"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, final lines
After the success of his children’s novel Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Mark Twain was soon at work on a sequel. But the novel starting taking on a much more serious tone than he anticipated, and Twain set it aside for a number of years. In the 1880’s, the initial optimism of Reconstruction began to fade and the South entered a time of social unrest. It might have been the increasing weight of racial oppression, with the Jim Crow laws looming just five years away, that motivated Twain to finish and publish Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885. In it, the titular Huck is living in pre-war Mississippi, with a mean drunk for a father and under the care of the Widow Douglas, who is determined to whip him into a civilized, church-going young man. Finding the atmosphere oppressive, Huck soon begins his journey aboard a raft with a runaway slave named Jim. Along the way, he becomes more resolved that he’s better off not becoming “sivilized” as society defined it at the time.
The noble thing about Huckleberry Finn is how the novel allows itself to settle completely in the mind of a young man. Twain has a lot of institutions to address—Southern society, religion, intellectualism, and especially racism and slavery. But he writes in vernacular English and speaks through the uneducated Huck, with moral lessons either understated or not articulated at all by its narrator. It is in this voice that Twain accomplishes his best of satire, not to mention moments of honesty. Twain allows Huck to wrestle with the cognitive dissonance that results when ideas and beliefs begin to contradict one another.
At first Huck lives under many of the same assumptions and traditions as the rest of the white folks around him. Jim quickly becomes a kind of father figure for Huck, but despite helping him escape, Huck is slow break the notion that he should treat Jim as anything but inferior. Early in their journey, Huck apologizes to Jim after teasing him, and actually feels guilty about feeling guilty—that he should be humbled by a black man. Huck meets a series of colorful characters along his journey, with most of them—like the band of robbers, the feuding and ill-fated Grangerford and Shepherdson families, and the two con-men masquerading as royalty—serving to convince Huck of how hypocritical his society actually is.
That kind of cognitive dissonance only increases, right until the moment that Jim is sold to another family. Huck believes that freeing Jim will lead to Huck’s own damnation, but resolves to help Jim anyway, declaring "All right, then, I'll go to hell!”
The novel resolves tidily—Jim is freed once again, and the well-meaning Sally Phelps offers to adopt Huck. But Huck, as he says in the novel’s closing lines, has “been there before.” Huck is fond of the Phelpses and they only want what they perceive as best for him, the pillars of society in the South: religion, etiquette, education, and morality. But as Huck has come to see it, piety and hygiene aren’t worth much and, though he might not be able to articulate as much, he can do a better job educating himself that society has done thus far. Huck decides to head West, where civilization hasn’t had a chance to arrive yet.
Diversity is about inclusion—adopting or at least acknowledging ideas and cultures different from one’s own. But in Huck’s case it’s equally about rejection—of his old life, of “decent society.” Huck’s quest has prepared him discern for himself, to take the best of every world he encounters, accepting truth where he finds it, and rejecting the worst—the end goal for children in their efforts to make diversify, challenge their own beliefs, and make new discoveries.
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