Becoming a Pal of Huck . . . and Jim

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/25/11—For all their dedicated efforts, our teachers at Deep Gap Elementary School couldn’t rid us of our non-standard habits of speech. Imagine our delight when one of them, Mrs. Grady Moretz, in the sixth grade started our class each day by having us read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here was a work held up as a literary masterpiece, something we should all read and enjoy.

Indeed, we did for, as we formed in our mouths the words he spoke, we were instantly drawn into Huck’s world, his speech being essentially the same as ours. He seemed one of us, though not a mountain boy. His trip down the Mississippi River and encounters with folk along the way captured us, making the start of each school day something special. Would he somewhere slip up and be found out, would Nigger Jim be caught, would Tom Sawyer ever enter the story, would Huck’s natural goodness ever be recognized?

The story carried us from our isolated world in the Blue Ridge to a much wider one as Huck rafted down the great river. His adventures raised issues we hadn’t thought about, since slavery had not been a part of Deep Gap’s past. His friendship with Jim and the measures he took to protect him led us into discussions we had not foreseen as sons and daughters of WASPS. For instance, was it right that Huck told a passel of lies to befriend a Black man?

Reading of Huck’s love and respect for Jim prepared me for a life-changing book I came upon years later in college, Black Like Me, an account of a White man’s darkening his skin and adjusting his speech habits to live among Negroes. His life as a man who passed as a Black brought him face-to-face with the reality of trying to get on in a White man’s world—the slurs, bad-mouthing, the intolerance, the enforcement of Jim Crow “laws,” the economic bondage, the lack of a vote, the hatred. The book revealed how unjust, how hypocritical, how inhumane American society was in its treatment of its Black citizens. Having read the book, I could no longer accept Deep Gap’s views regarding Negroes.

I vowed to judge each Black man or woman on his/her merits. I hoped to rise above the prejudices inherent in a community with little or no knowledge of Blacks; lily-white in all things but a shared enjoyment of foxhunting and gospel singing (at least in our household). Dad spent many pleasurable nights hunting with a “mulatto” (a term no longer in use) from a neighboring county, and spirit-lifting hours vigorously tapping his feet to lively spirituals. Blacks were OK in their place but not nearly considered Dad’s equals.

Huck’s adventures and his acceptance of Jim plus my reading of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me proved a liberating experience, one that had moved forward ambivalently during my US Air Force hitch in the early 50s. My WASPishness was not something to be overcome instantly by serving in an integrated military unit, however.

Meanwhile, back to Huck and Jim on their raft . . . .  Their adventures together led me to dream of rafting down the Father of Waters, too. I’d begin my trip in a canoe on the South Fork of New River, which flowed as gently as Burns’s Afton in the stretch I knew near Brownwood, North Carolina. Turning to a stack of National Geographic maps of the eastern half of the nation, I traced the South Fork, noted its merger with the North Fork in a neighboring county, and followed its course through Virginia and its change of name to the Kanawha in West Virginia before being embraced by the Ohio River on its journey to join the mighty Mississippi.

I naïvely assumed that the New would flow with Afton-like gentleness as it wiggled its way northward through the Blue Ridge, cutting a gorge through the rugged mountains of West Virginia. Perhaps there’d be a short portage or two in narrow, rocky stretches, but my buddies and I would pass without harm or hurt to the Gulf of Mexico.

Such daydreaming gave me and my friends something to brag about. We didn’t build a canoe or draw up plans for a raft. Our adventure was all talk, the idle chatter of neophyte braggadocios.

Many, many years later, a bookseller I know who lives near the headwaters of the South Fork, in Blowing Rock, NC, told me of a book I’d find fascinating, Noah Adams’s Far Appalachia: Following the New River North. Of National Public Radio fame, Adams excels in bringing places and people alive in his journalistic reports. He took me far beyond the stretches of the river familiar to me from boyhood days to its turbulent passage through the rocky gorge in West Virginia and beneath the celebrated bridge that spans the river at a height of 876 feet.

With his book as a guide, my wife and I stopped at Hawk’s Nest State Park and watched rafters and kayakers work their way through a fairly calm stretch of the river. Even that calm stretch would have been enough to frighten me away from fulfilling my dream of drifting down the New on my way to reach Huck’s river.

I knew from Adams’s book that treacherous white water awaited farther downstream. Daydream would have changed into nightmare.

Yet, vicariously, Huck remained in my dreams, since I finally “joined” the middle-aged women aboard a luxury steamboat, who relived and remembered their youthful rafting down the Mississippi in Lee Smith’s rich and evocative novel, Last Girls. If I was not up to rafting, I could book passage on a luxury steamboat, take along a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, order up a round of good whiskey for my old daydreaming buddies, drink every glass myself and do arm-chair traveling in high style.

Thanking Huck for the inspiration would be my last act before drifting off to dreamland again. “Thanks, Pal!”