"Nobody Kin Tell"

Okay. When a person says something, generally they are telling the truth. Except, of course, liars. Personally, I don't think that Mark Twain was a liar, therefore, when he said "that the model for Huck Finn was a poor white boy[...] who once helped a run away slave" (p.4 of this essay), why didn't they just leave it at that?

Now, a certain "scholar" thinks that Huck might be a black boy based on a certain "Jimmy". Okay, sure, maybe this Jimmy boy influenced Huck's speech. But personally, I don't exactly think that Huck was black, because, well, let me think, he wasn't a slave? Hm...good point, right?

This just proves that people generally don't know what they are talking about, and like to make stuff up out of nothing, when really the author of a novel meant something to be one way, and they twist and change it, so that it is something else. Huck Finn wasn't black. Sure, he talked funny, because he wasn't educated! And also, he spent time with Jim, who was black.

And why did somebody write about this? It is not a big deal. So what if Huck's speech was taken from a source that was African American? To me, it wouldn't change the story at all. I would still interpret it as Mark Twain writing in a critique-ish way about his society.

And personally, I don't think that it has anything to do with the way Huck constantly uses the "n-word". Although the writer is correct in that when the "n-word" is used within a certain group, it does not hold offense, I don't think that very enlightened statement has much to do with Huck not being black at all. Because, as you know, in the story, Huck wasn't black.

Mark Twain used a white boy to show how society can teach us something completely wrong, which we will think is right. He used a white boy specifically to show the change from when he was in that society, to when he was out of the society, because blacks were being enslaved, and whites were being taught that that was okay. If Huck actually was black, that would make his story confusing and take away what Twain had wanted people to get out of it.

And that is the end of that.