Superstition

Is it a sign of immature faith that just as we imagine God as the great puppeteer, we imagine evil forces as something that we can have power over by ritual.

Chapter 1

Huck imagines:

The leaves rustling as mournful.
An owl who-whooing about somebody that was dead.
A whippoorwill...., also signaling that someone is dead.
A dog crying about somebody that was about to die.
The wind whispering something that he couldn't make out.
The woods making a sound that a ghost makes.

He experiences:
A spider is killed and reflects bad luck.

He turns around 3 times.
He ties up a lock of his hair with a thread to keep witches away.
There is no antidote for killing a spider.

As Huck is transformed by love, will this superstition, and the interpretation of the sights and sounds of nature, be transformed as signs of God, not signs of the devil?


Chapter 2

After Tom plays a trip on the sleeping Jim by hanging his hat on a tree branch, Jim builds a narrative that witches came to him and took him away and then put him back and hung the hat on a tree.
So clearly Jim believes in witches and is superstitious as well.

Chapter 8

Huck is presumed dead. Drowned.
How does one find a body that has been drowned in the river?
Not sure whether this is superstition, but the town folks fire a cannon over the water, hoping that it will bring the body up from the bottom. In the footnotes to the chapter, Hearn confirms that this is a superstition, and not scientific. [Chapter 8, footnote 2]
Another superstition, clearly, is the practice of filling a loaf of bread with some quicksilver (mercury) so that it would float near where a body lay. [footnote 3]
This superstition is reported by Huck, so he has shown us that he is just as superstitious as Jim.

Chapter 10

In Chapter 9, Huck and Jim discover a body in a house floating down the river. Jim won't let Huck look at the face. Here is chapter 10, when Huck asks Jim to talk about the dead man, Jim gets out of it by telling Huck it would be bad luck. So here Jim uses superstition to avoid revealing that the body was Pap. Still, Jim may have really believed it was bad luck. But here superstition comes in handy as a way to avoid talking about the truth.

Then, in a second superstition story, Huck reveals that he picked up a snake skin, and Jim assured him it was bad luck. Huck plays a mean trick, putting a dead snake near Jim's blanket, a second snake came and curled around it, and then bit Jim. Huck blames it on bad luck, to avoid taking responsibility. Another example of using superstition as a diversion from the truth.
This leads to more talk: roast a piece of the snake; take off the rattles and wear them; the snake skin curse is not as bad as looking at the new moon over your left shoulder.

Friendship

Chapter 8

It is in this chapter that we first look at the relationship between Huck and Jim.

As I look at the premise that Jim is mentoring Huck in the art of spiritual awakening, I want to be careful not to see that Huck is having a similar affect on Jim. It seems that, in this chapter, Huck is the one who is showing some degree of love, or at least friendship when he encounters Jim, promises not to turn him in, and is concerned that he hasn't eaten anything but strawberries since he arrived on the island.

Looking at the sequence:

Huck remarks, when he first sees that Jim is on the island with him by the campfire:
"I bet I was glad to see him."

Jim, thinking he is seeing a ghost, after asking the ghost to leave him alone, remarks:

'...'at 'uz awluz yo' fren'." (what was always your friend)

Huck proceeds to convince Jim that he isn't dead. This is not Tom Sawyer, who probably would have played along for awhile. We don't see that cruel streak in Huck, and probably won't.

Then he says:
"I was ever so glad to see Jim."
and
"I warn't lonesome, now."
and
"I told him I warn't afraid of him telling the people where I was." The italics are Twain's.

Then there is an exchange about what Jim has eaten, which culminates with Huck's concern:
"Well, you must be most starved, ain't you?"

Huck then proceeds to share all that he has, bacon, sugar, coffee, etc.

So, up until this point the exchange is that Huck is happy to see Jim; he needs companionship. He is happy to share what he has. He is concerned about Jim's hunger. He trusts that Jim won't betray Huck's deception about his fake death.

Why is this? Is there a prior history here? Jim has said that he has always Huck's friend. Or is this the first we see that Huck has a deeper self that sees Jim as a human being? Is Huck falsely pretending to care for Jim because he needs a companion?
I guess I don't buy it. Huck was doing perfectly fine by himself. He doesn't need a companion, or at least we think he doesn't given it's still early in his adventurous escape.
Of course there is the argument that he's glad that Jim is not an enemy. There is relief that Jim is not a stranger. But could that account for such generosity and concern?

Now comes the first test of this 'friendship':

Jim reveals to Huck that he has escaped, and is now a runaway slave.

Jim reminds Huck that just minutes before he has promised to keep what Jim is about to tell him a secret.

Huck says:
"Well I did. I said I wouldn't and I'll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low down Ablitionist and despise me for keeping mum - but that don't make no difference. I ain't agoing to tell, and I ain't agoing back there anyways."

So we have two ways to look at this:
First, the integrity of giving your word. Huck didn't know what the story was when he promised not to tell. When the story was revealed, a slave that had run away, Huck could have said that even though he promised, the story was sufficiently bad enough that Huck could not keep his promise.

So is Huck keeping his word because he had promised, or is this Huck's first test about what he considers to be an injustice?

First of all, Huck sees his own story here. He has escaped himself, probably from death. He has this in common with Jim now.

And I think more importantly, we already have seen evidence that Huck sees Jim as a fellow human being, concerned for his health. Now he is concerned for his freedom.

It may be too early to draw this conclusion.

Continuing the development of the friendship:

Jim tells the story of his escape. Something Huck can appreciate.
There is more discussion about superstitions.
Jim then tells how he lost his riches ($14) to speculation.

So this long discussion of adventures and life's lessons draws us closer into the companionship that has been revealed.

Finally, there is this statement by Jim after Huck remarks that perhaps Jim will be rich again:

"Yes- en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars." (Miss Watson was going to sell him for that much)

There is a whole basket of emotions in reading that statement. The sadness that a human is valued in dollars. The pride in Jim that he is worth so much. The humor in the juxtaposition of the two.

Chapter 11
Time for Huck to show concern for his friend. When he sneaks away to town dressed as a girl, the old lady in the shack tells him that the town thinks that either Pap or Jim murdered Huck. Huck is horrified, and has trouble concealing it. The nature of his questions, "are they going over tonight" referring to her husbands desire to hunt Jim on Jackson's Island, gives him away.

Chapter 16
Huck receives two twenty dollar gold pieces from the men on a skiff who don't want to help Huck and 'his pap' because they suspect they have smallpox. Huck doesn't 'give' Jim money. He simply states that they had twenty dollars 'apiece'.

Ignorance

How are ignorance and superstition related?

Esoteric vs Exoteric. Max suggests that first one must reject the exoteric before one can appreciate the esoteric. At first, Huck's understanding of truth beyond what he experiences is tied into Miss Watson's and Aunt Sally's exoteric understanding of the Bible, and superstition, which he hears from others, including Jim.


Chapter 1.
Huck is convinced by Tom to return to the Widow Douglas' home by offering him a chance to join his newly formed band of robbers.
So we start out with the quaint observation that Huck and Tom are going to play at being robbers. Innocent enough. As a child I played cowboys and indians, and inevitable, someone got shot. Noone really was harmed (whether we should have assumed the indians were the bad guys is another story).
So on the one hand, it's just pretend, right? Or will there be evidence later on, much as there was in Tom Sawyer, that people will actually be harmed? 
If so, and if Huck knows this as early as Chapter 1, then in fact we come to the first stop of the spectrum of Huck's formation- he is unaware that he is, or will be, hurting people by playing the robber role.
Moral ignorance? What do we call this?

Chapter 2

Tom forms his band of robbers. One of the conditions is that if someone betrays the gang, his family must be killed. Huck has no family (at least noone knows whether his Dad is dead or alive). But Huck, about to be disinvited to the gang, offers that Miss Watson could be killed. The gang agrees so Huck is allowed to join the gang.

This moral ignorance, with no basis in reality or experience, but only fantasy, seems like a setup for a crisis. Eventually the opportunity to kill someone for real will present itself, and the clash of fantasy and the real will represent a growth event along the path to compassion and love.


Chapter 5

Here Huck encounters his father, 'Pap'. Pap has heard that Huck can read, and has money. Now Huck is not really educated, but compared to Pap, he is learned, and Pap proceeds to deride Huck for purposely trying to denigrate and embarrass his Father by educating himself. No matter that Huck himself has not really sought out an education, but has been forced to submit by the widow and Miss Watson.
In an almost throwaway line, Pap says that he has heard that he has got religion too.

Chapter 8

I don't know if it really is right to call it humor, but at the end of the chapter, Jim claims that he is still rich because he is worth eight hundred dollars, the amount that the widow was going to sell him for to the slave trader. Something in the statement makes me smile, that Jim takes some sort of pride in the fact that he is worth so much money.

Self Sacrifice and Humility

References to Huck's self-sacrifice for Jim, are, I'm sure, preceded by instances of Jim's self-sacrifice for Huck. Can't Jim more efficiently and quietly slip down the river without having to baby sit Huck?

Reading Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited, he makes this point:

When faced with oppression from power, there are alternatives:

Non-resistance.
Resistance.

Jesus chose a form of resistance, but an entirely new form: humility.

"humility cannot be humiliated" is quoted from Vladimir Simkhovitch's Toward the Understanding of Jesus.

One who is truly humble has possibly attained no vulnerability to fear.

Is it worth looking at Jim as one whose entire strength in dealing with his singular journey to escape and reunite with his family comes from humility? Where would this humility have come from? Is it the same quality that Jesus embodied?

So are there signs, in each of the encounters that Twain chronicles of Jim, of this humility as the source of strength?

Chapter 8

Huck encounters Jim on Jackson's Island, and immediately, and without hesitation, offers Jim all that he has to eat.

Prayer

Chapter 1: Supper Prayer

The widow would 'tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals..."

Chapter 3: Petitionary vs Emptying of Self [The two providences]

Miss Watson teaches him about prayer.
First, she takes him in the closet after he returns all mussed up from his adventure in Chapter 2 with Tom and the gang.
"She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it."
Once he got a fish line but no hooks.
He takes prayer as a literal list of requests for himself.
He asks Miss Watson and she calls him a fool.

Then, in a subtle aside, Huck set down in the woods (earlier) and had 'a long think about it'.
This second prayer reflects a kind of contemplative prayer, where Huck is asking for some guidance on what prayer really is, and why it doesn't 'work'. Again he cites examples of what is 'not working'- money lost, recovery of stolen goods. "Why can't Miss Watson fat up?".

After a time, he says to himself(always an indicator of the possibility of a conversation with God) that since he can't figure it out, he'll ask the widow.
Obviously at this point he is unhappy with the answer he has given himself that prayer doesn't work, and trusts the widow to straighten him out.

She tells him, because at this point he is open to hearing it, that he was to pray for 'spiritual gifts'.

Spiritual Gifts.

And so we now get to one of the central threads of my investigation of Jim and Huck, as the widow explains what she means:

"I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself."

Huck again goes into the woods, thinks about it, but couldn't see any advantage to this approach (except for the other people).

But the seed is planted.

Huck recognizes the difference as two Providences.

The widow's Providence showed promise. Miss Watson's Providence left him with a feeling of hopelessness.

He decides that he will choose the widow's way.

This is the first of the great conversations Huck has with himself regarding God and how God moves among humans.

Chapter 8:
"now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing."

This in reference to the 1st kind of prayer that Miss Watson speaks about, petitionary prayer, And because the loaf floats near to shore at Jackson island, Huck concludes the prayer has worked. This kind of thinking, deduction from evidence that has other explanations, like the natural current of the water, is associated with Fowler's Mythic or Literal Faith.
But Huck further observes that there are conditions to this kind of faith in prayer:
"That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind."
So prayer of this kind depends on a God that grants the effectiveness of prayer only to the righteous, or the learned, or the repentant sinner, etc.
Huck will continue to struggle with this concept, that he is not good enough to warrant God's attention of the gift of getting what he wants in prayer.

Love

Chapter 2

Tom and Huck are sneeking off during the night, and Jim hears them. He comes close, determined to listen further, but eventually falls asleep. Tom wants to tie Jim up as a trick. Huck says no. Huck says that it's because Jim might wake up. But the reader is given a second option- Huck is not really up to playing tricks like Tom.
This will change later as Huck tricks Jim on the river into thinking Huck is dead.
But here is an early glimpse at Hucks conscience.

Chapter 8:

Jim's first real encounter with Huck on Jackson island. Huck finds him near his fire, and greets him: "Hello Jim!".
Huck says he was glad to see him.

Jim, thinking the dead Huck is a ghost, is frightened, but then begins his first revelation of who he is:

" I hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'. I awluz liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em. "

"...en doan' do nuffin to Ole Jim, 'at 'uz awluz yo' fren'."

So here is the basis for the beginning of the friendship, and for the master to teach the student. First of all, Jim tells Huck, and the reader, that he likes dead people and does all he can for them.
What does that mean? Is that just superstition? How can we read further into this seemingly throwaway statement?
At it's most basic, Jim is offering that he is respectful of the dead, perhaps prays for them, or performs some sort of ritual to honor them. We don't know. But at it's most simple I think it means that he shows he is capable of love towards the departed souls.

And then, further, Jim says that he has always been Huck's friend. We don't have evidence of that (unless I don't recall from Tom Sawyer). We do know that Huck was reluctant to trick Jim in chapter 2. So there must have been previous encounters.
What has Jim already seen in Huck to reveal that Huck has always been his friend? It would have been acceptable for Jim to have just said "Huck I AM your friend".

Further, Huck reflects that he was glad to see Jim and he wasn't afraid that Jim would rat him out. And that he was no longer lonesome.
So at this first encounter we see trust, friendship, and what appears to be a human to human encounter.

Then in a conversation about preparing a meal, Huck appears to be genuinely concerned that Jim has had nothing to eat but strawberries for the last 3-5 days.
After a meal of catfish and bacon and meal and coffee, they 'laid off and lazied'; so it is apparent that Huck is comfortable just hanging out with Jim.


As Jim recounts his escape, another sentiment about Huck: "I 'us powerful sorry you 's killed Huck, but I ain't no mo' , now."