The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Colonel Grangerford is tall and severe-looking, but cheerful and well respected. His sons are Tom and Bob. The two young sisters are named Charlotte and Sophia. The family is rich in property and slaves (they have assigned Huck his own slave named Jack), and hosts large gatherings of kin-folk from the surrounding countryside. There were three other brothers, but they were killed over the years in an ongoing spat with the Shepardsons.

The Shepardsons, who share a river landing dock down the road from the Grangerfords, are equally prominent, numerous, and rich. Huck becomes fully aware of the Shepardson-Grangerford feud when one day Buck lays in wait for the passing Harney Shepardson and exchanges gunfire with him, and act for which he receives praise from the Colonel. Buck later explains the feud, which began 30 years ago for reasons Buck can’t remember. It’s a deadly battle that has caused two deaths this year. There are many unexpressed rules of engagement to the conflict, but Buck is firmly convinced that there are no cowards in either family, though the occasional unarmed man is gunned down.

The next Sunday, the Grangerfords all go to church, the men armed. They sit near the equally armed Shepardsons and hear a tedious sermon about brotherly love. After dinner, Sophia takes Huck aside and, winning his confidence, asks if he would travel the three miles back to the church to fetch her bible. Huck, understanding that there must be more to the story, examines the bible as soon as he’s alone with it and discovers a hastily written meeting place inside it. Sophia swears him to secrecy.

Later, Jack secretly bids Huck to come down to a river island, where Jim is waiting for him. The two have a happy reunion. Jim tells Huck that he was slightly injured after the raft was destroyed; he has been lying low and is in communication with the Shepardsons’ household slaves, who have kept Jim hidden and fed. In the meantime, Jim has patched up the raft and collected a few provisions.

The next day Huck wakes to find the Grangerfords are gone. Jack informs him that Sophia ran off to marry Harney Shepardson, and that the family has armed themselves and gone upriver to intercept the wedding. Huck hurries to join the party. When he finds a skirmish happening near the steamboat landing, he climbs a tree to get a better view. He sees Buck engaged in the fighting and calls for him. Buck informs him that the Colonel and his other two sons are dead from an ambush, but Sophia and Harney are safe down the river, away from the fighting. Soon after, Buck joins the fray and gets injured; Huck loses sight of him. Later, Huck finds Buck’s dead body. Grieving, he drags Buck out of the river and covers his face with a cloth.

On the river island, Huck catches up with Jim, and the two hurriedly leave the feud behind them, both happy to be back on the raft and downriver.

For several days Jim and Huck find peace in a wide and lazy section of the river. They observe the river and the habits of the people who work and travel it, and they discuss the origin of stars.

One morning, while picking berries, Huck runs into two scoundrels being pursued by dogs and men. They beg Huck for his help in covering their tracks in the river, and soon after they’re all safe, hiding together on the raft in the cottonwoods. One of the scoundrels is nearly 70, the other 30. Both have ragged clothes and are carrying carpet bags. The two men introduce themselves to each other. The younger man says he is a journeyman printer with a side business in faulty patent medicines. The older man pretends to be a preacher for money.

They decide to team up, though the younger man bemoans the state of his poor company. This, he says, is because he is the rightful heir to the estate of the English duke of Bridgewater, cheated out of his inheritance by an impostor. Huck and Jim easily believe the story; they agree to refer to the younger man as “Your Grace” and perform other honors, such as serving him at dinner. Not to be outdone, the older man claims to be the deposed son of Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, and the rightful king of France. Having been outranked, the duke stews a while, but then the men decide to continue their partnership.

Huck quickly concludes that the men aren’t royalty at all, but he stays silent to keep the peace.

The two scoundrels become curious about Jim’s status as a runaway and about the pair’s preference for travelling by night, so Huck invents a story about a trip to New Orleans, a dead father, and continual harassment about Jim’s status. The duke says he’ll come up with a better plan, and then the duke and the king briefly squabble over who will sleep in Huck’s makeshift bed on the raft, and who will take Jim’s. They travel through a storm, avoiding a passing town.

The next morning Jim and Huck rest while the scoundrels come up with a “campaign” to make money. The duke has several bills in his bag alluding to various scams, but he decides on renting a hall and acting out scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, though he needs to get the king up to speed on his scenes.

In the town of Pokeville, they discover that most of the citizens are out at a revival meeting. The duke finds an empty print shop and gets to work, while the king and Huck head out to the revival, two miles into the woods.

It is a hot day, and the preacher has increasing command of the large crowd, leading them in a hymnal recital. He asks all mourners and penitent people to come to the front of the tent to publicly wail, which the king does with verve. The preacher asks the enthusiastic king to speak, and so the king concocts a story about being a ruined pirate down to his last penny and claims that he’s a changed and newly devout man. The preacher starts a collection for the king that nets just under $90 and many offers for room and board. In the meantime, the duke has printed and sold a few fake newspaper subscriptions to gullible farmers. He’s also printed a fake wanted ad for Jim, which they can show the curious while they travel in daytime.

They escape Pokeville by night, and the scoundrels get drunk on a gallon of stolen whiskey.

The scoundrels continue to practice Shakespeare and plan several flourishes to their performance, such as tumbling and dancing. The duke then recites Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, and while his memory of it is botched, Huck is nevertheless impressed. The duke manages to print a few handbills for the show, and in the next small town, they discover ideal circumstances: a circus attraction on its last night in town.

The town is named Bricksville, in Arkansas. It is a poor town, and much of the infrastructure is underdeveloped or eroding. There are many idle inhabitants who take delight in small cruelty to animals and chewing tobacco. Noon comes, and the shambolic circus crowd begins to populate.

A well-known man named Boggs comes in on horseback, saying he’s “on the waw-path, and the price ov coffins is a gwyne to raise” (144). He’s very drunk, and the townsfolk are delighted by his harmless disturbances. Boggs rides up to the largest store in town and calls out its proprietor, Colonel Sherburn, naming him in a variety of insults. Sherburn, an imposing figure, comes out of his store and tells Boggs he’ll endure his insults for another 15 minutes, but after that his patience will be up. The townsfolk desperately try to turn Boggs away, and someone runs to fetch his daughter to try and talk sense into him. They nearly get him off the street, but then Sherburn appears with a pistol. Boggs pleads for his life, but Sherburn guns him down and leaves the scene.

The town gathers as the daughter mourns her father’s death. After an amateur forensic analysis of the crime scene, a lynch mob is formed to hang Sherburn.

The mob is in a violent fury as they head to Sherburn’s house. When they get there, they tear down his fence, and Sherburn steps onto his porch with a shotgun. He silently faces the crowd, then laughs scornfully. With a speech, he impugns the Southern character and its legal system, particularly its practice of lynching. He tells them that they’re a mob and they “don’t fight with the courage that’s born in them, but with a courage that’s borrowed from their mass” (149). With that, the cowardly crowd disperses.

Huck sneaks into the circus beneath the tent. He’s impressed by the horseback acrobatics and by the clown who continually harasses the ringmaster. Huck takes special note of a drunk man who suddenly enters the ring and demands to ride a horse; he’s further astonished when they let him. The man cavorts on the horse, looking as if he is in great danger, before he tears off his suit and reveals himself to be an acrobat. Huck feels bad for the ringmaster, believing him to be the victim of a clever prank rather than its architect.

That night, the king and the duke’s Shakespeare performance is poorly attended and ridiculed. In the morning the duke prints flyers announcing a new act called the Nonesuch, featuring “World-Renowned Tragedians,” with the important warning “LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED” (153).

The duke and the king go to work rigging a stage and perform to a sell-out crowd. However, the performance is an idiotic farce, plainly designed to separate people from their money. The audience is ready to storm the stage when one man steps up and announces that they’ll all be laughing stocks if people find out they’ve been lied to. The audience decides to praise the show and drum up an audience for the next performance, so they won’t be the only ones swindled. The performance sells out a second night, to an equally bewildered crowd. That night, the gang hide the raft further up shore.

On the third night of the performance, a larger and much angrier crowd appears, their pockets bulging with weapons and rotten eggs to throw at the performers. The gang sneak away with the proceeds into the night before the Nonesuch can start, and as the raft slips away, the king and the duke congratulate themselves on a plan perfectly executed. Jim and Huck conclude that both kings and con-men are “rapscallions,” and Huck recounts an apocryphal life of Henry VIII to illustrate the kinds of criminal enterprises royalty is capable of.

The next morning Huck overhears Jim mourning for his family and asks after them. Jim recalls a time after his daughter Elizabeth recovered from scarlet fever. He had punished her for not minding a simple directive, only to discover she was deaf. He grieves for his part in punishing her, and Huck is touched by his grief.

Near a pair of villages further south, the king and the duke plot a new campaign, but Jim interrupts, saying he’s tired of being tied up to the raft and pretending to be a captured slave while the three others go on their adventures. The duke dresses Jim in exotic clothing, paints his face a sickly blue, and tells him to pose as a “sick Arab” should the curious call, which satisfies Jim.

The king and the duke decide that word spreads too quickly for them to attempt their lucrative play again. While scouting for their next campaign, the king and Huck find a young man at an upriver steamboat landing who tells them all about the prominent Wilks family who have just lost their patriarch, Peter. The young man expects to find Peter’s brothers Harvey and William travelling to meet the family any day now. The young man says Harvey Wilks is a preacher in London and William is his “deaf and dumb” younger brother, and that both stand to gain a large inheritance from the dead Peter (162). Through intense questioning, the king learns everything there is to know about the family, including the three young daughters. Peter Wilks’s funeral is scheduled for the next day.

The gang reconvene on the raft to get their story straight. The king will adopt Harvey Wilk’s English accent, the duke will play deaf and speechless, and Huck will be their young servant. They catch a boat upriver and pay to be let off in the next city.

Upon landing and “learning” of Peter Wilks’s death, they go into histrionic wailing and are led to the Wilks’s house. Huck reflects, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race” (165).

The two scoundrels and Huck are taken quickly into the Wilks family and become the talk of the town. Huck especially likes the red-headed Mary Jane Wilks. The king takes command of the funeral arrangements, giving speeches and inviting guests to the wake, naming them from a list compiled from the gossipy young man upriver.

Soon the king and the duke receive a letter detailing the cellar location where the Wilks inheritance is stashed. The letter distributes the uncovered $6,000 in gold pieces equally between the scoundrels and the girls. The inheritance further distributes the household to the girls and an additional $7,000 worth of property and holdings to the scoundrels. Greedily counting the money, however, the scoundrels find the pile short by over $400. To waylay suspicion, they make up the deficit from their own pockets and decide to make a show of giving all the money to the girls.

This gesture firmly endears them to the family. When the family doctor speaks up at the wake, pointing out the poor quality of the king’s English accent and the general shabbiness of their ruse, the townsfolk rush to the scoundrel’s defense. In defiance of the skeptical doctor, Mary Jane shoves the entire $6,000 into the king’s hands, imploring him to invest it for her and her family.

The girls arrange for the duke to sleep in the spare room, while the king will displace Mary Jane from her room and Huck will sleep in a cubby. That evening the girls serve dinner for all the guests. After dinner, the youngest daughter, Joanna, draws from her significant knowledge of England and asks Huck questions. Huck knows very little of English geography, history, or custom, and only barely holds up his end of the conversation. Joanna leaves the conversation puzzled and distrusting. When the two other sisters innocently rush to Huck’s defense, however, Huck feels such a pang of conscience that he commits to action.

That night Huck sneaks into the king’s room with a plan to hide the money. He suspects that he would endanger Mary Jane and himself by revealing the truth, so he intends to write her with the money’s hiding place sometime in the near future. In the king’s room, however, he must hide as the king and the duke discuss a plan to sell off the family fortune and holdings, leaving the family with nothing. Their conversation reveals that the money is hidden under the bed.

When they leave, Huck grabs the money and waits for his chance to hide it away from the house.

When everyone in the house is sleeping, Huck sneaks the money past the open casket, but footsteps interrupt him. Huck quickly stashes the money in the casket and hides. Mary Jane enters and grieves quietly near her father’s side. Huck, returning to bed and fearing getting caught again, is unhappy that the money will be found and likely returned to the scoundrels.

The next day the undertaker directs the funeral with expert care, even shooing off a howling dog near the door. Very soon after, the coffin is nailed shut, with Huck not knowing whether anyone discovered the money. Huck upbraids himself for his botched plan and resolves to never mention it again.

Within the next few days, the king and the duke begin selling their portion of the estate, starting with the Wilks’s slaves. This severely shocks the family, who “hadn’t ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away” (184). When the angry duke and king discover their money is gone, they first accuse Huck. Huck blames it on the now-sold-away housekeeper, a story the scoundrels instantly believe. The gang fall into disarray but plan to accelerate selling the rest of the property.

Huck comes across Mary Jane, who continues to mourn for her lost servants’ family as she prepares for a trip to England she will never take. Huck, moved by pity, admits that he knows the family will be back together within two weeks.

Huck carefully manages the information he next provides to Mary Jane, still fearing for their safety, and especially Jim’s. He makes her promise to leave town for a few days after he tells her what he knows, so her face won’t reveal the truth after she hears it. He reveals the scoundrels’ ruse and tells her they can be identified by anyone who was scammed in Bricksville. Huck and Mary Jane have an emotional parting, and he provides her with a note detailing where he thinks the money has gone. Afterward, he concocts a complicated lie for the other two sisters concerning Mary Jane’s whereabouts tending to a sick neighbor.

Finally, while nearly everything is getting sold off at an auction, an uproar moves through the crowd. Peter Wilks’s real brothers have arrived.

The king and the duke compose their attitudes as the real Harvey Wilks addresses the crowd, insisting that they are Peter Wilks’s real brothers and that, within a couple days, they will receive their baggage and prove it. The family doctor presents a man who swore he saw the king in a canoe with Huck the day before he arrived. The crowd’s sympathies are split, and they insist on a confrontation between the men at the local tavern to get at the truth.

The scoundrels must first explain the missing money, which they blame on the slaves they sold down the river. Their interrogation lasts for hours past supper and into the night. When Huck is compelled to answer for his role in the affair, he is immediately revealed as a fraud. The estate’s lawyer takes the king into his confidence, then compels him to write something on paper, at which point he compares the handwriting to the authentic writing he has, noting the dissimilarities. Unfortunately, both pairs of brothers are equally unreliable, as the one who corresponds for them both has his writing arm in a sling.

The issue comes to a head when the real Peter Wilks asks the king what is tattooed on his brother’s chest. The king improvises a blue arrow, while the real brother claims it’s a monogram. The undertakers, however, claim to have seen no mark at all, and so the mob moves to dig Peter Wilks out of his grave and check for themselves, and hang the pretenders proven wrong by the evidence.

Huck fears for his life as the digging commences. When they find the bag of gold on Peter Wilk’s chest, the crowd forgets Huck in its excitement, and he slips away into the night and onto the road. A storm rolls in by the time Huck returns to town, steals a canoe, and finds Jim waiting for him on the raft, still dressed in blue face paint.

Unfortunately, the fleeing king and the duke overtake the raft in a skiff, reuniting the gang, to Huck’s disappointment.