’s town who had decided to escape from the tyranny of slavery.  They find themselves floating down the Mississippi River on a raft, and come upon one episode after another which require them to be brave, clever, and creative.

If, however, you read the book as an adult, you may discover that it is really about much more than  the adventures of a white boy and a black man floating on a raft down the Mississippi River.  It is about friendship, sacrifice, commitment, loyalty, trust, freedom, and especially about race and slavery.  And in  a deep and profound way, it is the quintessential American Story of people on the move,  searching for a better life.

 Huckleberry Finn’s In-Between Crisis

The critical moment in the book, which critics have called the “moral climax” of the novel, and which for many is the key to its greatness, occurs when, after scouting around shore for news, Huck returns to the raft and finds Jim gone.  “I set up a shout,” says Huck, “and then another one, and run this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching; but it warn’t no use – old Jim was gone.  Then I set down and cried.”

He learns from a boy he encounters on the shore that Jim had been sold to a neighbor for $40 by a “stranger,” who was actually one of two scoundrels who had traveled with Huck and Jim for several weeks on the raft.

Huck returns to the raft and “set down in the wigwam to think.  But I couldn’t come to nothing.  I thought until I wore my head sore, but I couldn’t see no way out of the trouble.”

He finally comes to the conclusion that since Jim was once again caught up in slavery, “it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was.” So he decides to write a letter to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, and tell her where Jim was so she could come and get him.

He soon gives up this idea when it it occurs to him that it would be bad for Jim and also for him when word got around that Jim had tried to escape and Huck had helped him.

As he pondered what to do, he began to feel guilty about helping Jim escape: “…my conscience went to grinding me and the more wicked and lowdown and ornery I got to feeling.”  At last, he decides that it was God who was making him feel so terrible: “It was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know that my wickedness was being watched all the time up in heaven.”  And this led him to the conclusion that he needed to pray and “see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better.  So I kneeled down,” he said, “but the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use trying to hide it from Him.”

After struggling with his feelings of guilt and fear, he comes to a decision.  He would write a letter to Miss Watson “and then see if I can pray.”  And suddenly, everything changed: “Why it was astonishing, the way I felt light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone.”

So Huck found a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote a letter to Miss Watson, telling her where Jim was and how she could arrange to have him returned. “I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life,” wrote Huck, “and I knowed I could pray now.”

But instead of rushing off to mail the letter, he laid it aside and began to think, “…thinking how good it was that all this was happening so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.”  And then, he continued, “…[I] got to thinking over our trip down the river, and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight and sometimes storms, and we a floating along talking, and singing and laughing.”

And before long Huck was in a different kind of trouble. His “solution” to the grindings of his conscience and the raspings of his feelings of guilt began to fade as he remembered that Jim had been kind and loving to him, had protected him, and defended him, had let him sleep when it was his turn to stand watch.  And he couldn’t get it out of his mind that when Huck had saved Jim by telling slave hunters that the only other person aboard the raft was his pap who had the smallpox, how Jim had been so grateful, and “said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.”

He looked around and saw the letter he had written and it came to him that he was now between two choices:  Take Miss Watson’s side by sending her the letter, or stand with Jim by not telling her where to find him.  At this moment, as Huck struggled between these two choices,  Huck’s world underwent a  powerful transformation:

“It was a close place,” Huck said.  “I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling because I’d got to decide, however, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied it a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then I said to myself:  All right, then, I’ll go to hell” – and I tore it up.”

The two things that Huck was “betwixt,” were, first, his duty to society in accordance with God’s principles as taught him by Widow Douglas, who had adopted him had tried to “civilize” him. What this required him was to send the letter to Miss Watson so justice could be done: An escaped slave should be captured and returned to his rightful owner. The other side of the “betwixt” would be to not send the letter, and since that would meant helping a slave to escape, it would also mean being consigned forever to hell. It is important here to understand that, according to the critics and scholars who have studied the religious world views of those who lived in those times, going to hell was not an imagined consequence of willful sin, but something that people- including Huck – believed would actually happen.

“A Stout Heart and a Deformed Conscience”

In later years, Twain made clear that he meant this moment to be the emotional as well as the moral center of the novel. During the lecture tours that took up most of the remaining years of his life, Twain described Huckleberry Finn as “a book of mine where a stout heart comes into collision with a deformed conscience and the conscience suffers defeat.”

The deformed conscience that Twain was describing was one he knew well, for it was part of the society he knew as a child.  Among its most salient principles were centered on race:  that black people were inferior to whites; that in some ways they were subhuman creatures; and that keeping them as slaves was part of the natural order of things.  Important to this worldview was that if slaves attempted to escape, all methods were legal in catching them and returning them to slavery.

Twain’s reference to a “stout heart,” was something new. In the context of the novel, Huck begins the trip with a conscience that had been formed by the society in which he had lived up to that time.  However, during the weeks that followed, as he and Jim spent time together on the raft, his belief’s about black people that were part of Huck’s “deformed” conscience began to be replaced by a different understanding of who Jim was.  As Huck struggled with the decision to send the letter, he paused: “..I got to thinking  over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night time, and sometimes moonlight, and sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking and singing and laughing.”  His words help us see what is happening: ” …and I see Jim before me…” – not a black man, nor a slave, or even more serious, an escaped slave.  Slowly, he begins to see Jim as a human being, a person, one who laughs and cries, a father who misses his children ever since they were sold as slaves “down the river,” a husband who loves his wife and who, when free, wants to earn enough money to buy her out of slavery, and a friend who had been kind and loyal to him.  Because of these experiences, a “stout heart” begins to emerge in Huck, gains strength, and begins to collide with his deformed conscience. And finally, when Huck must choose between “doing what’s right” according to societies’ principles, or disobeying and going to hell, he obeys his stout heart: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

And not only does he choose to go to hell.  As he makes clear with his next words, it’s going to be”wickedness” all the way down:

It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said: and never thought no more about reforming.  I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t.  And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would go and do that too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

Property Rights vs. Human Rights

In 1953, Ralph Ellison, American novelist, literary critic, and author of Invisible Man, an award-winning book about the black experience in American, wrote that “Huck has struggled with the problems poised [sic] by the clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge of his humanity, gained through their adventures as fugitives together.  He has made his decision on the side of humanity.”

“Property Rights vs Human Rights” are primarily 2oth century words and reflect 2oth century controversies.  They would have meant nothing to Huck. What he did come to understand while rafting down the Mississippi with Jim, was that no matter what they had tried to teach him in Sunday School, it no longer made sense to see Jim as property.  On the raft, Huck was gradually able to let go of  the “truths” that were part of his deformed conscience and replace them with a new truth: Jim was not property, but a human being like himself.

Getting to the Simplicity on the Other Side

“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  “but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Holmes’ words can help us think about how to live our lives. Finding the path toward living a Good Life requires that we must move away from the simplicities on this side of complexity – biases, prejudices, distortions, and untruths – and move toward the simplicities on the other side, a passage that takes us into the middle of and through the confusions, controversies and  complexities that are part of this life.  What Holmes failed to tell us was how we are to do this.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  we discover that Mark Twain has offered us a way.  From his book, we can identify three ideas that can help with this journey:  First, we know that the book is a  work of fiction, created entirely by the fertile brain of Mark Twain.  But what is also known to all readers of good fiction, is that great novels contain profound truths. Twain has given us some profound truths to consider.  Second, what is clear to us now as we read Twain’s book, was that Huckleberry was not only escaping from his “Pap,” but he was also making a journey toward becoming a fully-realized human being.  And here, Huck needed to find a way to rid himself of the racial distortions and untruths that were part of his deformed conscience and replace them with more accurate and enlightened principles.  And finally, Mark Twain arranged for this to happen by putting an ignorant, prejudiced, boy who was determined to escape from his own experience of slavery, on the same raft with an uneducated black man who was “owned” by another  human being, and who also had decided to escape to freedom, and send them off together down the Mississippi River.  Eventually, Huck found himself in a desperate struggle between two opposing views: That Jim was a slave attempting to escape vs. that Jim was a human being like all other human beings.  By tearing up the letter, and accepting that by so doing he would go to hell, Huckleberry Finn discovered and then embraced an important truth on the other side of complexity.

Messing With Mr. In-between

We are not characters in a novel. There is no author to write us into a story which include problems demanding enough that, in order to get to the simplicity on other side, require us to seriously  “mess with Mr. In-between.”

Not to worry; it’s all taken care of.  While we are not characters in someone else’s novel, we are characters in our own stories, human beings trying to find the best way through our lives that are crowded with challenges, dilemmas, conundrums, and problems of all kinds. As Samuel Florman observes in The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, many of these problems come from two sources:  other people and nature.  “Men [sic] are imperfect and nature is often unkind, so that unhappiness, uncertainly, and pain are perpetually present.”  Add to these unpredictabilities and uncertainties inherent in human behavior and nature, the demands from society that we conform to specific and often arbitrary expectations, norms, and rules, and it becomes clear that we will always be struggling with one problem after another.

While Nature, other people and society, are contributors to the troubles we grapple with in our lives,  they are not responsible for all of them. We must also look to ourselves.  “Contemporary man [sic],” writes Florman,  “is not content because he wants more than he can ever have…[There are] too many people wanting too many things.”  Living in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction can often lead to making unwise, and even stupid, choices which then, predictably, lead to unpleasant consequences.

As we make our best efforts to live Good Lives, we should not be surprised to find ourselves repeatedly on “metaphorical” rafts, doing our best to navigate through white and uncharted waters.  Eventually, we will find ourselves “between a rock and a hard place.”  Then we must do what Huck did:  Mess with Mr. In-between until it becomes clear what is the right thing to do – and then do it.