In the village of Hannibal, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi River, all the boys aspired to be steamboat pilots. “Pilot was the grandest position of all,” wrote one of them decades later. “The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary.” When the boy’s parents would not let him pursue a career on the river, he ran away from home. After a few false starts, he convinced a pilot to take him on as an apprentice.
The name of this boy was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. On completing his training, Clemens became a pilot. “I was going to follow the river the rest of my days and die at the wheels when my mission ended,” he later wrote. “But by and by, the war came, commerce was suspended, and my occupation was gone.”
Clemens served as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi from 1857 to 1861 when river trade was suspended at the start of the American Civil War. After trying to be a silver miner and a journalist, Clemens eventually found success as a writer and became famous as Mark Twain.
In "Life on Mississippi" (1883), Twain wrote in painstaking detail about his short, eventful career as a steamboat pilot and also another journey he took on the river in 1882. The second part of the book is filled with nostalgic memories of the “old Mississippi Days of steamboating glory & grandeur as I saw them,” but also about competition to steamboats from the railways and new towns on the Mississippi’s banks, full of bad architecture. The river, however, was intrinsic to Twain’s self-making. In the introduction to a 1984 edition of "Life on Mississippi," James M. Cox, a scholar of English literature, describes the Mississippi as “the river flowing through the heart of Mark Twain’s boyhood… the river he succeeded in identifying himself with.” The river also plays a critical part in the novel, which is often considered Twain’s masterpiece, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884).
Though a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876), the picaresque novel has long overshadowed its predecessor. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemmingway once said: “All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
The novel has been canonised and is frequently taught in schools and universities. But its legacy is increasingly contested. The racial attitudes of the pre-Civil War southern United States (US), the less-than-favourable treatment of African American characters, and the frequent use of the slur “nigger”—literary scholar David E.E. Sloan claims at least 200 times—have been critiqued in recent years. Some anti-race activists have even called for the novel to be banned from school curricula in the US.
Yet, like all good literature, the novel inspires a wide spectrum of responses. Many focus on the Mississippi, which is prominently featured in it.
The book narrates the adventures of Huck Finn, a teenage boy in St Petersburg, a fictional village on the bank of the Mississippi. The village is based on Hannibal, where Twain grew up. When the novel opens, Huck is living with a widow who has adopted him. His life is sedentary but comfortable.
Then, suddenly, his alcoholic and abusive father, Pap, turns up to reclaim his custody. As Huck reveals, Pap is not overcome with paternal affection—he is more interested in Huck’s share of the treasure he and Tom discover at the end of "Tom Sawyer." When Pap is not allowed to take custody of Huck or his money, he kidnaps his son and locks him up in a secluded log cabin in the woods outside St Petersburg. Faking his own death, Huck escapes from the cabin and takes shelter on an island in the Mississippi River.
The island has another fugitive—Jim, an African-American slave that Huck knows. The narrative of the novel takes place in the 1840s-50s when slavery was still legal in many parts of the US, especially the southern states. Jim tells Huck that he ran away on hearing that his owner intends to sell him. Now, he is suspected of having murdered Huck. During a flood, the duo come upon a log raft and a house floating down the river. Jim discovers a dead man in the house but prevents Huck from seeing the man’s face. They start sailing down the river on the raft. Their destination is the town of Cairo in Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers. Jim hopes to escape upon reaching Cairo, which is close to the free state of Ohio. However, the duo never reach the city; their raft sails past it at night.
They continue to sail down the river, having several adventures, including outlandish ones with two confidence tricksters identifying as the King and the Duke. Eventually, the King and the Duke sell Jim, who is imprisoned as a runaway slave.
Huck—and his friend Tom Sawyer—make elaborate plans to rescue Jim. The plans fail after Tom sustains a bullet injury while fleeing with Jim and Huck. However, their troubles are resolved when they learn that Jim’s owner has made a provision in her will to liberate him. Huck, too, is freed from the threat of his alcoholic father when Jim reveals that the body they discovered earlier was of his parent.
The Mississippi is, as we see it, central to the narrative of Huck Finn. It allows Huck and Jim to escape from an abusive home and an oppressive society, respectively. “The river is literal, yet it is metaphorical at the same time,” writes literary scholar John Bird in his book "Mark Twain and Metaphor" (2007).Though Twain was intimately familiar with the Mississippi River from his days as a steamboat pilot, he chose novelistic truth over geographical accuracy while writing "Huckleberry Finn." The annotation for a scholarly edition of the novel, published in 2001, notes: “In the early chapters, the raft’s journey confirms well to a mathematical model… The model breaks down, however, soon after Cairo is passed… By the time the raft reaches Pikesville and the Phelps farm, which Mark Twain in several statements, firmly located in Arkansas, the disjunction between daily mileage and the passage of time is so great that some scholars argue for a location much further south, deep in Louisiana.”
Twain chose novelistic truth over geographical accuracy while writing Huckleberry Finn
The imaginative geography of Mississippi, however, allows Twain to work in Biblical metaphors. Literary scholar Billy G. Collins, in his article "Huckleberry Finn: A Mississippi Moses" (1975), compares Huck to Moses, the Biblical prophet who delivered the enslaved Israelites from Egypt. Collins claims that Twain used the first 11 chapters of the Book of Exodus to critique the practice of slavery, which was often sanctioned by religion in the Antebellum South.
However, scholars have critiqued giving too much agency to Huck—and too little to Jim—in recent years.
In recent years, both critical and creative responses to "Huckleberry Finn" have tried to rescue Jim from this stereotype. The most notable is Percival Everett’s novel "James" (2024), which won the National Book Award for Fiction last year. It is told from the perspective of the runaway slave: “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being.”
The most startling aspect of Everett’s novel is the language that enslaved African Americans use. While in "Huckleberry Finn," Jim and the other Black people speak in a dialect, in James, their speech—and the novel’s narration—are in formal English.
The code-switching between the language that the enslaved people speak among themselves and the uneducated dialect that they perform in front of their white owners is a strategy. It allows them to conceal their sophistication, which can be threatening, and also reclaim the narrative for themselves.
The boyish adventures of Huck Finn, floating down the Mississippi, are a matter of life and death for a runaway slave. The river is no longer an idealised metaphor of liberty—it is the site of racial struggle.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist
