What does huckleberry finn look like

Because he is completely free to do anything he likes, boys admire him, and all the boys enjoy his company. Although Tom is the central or most dynamic character in the novel and the one who changes the most, we should not dismiss the change that occurs in Huck Finn. Huck is an outcast, and he conducts himself as an outcast. Until Mr. Jones the Welshman invites and welcomes Huck into his home, Huck has never been invited into anyone's house.

He is realistic, knowing that he does not belong. Because he exists on the periphery of society, Huck's character acts as a sort of moral commentator on society--a role he resumes in Twain's great American masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nevertheless, when the outward layers and superficial forms of society are stripped away, the reader sees another dimension of Huck's character revealed.

Near the end of the novel he proves his nobility when he risks his own life to protect the Widow Douglas, and unlike the typical boy, he does not want praise or recognition. These traits are part of the reason that Huck Finn was viewed as a book not acceptable for children, yet they are also traits that allow Huck to survive his surroundings and, in the conclusion, make the right decision.

Because Huck believes that the laws of society are just, he condemns himself as a traitor and a villain for acting against them and aiding Jim. More important, Huck believes that he will lose his chance at Providence by helping a slave. When Huck declares, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he refuses his place in society and heaven, and the magnitude of his decision is what solidifies his role as a heroic figure.

Previous Chapter the Last. Next Jim. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title.

Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks? My Preferences My Reading List. When I struck the head of the island I never waited to blow, though I was most winded, but I shoved right into the timber where my old camp used to be, and started a good fire there on a high and dry spot. Then I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our place, a mile and a half below, as hard as I could go. I landed, and slopped through the timber and up the ridge and into the cavern.

There Jim laid, sound asleep on the ground. I roused him out and says:. Jim never asked no questions, he never said a word; but the way he worked for the next half an hour showed about how he was scared. By that time everything we had in the world was on our raft, and she was ready to be shoved out from the willow cove where she was hid.

Then we got out the raft and slipped along down in the shade, past the foot of the island dead still—never saying a word. We was in ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things. If the men went to the island I just expect they found the camp fire I built, and watched it all night for Jim to come.

I played it as low down on them as I could. When the first streak of day began to show we tied up to a towhead in a big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked off cottonwood branches with the hatchet, and covered up the raft with them so she looked like there had been a cave-in in the bank there.

A tow-head is a sandbar that has cottonwoods on it as thick as harrow-teeth. We laid there all day, and watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and up-bound steamboats fight the big river in the middle. When it was beginning to come on dark we poked our heads out of the cottonwood thicket, and looked up and down and across; nothing in sight; so Jim took up some of the top planks of the raft and built a snug wigwam to get under in blazing weather and rainy, and to keep the things dry.

Jim made a floor for the wigwam, and raised it a foot or more above the level of the raft, so now the blankets and all the traps was out of reach of steamboat waves. Right in the middle of the wigwam we made a layer of dirt about five or six inches deep with a frame around it for to hold it to its place; this was to build a fire on in sloppy weather or chilly; the wigwam would keep it from being seen.

We made an extra steering-oar, too, because one of the others might get broke on a snag or something. This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness.

We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next. Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see. The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind.

So we talked it over all one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what.

Take it all round, we lived pretty high. The fifth night below St. Louis we had a big storm after midnight, with a power of thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in a solid sheet. We stayed in the wigwam and let the raft take care of itself. When the lightning glared out we could see a big straight river ahead, and high, rocky bluffs on both sides. We was drifting straight down for her.

The lightning showed her very distinct. She was leaning over, with part of her upper deck above water, and you could see every little chimbly-guy clean and clear, and a chair by the big bell, with an old slouch hat hanging on the back of it, when the flashes come.

Well, it being away in the night and stormy, and all so mysterious-like, I felt just the way any other boy would a felt when I see that wreck laying there so mournful and lonesome in the middle of the river. I wanted to get aboard of her and slink around a little, and see what there was there. So I says:. Seegars, I bet you—and cost five cents apiece, solid cash. Do you reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing?

I wish Tom Sawyer was here. Jim he grumbled a little, but give in. The lightning showed us the wreck again just in time, and we fetched the stabboard derrick, and made fast there. The deck was high out here. Jim whispered and said he was feeling powerful sick, and told me to come along. I says, all right, and was going to start for the raft; but just then I heard a voice wail out and say:.

By this time Jim was gone for the raft. Then in there I see a man stretched on the floor and tied hand and foot, and two men standing over him, and one of them had a dim lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol. And what for? Put up that pistol, Bill.

The man came a-pawing along in the dark, and when Packard got to my stateroom, he says:. And in he come, and Bill after him. But before they got in I was up in the upper berth, cornered, and sorry I come. Then they stood there, with their hands on the ledge of the berth, and talked. I was too scared. They talked low and earnest. Bill wanted to kill Turner. You listen to me. So they started, and I lit out, all in a cold sweat, and scrambled forward. Well, I catched my breath and most fainted.

Shut up on a wreck with such a gang as that! So we went a-quaking and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, too—seemed a week before we got to the stern. No sign of a boat. But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we are in a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We struck for the stern of the texas, and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight, hanging on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight was in the water.

When we got pretty close to the cross-hall door there was the skiff, sure enough! I could just barely see her. I felt ever so thankful. In another second I would a been aboard of her, but just then the door opened. One of the men stuck his head out only about a couple of foot from me, and I thought I was gone; but he jerked it in again, and says:.

He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and set down. It was Packard. Then Bill he come out and got in. Packard says, in a low voice:. The door slammed to because it was on the careened side; and in a half second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me.

I out with my knife and cut the rope, and away we went! We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the paddle-box, and past the stern; then in a second or two more we was a hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.

When we was three or four hundred yards down-stream we see the lantern show like a little spark at the texas door for a second, and we knowed by that that the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning to understand that they was in just as much trouble now as Jim Turner was. Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to be in such a fix.

So says I to Jim:. But that idea was a failure; for pretty soon it begun to storm again, and this time worse than ever. The rain poured down, and never a light showed; everybody in bed, I reckon. We boomed along down the river, watching for lights and watching for our raft. After a long time the rain let up, but the clouds stayed, and the lightning kept whimpering, and by and by a flash showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and we made for it.

It was the raft, and mighty glad was we to get aboard of it again. We seen a light now away down to the right, on shore. So I said I would go for it. The skiff was half full of plunder which that gang had stole there on the wreck. We hustled it on to the raft in a pile, and I told Jim to float along down, and show a light when he judged he had gone about two mile, and keep it burning till I come; then I manned my oars and shoved for the light.

As I got down towards it three or four more showed—up on a hillside. It was a village. I closed in above the shore light, and laid on my oars and floated. As I went by I see it was a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a double-hull ferryboat. I skimmed around for the watchman, a-wondering whereabouts he slept; and by and by I found him roosting on the bitts forward, with his head down between his knees.

I gave his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to cry. He stirred up in a kind of a startlish way; but when he see it was only me he took a good gap and stretch, and then he says:. Why, how in the nation did they ever git into such a scrape? And then what did you all do?

So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help somehow. But take it all around, I was feeling ruther comfortable on accounts of taking all this trouble for that gang, for not many would a done it. I wished the widow knowed about it.

I judged she would be proud of me for helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and dead beats is the kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in. Well, before long here comes the wreck, dim and dusky, sliding along down! A kind of cold shiver went through me, and then I struck out for her.

I felt a little bit heavy-hearted about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned if they could stand it I could. By the time I got there the sky was beginning to get a little gray in the east; so we struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the skiff, and turned in and slept like dead people.

By and by, when we got up, we turned over the truck the gang had stole off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars. The seegars was prime. We laid off all the afternoon in the woods talking, and me reading the books, and having a general good time. Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a nigger. How much do a king git? Why, how you talk! They just set around.

But other times they just lazy around; or go hawking—just hawking and sp—Sh! But mostly they hang round the harem. Solomon had one; he had about a million wives.

Bofe un you claims it. What does I do? No; I take en whack de bill in two , en give half un it to you, en de yuther half to de yuther woman. En what use is a half a chile? It lays in de way Sollermun was raised. He as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. I never see such a nigger. He was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see.

So I went to talking about other kings, and let Solomon slide. I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that would a been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.

Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French. I got some of their jabber out of a book. You answer me that. Is a cow a man? Is a Frenchman a man? You answer me dat! So I quit. We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble. I passed the line around one of them right on the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she went.

I jumped into the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her back a stroke. As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right down the towhead.

I whooped and listened. Away down there somewheres I hears a small whoop, and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to hear it again.

I did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan, and beat it all the time, but he never did, and it was the still places between the whoops that was making the trouble for me.

Well, I fought along, and directly I hears the whoop behind me. I was tangled good now. I throwed the paddle down. The whooping went on, and in about a minute I come a-booming down on a cut bank with smoky ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that fairly roared, the currrent was tearing by them so swift.

In another second or two it was solid white and still again. I just give up then. I knowed what the matter was. It had the big timber of a regular island; it might be five or six miles long and more than half a mile wide.

I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon. You never knowed a sound dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much. I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to keep from knocking the islands out of the river; and so I judged the raft must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would get further ahead and clear out of hearing—it was floating a little faster than what I was. I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a snag, maybe, and it was all up with him.

But I reckon it was more than a cat-nap, for when I waked up the stars was shining bright, the fog was all gone, and I was spinning down a big bend stern first. It was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest and the thickest kind of timber on both banks; just a solid wall, as well as I could see by the stars.

I looked away down-stream, and seen a black speck on the water. Then I see another speck, and chased that; then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft. When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steering-oar.

The other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and branches and dirt. Why, what in the nation do you mean? Where would I go to? Is I heah, or whah is I? You answer me dat. I been setting here talking with you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon I done the same. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim.

So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable. He said the first towhead stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the current was another man that would get us away from him. It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it was clearing up again now. It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar. You could see them first-rate now.

Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:. Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed his foot to get him to take it back. We slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession.

She had four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman on such a craft as that. We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got hot. We talked about Cairo, and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it.

Jim said if the two big rivers joined together there, that would show. But I said maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old river again. That disturbed Jim—and me too. So the question was, what to do? I said, paddle ashore the first time a light showed, and tell them pap was behind, coming along with a trading-scow, and was a green hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo.

Jim thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and waited. Every little while he jumps up and says:. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more.

That was where it pinched. 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 every way she knowed how. I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was fidgeting up and down past me.

We neither of us could keep still. Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. It most froze me to hear such talk. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By and by one showed. Jim sings out:.

He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:. I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me.

When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:. Well, I just felt sick. Right then along comes a skiff with two men in it with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says:. Is your man white or black? I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:. I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a stroke or two, I says:. Odd, too. They stopped pulling. One says:. What is the matter with your pap? They backed water. Confound it, I just expect the wind has blowed it to us.

Do you want to spread it all over? It will be long after sun-up then, and when you ask for help you tell them your folks are all down with chills and fever. I feel mighty mean to leave you; but my kingdom!

Good-bye, boy; you do as Mr. If you see any runaway niggers you get help and nab them, and you can make some money by it. I was stuck. He was in the river under the stern oar, with just his nose out. I told him they were out of sight, so he come aboard. Then we talked about the money.

It was a pretty good raise—twenty dollars apiece. Jim said we could take deck passage on a steamboat now, and the money would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free States. Towards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty particular about hiding the raft good. Then he worked all day fixing things in bundles, and getting all ready to quit rafting.

That night about ten we hove in sight of the lights of a town away down in a left-hand bend. I went off in the canoe to ask about it.

Pretty soon I found a man out in the river with a skiff, setting a trot-line. I ranged up and says:. I paddled to the raft. Jim was awful disappointed, but I said never mind, Cairo would be the next place, I reckoned. No high ground about Cairo, Jim said.

I had forgot it. We laid up for the day on a towhead tolerable close to the left-hand bank. I begun to suspicion something. So did Jim. When it was daylight, here was the clear Ohio water inshore, sure enough, and outside was the old regular Muddy!

So it was all up with Cairo. We talked it all over. So we slept all day amongst the cottonwood thicket, so as to be fresh for the work, and when we went back to the raft about dark the canoe was gone! We both knowed well enough it was some more work of the rattlesnake-skin; so what was the use to talk about it? It would only look like we was finding fault, and that would be bound to fetch more bad luck—and keep on fetching it, too, till we knowed enough to keep still.

The place to buy canoes is off of rafts laying up at shore. Well, the night got gray and ruther thick, which is the next meanest thing to fog. It got to be very late and still, and then along comes a steamboat up the river. We lit the lantern, and judged she would see it. She aimed right for us. She was a big one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it; but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us.

There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a powwow of cussing, and whistling of steam—and as Jim went overboard on one side and I on the other, she come smashing straight through the raft. I dived—and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a thirty-foot wheel had got to go over me, and I wanted it to have plenty of room. I could always stay under water a minute; this time I reckon I stayed under a minute and a half.

Then I bounced for the top in a hurry, for I was nearly busting. I popped out to my armpits and blowed the water out of my nose, and puffed a bit. Of course there was a booming current; and of course that boat started her engines again ten seconds after she stopped them, for they never cared much for raftsmen; so now she was churning along up the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I could hear her.

But I made out to see that the drift of the current was towards the left-hand shore, which meant that I was in a crossing; so I changed off and went that way. It was one of these long, slanting, two-mile crossings; so I was a good long time in getting over.

I made a safe landing, and clumb up the bank. I was going to rush by and get away, but a lot of dogs jumped out and went to howling and barking at me, and I knowed better than to move another peg. In about a minute somebody spoke out of a window without putting his head out, and says:.

Strike a light there, somebody. What did you say your name was? Rouse out Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns. George Jackson, is there anybody with you? I heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light. The man sung out:. Put it on the floor behind the front door. Bob, if you and Tom are ready, take your places. Now, all ready. Step forward, George Jackson. Come along now. The dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind me.

When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and unbarring and unbolting. The old gentleman says:. He told me to make myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself; but the old lady says:. Buck looked about as old as me—thirteen or fourteen or along there, though he was a little bigger than me.

He came in gaping and digging one fist into his eyes, and he was dragging a gun along with the other one. When we got up-stairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on. While I was at it he asked me what my name was, but before I could tell him he started to tell me about a bluejay and a young rabbit he had catched in the woods day before yesterday, and he asked me where Moses was when the candle went out.

Say, how long are you going to stay here? You got to stay always. Do you own a dog? Do you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness? Confound these ole britches! Are you all ready? All right. Come along, old hoss. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women.

They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs. So they said I could have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was.

So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:. I set it down, private, because somebody might want me to spell it next, and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to it. It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town.

They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a saw-log. There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it.

It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out. Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. They squeaked through underneath.

There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things. This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a big family Bible full of pictures.

I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too—not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket. They was different from any pictures I ever see before—blacker, mostly, than is common.

Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost.

But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon—and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung flowers on it.

Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head.