#huckleberry / texts. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zialltops · 9 months

Text

honeysuckle’s & huckleberry’s

After four years away at collage, you’re finally home with the tools and knowledge to save your family ranch. That is, if their ranch hand would stay out of your way.

Or: Ranch hand Joel doesn’t know how to handle the return of his bosses prodigy daughter, her snarky little attitude, or her sinfully tight jeans.

a/n: this chapter gets me right in the feels every time. I love watching the way Joels character changes and his train of thought shifts. I hope you guys like this chapter because it was so fun for me to write 🥹❄️

Masterlink

Chapter 3: Blue

As it turns out, extreme levels of dopamine in his brain after a bone chilling orgasm is exactly what Joel needs to level himself out while you’re sitting beside him in the passenger seat. It doesn’t make him stop thinking about it, but it does keep the tiny little gremlin in his head that tells him to pop a stiffy at bay. The only thing he has to worry about is his eyes, keeping them off of you and on the icy driveway as he pulls away from the house. The snow has started to melt, leaving behind a sloppy mud that makes the truck slip and slide. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get your car out, even if I can I don’t think you’ll be able to drive it in this.”

You make an exaggerated groan and he doesn’t even need to look to know you’re rolling your eyes at him from your spot beside him on the bench seat. “You just love deciding what I can and can’t do, don’t you? You know I lived here my whole life right?” He dares a glance over and you’re staring at him with your eyebrows knitted together and your arms crossed. His eyes tick down and he wants to kick himself in the head for even looking because your shirt is leaving nothing to his imagination and little to wonder about how good they would look bare with his dick between—jesus christ, Joel, get yourself together Man. “I wasn’t doubting your ability, I’m suggesting that it would be dangerous for you to even try.”

The truck hits the pavement and most of the snow has melted, but the freezing temperatures leave a icy film across the top. He had to go easy on the breaks and hope to god the truck makes it up the inclines he has to take to get to your car. The last thing he needs is to be stuck out here in the cold with just your bodies to keep each other warm. He absolutely one hundred and ten percent wont survive that, not without absolutely humiliating himself. God, he fucking hates how much you affect him against his will.

“Since when do you care about what’s too dangerous for me, huh?” Why in the hell is he arguing with you like you’ve been married for twenty years? “You left me in the snow to freeze to death in my car four days ago, why am I going to listen to you about whats too dangerous for me?” You have a point, but so does he so he just shuts his fucking mouth and keeps on driving.

It takes twice as much time to get down the pass than it usually does, but the lower Joel gets, the more the ice melts into cold water and mud. By the time he gets to your car, the road is clear but the car is still sunk down to the rims in the embankment. Theres a uneasy sort of silence in the truck, something lingering around the cab of the old blue pickup that feels like shame and embarrassment.

“Texting, huh?” He breaks the silence with a crude joke that earns him a deep glare. “Fuck you, asshole. You know, I really don’t know what it is that my parents see in you. My mom always said how polite you were but I don’t believe that for a second after knowing you for a few days.” You prop open the door and climb out into the snow with your car keys in one hand and the other holding your unzipped jacket closed. Your stupid fucking shoes and that tight ass—fuck.

How is he supposed to be okay with the way you make his body react when you literally curse the ground he walks on, thinking he’s the worst thing that ever happened to this damn town? He gets out after you and slips on his gloves to keep the cold off his hands. The winter always leaves him cracked and brittle from cold work, sometimes his knuckles bleed and his bones ache for gentle hands instead of hard callouses and a cowboys scars. “You don’t know anything about me.” He reaches into the back for a chain while you open the door to your car. “I know enough. I know you’re bullheaded and selfish. I know you’re rude and you don’t care about anyone but yourself.”

Fucking bitch, like he’s not allowed to have some self preservation after the life he’s lived, always cleaning up Tommy's mess and abandoning his own life in the process. “Don’t act like you’re any better.” You lean out of your car and make a face at him while he hooks the chain to the front of the truck. “Me? You don’t know a damn thing about me.” Like you didn’t just spout off about all the things you think is wrong with him—he can do that too. He has a fucking list of reasons you piss him off. “I know that you’re entitled and expect people to be at your beck and call. I know you’re privileged with no regard for anyone around you.”

He follows the chain to your car and hooks it to the chassis underneath. “Well were just a match made in fucking heaven then, aren’t we?” Its dripping with distain and bitterness, so Joel ignores the comment no matter how much his brain runs and runs about all the way he could be made for you, the way’s he’d fuck that attitude right out of you until you’re quiet. But he can’t and he won’t, he’ll probably spend the rest of his life wondering what you’d feel like, the way you’d shake and scream and beg for more—but wondering is far as that fantasy will ever go.

Because at the end of the day, you’re still Hank's daughter and you’re still half his age and—you hate his guts, which is definitely a deal breaker when it comes to getting someone in your bed. So he keeps his mouth shut and heads back to his truck to tug your car out. “When you’re out, hit your brakes so you don't slam into me.” You sink down into your seat and glare at him. “I’m not stupid!” He never said you were, but he doesn’t expect you to know everything, so he does his best to be the helpful asshole he usually is.

He pulls the little car out, manages to keep the chain tight until it's back on the road and the brake lights come on in front of him. He puts the truck in park and hops out to unhook the chain, but you don’t open the door. When the car is unhooked, you’re already pulling away without a word of thanks. Joel knows he’s well past earning the way you treat him, but that doesn’t make him stop wishing he could just get you out of his head already, wish he could hate you with that same mind altering disgust that you have for him, maybe watching you drive away would be easier.

Two months pass much like the first week. Joel keeps to himself, you frown at him and avoid him where you can. When you do see one another, Joel feels like you’re always at each other's throats. Everyone in the house has started to notice the distaste in your strained relationship, if Joel is willing to let himself call it that. It’s more like a forced acquaintance. Either way, your parents even see the way the two of you bicker and fight, but rarely does anyone but Tommy make comments about it. Tommy likes to bring it up any chance he gets, usually when Joel is alone just to rile him up further. He says stupid shit, like “I bet the sex you guys would have would be crazy good” when it’s just him and his brother at the dinner table and it makes Joel stiffen and run off to the cabin without his plate or a goodbye.

He sneaks in later for his plate and catches you in the kitchen with red eyes and tear stained cheeks, but you cross your arms over your chest and try not to meet his eyes. You’re dressed in just a big tee shirt and he can see from your bare feet to the tops of your thighs. He’s the luckiest son of s bitch in the world that he just worked himself over twice because he would be tenting his sweatpants right there in the kitchen.

That was three days ago and he still can’t get the sight of tears in your eyes out of his mind. He wonders if he did that, if he’d said something that struck a nerve and there you sat at the kitchen table after everyone was tucked in bed, crying your pretty eyes out. He feels like the worst fucking person in the world because of it, so he stays away even more, makes himself sad little ramen noodle dinners in his sad little hunting cabin he shares with his brother and he stares at his ceiling wishing it was you he was looking up at—smiling instead of frowning for once—all he wants is to see you smile. Really smile, for him, at him. He wonders what your eyes look up when they light up, wonders what your skin feels like when its not shaking in rage.

But between all the avoiding and hiding, Joel didn’t even realize how quickly Christmas had snuck up on him. He checks his phone sometime after lunch, his day spent getting the herd ready for another brutal snow storm. He’d been to town that morning for hot feed to keep them warm and any supplies they might run out of while snowed in, while deep, dark clouds hung in the distance. He was leaving the feed store when the clerk waved at him with a polite “Merry Christmas!” When he made it into the truck, he pulled out his phone and realized the date, December 24th. It was Christmas eve and it was an absolute miracle that stores were open right now. It was only eleven thirty and the sign posted on the door says it closes at two.

He starts to put the truck in reverse, turning around to look behind him while he pulls out. When he does, something inside of him doesn’t let his foot off the brakes. He thinks about you—in Christmas pajamas on the floor opening dumb little gifts from your parents because it's the first Christmas they’ve had with you for years. He imagines what they’d get you, probably things a grown adult needs—products, socks, underwear, (don’t even go there Joel) and he thinks about how disheartening that must be to a woman like you, used to proper city living now, expensive gifts and pretty things. You deserve pretty things, Joel wants to give them to you.

He turns around, throws the truck in park and jumps out, heading back into the feed store. He makes a bee-line for the glass jewelry case sitting in the corner, partially scavenged through since it is the day before christmas and all—he should have thought about this weeks ago. He scans through everything, shiny horse shoe earrings, matching pendants, jeweled cowgirl boots on a chain and turquoise ring sets. None of them look good enough, none of them scream you, sweet you—fuck, he’s seen it, when you’re so damn sweet, when you think no one is looking—Joel is, always looking.

He kneels down, scanning the bottom shelf of the case when he spots a simple golden chain and a bumble bee dangling delicately from its tiny hoops. It doesn’t have any stones on it and Joel thinks he likes that more, that it’s simple and graceful, not too flashy or obviously shoutings “look at what you do to me, look at how much I wish I could have you.”

In the end, he has just enough bills in his wallet for the necklace, tells the clerk he doesn’t need a bag as he stuffs the box in his pocket and heads back to the truck.

He has a busy day when he gets back to ranch, Tommy is checking on the pregnant heifers while Joel fill’s multiple feeders with hot grains that will keep them warm through the impending storm. He has just enough time before it starts to snow to get the horse fed and the equipment properly covered in tarps. This storm is set to drop more snow than they have seen all winter and Joel doesn’t look forward to the animosity that comes with never being able to get out of each other's hair. “How’s the heifers?” He asks Tommy when he brushes grain off his hands. “They all seem pretty far out besides one, she was really soft, sort of worried me.” Heifers get soft around the tail when they are close to caving, but Joel doesn’t think she’ll be willing to have her calf in this storm, so he lets it go. Instead, he takes a spot beside Tommy at the stable door.

“Snow’s comin’ down thick now,” Tommy says from the protective covering of the stable, staring out across the yard at the powder covered ground. Snow blows through the big sliding door, filling the building with cold gusts. “We should get inside before it gets worse.”

Joel wants to—when he looks off at the two story house, the christmas tree shining through the window, he spots you on the other side of it, fixing and ornament hanging from the nettles. The stable is a stone's throw from the house, Joel can see every feature, the color of your eyes, your sweet, sweet smile—because he’s nowhere to be seen.

He’s so busy staring, he doesn’t catch it in time when your eyes meet his across the yard. That sweet smile falls, those soft eyes harden and he feels his gut lurch. “You go ahead, Tommy. Think I’m going to hit the hay.” Tommy knows this bit just about as well as Joel does, knows he’s been avoiding the house, your parents, you because nine times out of ten, it’s just Tommy at dinner these days. Joel spends his night with microwaved meals and old episodes of The Rifleman to keep him busy until he finally gives in and slips his hands in his pants.

Tommy doesn’t put up a fuss, instead, he claps Joel on the shoulder and gives him this sad sort of smile before heading off towards the house. Joel turns in the other direction, follows the fence line for a half mile until he reaches the cabin. His feet are cold, his lips feel cracked after a long day outside in the harsh weather. He microwaves a sad little dinner, pretends the mac and cheese on the side is half as good as warm food at the table when the people he looks at like family. He’s simply not welcome there anymore.

He gets through two episodes before he promptly passes out, his pants left intact tonight because it’s not his dick leading the way tonight, its that look in your eyes when you saw him across the driveway. The pang he felt in his chest when you frowned and turned away like it hurt you to look at him.

He sleeps through the night, propped up like that on the couch and when he wakes on Christmas morning, his neck has a crick in it and his back is killing him. He barely drags himself off the couch and into the shower before his day has to start. The hot water eases out some of his muscles, but it still hurts like a bitch to stand up straight or turn his head.

But the cattle aren’t going to let him take a day off, the horses won't care for themselves, so he gets to it only a few minutes late. When he heads out the door, the ground is covered in two feet of pure white snow and dark clouds still hang overhead.

His Christmas is spent in the field’s and the stables and the box in his pocket burns a hole through his thigh the entire morning, until he’s shoveling off the driveway and the front door comes open. Louise makes her way onto the porch with a plate in her hands, shuffling down the slippery steps when she gets Joel’s attention. He tosses down the shovel and hurries over when she starts to wobble on the second step and nearly slips. He catches her arm and helps her steady before letting out a cold gust of air that fogs through the chill around him. “Miss Lou, what are you doin’ out here? It’s freezing.” She has a light coat on and her cheeks are red from the cold.

“You’re the one out here in the cold, Joel. It’s Christmas and you’re the only one working. Have you had a decent meal this week? I haven’t seen you at dinner in…well, I don’t know how long.” She’s the one reason Joel feels guilty for avoiding the house, in the years he’s lived here, she's always enjoyed cooking for them, she’d always tell him he couldn’t keep her dream alive if he was malnourished. He feels like that now, running on half the calories a man his size should be taking in and his mind is in a constant state of despair these days.

“Just needed some space is all, Ma’am, nothin’ you did.” He assures her, taking the plate carefully and helping her back up the steps. “I know it's not just that. My daughter can be really difficult sometimes…I know you two bicker. It’s a shame, really—I thought the two of you would hit it off.” That's the whole problem and what a shame it is that Joel can’t look at this woman’s daughter without thinking about all the ways he could have her, make her his. “Would you come inside? Hank and I got you something, he thought you would be in this morning but you never came. I'm sorry if your food is cold.”

He didn’t care if it was cold, his stomach hurt because he was so hungry, he'd eat it if it was frozen. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her no, so he heads inside the house with snow covered boots and a nervousness he hasn’t felt here since the first day he stood in this living room. For so long it's felt like his home too—but now he can't help but feel like an intruder.

When he closes the door behind him, Hank and Tommy are watching the game, but you’re nowhere in sight. He tries to shake off his nerves, moves to the couch beside Tommy and sits down. At his brother's feet is a brand new pair of deer skin gloves, Tommy’s favorite—but hard to come by. He knows they weren’t cheap and his heart aches a little, knowing they’d worked hard to pull together the money.

“Glad to see you can pull yourself away for a few minutes. You know it ain’t goin’ anywhere, stay for a little while.” He knows that—the storm will be with them for four days and he knows there will be more snow to shovel tomorrow, but he can’t stay for long, not when your prying eyes finally detect him in your safe haven. “I’ll stay for a little while, still a lot to do out there.” He knows Hank is too old for that kind of work, Tommy’s too lazy and Joel wants nothing more than to escape. “Got you somethin’, been saving up for it for a while now.” He leans down towards the tree and picks up a rather large box—it’s not gloves thats for damn sure. “Sir, I…I didn’t get you nothin’.” He didn’t have the money, he spent every dollar he had to his name on a stupid necklace for his daughter that would rather see him outside in the freezing weather shoveling snow than on her couch in front of the fireplace.

Hank throws a hand, playing off Joel's concern with an amused huff. “You do so much for us around here without asking for anything in return. You had one when you got here but i know it got tore up taking the cattle to pasture.”

Joel rips the wrapping paper, revealing a simple white box with the word Stetson on the top. Joel doesn’t even want to open the damn thing, he knows what's inside and how much it cost, an arm and a leg, probably a month's saving in the off season. “Hank…”

The olde man shakes his head firmly. “You deserve to have the sun off your neck, son. Just say thank you, make sure it fits.”

He pulls open the box and inside lays a black felt hat with a matching band, beautiful leather work that loops into an ornate metal buckle to hold it in place. He pulls the cowboy hat from its box, puts it on his head and—it’s a perfect fit.

It's been a long time since he had a hat, a lot longer since he had a nice one and a lifetime ago since he had the money for a new one, especially one this nice. “I don’t know what to say—thank you, Hank…this really…means more than you know.” More than he knows how to convey with words. It’s been a long time since Joel had a hat that fit, one that wasn’t second hand or made for someone else’s head. But this—this was made for his head, the measurement must be damn near perfect. “How’d you know my size?” He wobbles his head around and the hat doesn’t budge, hangs on snuggly. He’ll even be able to ride with this on. “I measured your head while you were sleepin’.” Tommy tells him with a smug grin. “That's weird, Tommy. I would have kept that to myself.”

It draws a laugh out of Hank who has abandoned the game in favor of watching Joel's excitement. “Well, what are you waiting for—go check yourself out in the mirror, make sure you like it,” he stands and walks over to the mirror hanging on the wall above a decorative entryway shelf. When he spots himself in the reflection, he realizes just how long it’s been since he’s seen the man looking back at him. He’s graying in his beard a little, the age lines on his face have gotten deeper and more pronounced, but the black hat on his head makes that same man grin from ear to ear.

The stairs creek behind him and he turns half of his body to look up them. Stopped halfway down the stairs, you’re staring at him with a slightly slacked jaw. Joel knew it, Christmas jammies that leave your legs exposed to his greedy eyes. This time, he tries to keep them to himself. “Oh, uh…” he swallows down the lump in his throat and his pocket burns all over again. Should he give it to you now? Will everyone question him if he does? If he waits to get you alone, does that suggest that the necklace means everything he wants it to? A peace offering, an ice breaker, a “I’m sorry about the way I’ve treated you, but I want to try again.”

Instead, he leaves it in his pocket and tries to tamper down the way his cheeks heat. “Merry Christmas, Honey.” He tilts his hat up a tad so he can look up at you, but your slightly dumbfounded look morphs into irritation and discontent.

“What are you doing here?” You cross your arms and Joel’s good mood disappears. “Your mom asked me to come in and eat. Your dad wanted to give me this.” He points to the hat and your eyes roll as you make the descent down the rest of the stairs. “So if you’re in here, who’s taking care of the ranch?”

It isn’t often that someone sticks up for one of them in an argument, they tend to not get between the two of you, but to Joel’s surprise, Hank interrupts his daughter. “He’s allowed to come in the house, Honey—he works hard around here, he’s not a yard dog.” But that doesn’t stop you from sneering at him when you pass him on your way to the kitchen where your mother is. “Sure looks like one to me.” It’s under your breath so Hank doesn’t hear, but Joel does.

And he feels like a fool. A fool for spending the last of his money on this stupid fucking necklace, like a fool for being so plagued by thoughts of you in a different world, one where you don’t innately hate him, one where he doesn’t fuck up every chance he has to change the narrative.

“I should get back to it, I’ll see you guys…later.” He starts to head for the door when Louise pokes her head around the corner. “Please come in for Dinner!” Joel tells her that he will, he hates lying to miss Lou, but he does it because it’s Christmas and the last thing he wants to do is worry her today.

He wastes the day shoveling off the driveway, tries his best to rub out the crick in his neck and finally calls it a day when the sun is nearly set and the animals are bunkered down for the night. It’s started to snow again, so Joel makes his way back to the cabin with tired limbs and a new dusting of snow hanging onto the brim of his hat.

Dinner is just as lonely as the night before but this time he doesn’t pretend it's Lou’s cooking, he lets it be exactly what it is—a tasteless mush and his misery to sip on.

The Rifleman is just as predictable as it was the night before, as is Joel—who falls asleep before he has the heart to get his hands on his dick. But unlike last night, he doesn’t make it long propped up on the couch before a knock startles him awake. He drags himself to the door with sleep in his eyes and a chill in his bones. When he pulls it open, his pocket ignites again. On the other side of the door, you’re standing in front of him with a plate in your hands and a vicious storm letting down behind you. Did you walk here in that? “My mom said I chased you off, that’s why you didn’t come to dinner.” Well, you aren’t wrong. If you were still away at college, Joel would have no problem spending Christmas with Hank and Louise and Tommy who is apparently too good to walk you down here.

“You didn’t have to bring me anything.” He says. He glances to the side where his hat hangs on the rack. “Actually, my mom made me so no, I didn’t have a choice.” Ahh, of course—of course you wouldn’t do something that nice for him. “Well, thank her for me, then…” he reaches out for the plate and his fingers brush yours—bolts of electricity shooting up his arm and igniting his starved skin. It’s been so damn long since someone has touched him with kind hands and all he wants is yours—your soft, gentle hands he’s seen folding laundry and soothing horses. You don’t release the plate, but your eyes track up to his, meeting them across the threshold.

He could hold that gaze for the rest of his life if you’d let him—he’s always wanted a chance to get lost in your eyes and he’s getting it right now, his home pouring with cold in exchange for the heat in your cheeks and the sparkle in your irises. “Joel—“

There's a loud sound somewhere over the fence beside the cabin. It draws both of your attention to the blinding darkness. Joel knows that sound, a distressed heifer, probably the one who was too damn close to calving in a storm like this. There’s no way Joel can save that calf if it doesn’t make it and even if he wanted to, the snow is too thick to help.

“What is that?” You ask, finally dropping your hand away from his when you glance back up at him. “Heifer, think she’s calving—Tommy said she was really soft and her milk came in. Afraid that calf might not make it tonight.”

There's a look of disbelief in your eyes, shooting from Joel to the fence line and back. “You can’t help her?” Joel shakes his head and listens to the cow cry out again. “Nothin’ I can do for her. They aren’t supposed to be calving yet, we still have a few more weeks and it’s too cold out there. We might lose the heifer too.”

Joel observes the way sadness takes over your face, then determination. “I’m going out there to help her.” You tell him, already heading off the porch before Joel can even interject. “Don’t you hear me? She’s not going to make it, honey, just let it go.” But you don’t, you start to jog towards the fence line, so Joel huffs in annoyance and slips into his boots and jacket, finally pulling his hat on on his way out the door. He grabs a spotlight off the shelf by the door and follows your tracks through the snow to the fence line. It doesn’t take him long until he finds you, knelt behind a laboring cow, who’s already pushing in the freezing cold. “I can’t get this calf to safety and this storm is getting worse—it’s not safe to be out here.”

There's blood marring the white snow and your delicate hands. “I’m not letting her die in the snow on christmas because we made her have a baby, Joel—she didn’t ask for this.” Joel sets the light in the snow beside him and rolls his sleeves up, kneeling down beside you in the soaked snow. “She’s not going to make it.”

You make a face at him, one Joel is more than accustomed to. “I’m not letting her die alone, then.” And Joel isn’t going to leave you alone in the snow for a second time, so he stays there beside you, helping deliver the little black calf, who shivers wetly in the cold. It’s a little boy, floppy ears and a wobble to him when he tries to hold his head up. Joel can't help but smile, because this is always beautiful, even if he can't save this little calf. He looks up and you’re grinning right back at him, your cheeks bitten red by the cold and your hands shaking, but you look so fucking proud right now. Joel is too, after watching you pull that calf out of his momma like you were made for that.

“What if we get them inside, would they make it then?” Joel doesn’t see how, the snow is too thick and someone would have to carry him. “They wont fit in my cabin and the stable is a half a mile away. We’d have to drag momma through this snow.” He has a lead in the cabin, he could get her out of this snow, he thinks. Would she even want to go, after having a calf in the ridged cold. “We should try—we should at least try.”

Joel leans back and brushes the blood off on his pants. “Yeah—fine, we can try. Stay right here, keep rubbing him to keep him warm.” He stands and jogs back to the cabin, racing inside for the lead that he runs back to you with. You have the calf laid out along your legs while you rub his wet skin. “He’s slowing down. I can feel his heart slowing down.” He’s getting too cold out here—if Joel doesn’t act now, he won't make it, so he wraps the halter around the heifers head and hands you the lead. “Think you can pull her? She’s going to put up a fight.” You take the lead from him and nod, grabbing the light out of the snow while he picks the calf up under his belly. He makes a little sound at Joel while he starts to make his way through the deep snow.

It’s a long walk back to the stables, but you tug on that heifer and Joel carries the calf the entire way there, until he reaches the gate and manages to push it open just enough to get them through. He makes it to the stable doors in just enough time, throws it open and helps you inside. It’s not much warmer in here, but theres no snow and theres straw in the empty stable towards the back, so Joel makes his way over and lays the little calf down in the bedding. You’re right behind him with the heifer who takes straight to her baby once she has him in her sight again.

Joel plops down in the straw in the corner of the room once they are both situated, trying to catch his breath and warm himself up at the same time. He’s covered in blood, so are you, but you saved both of their lives and Joel has more respect for that than he knows what to do with. You risked your life out there for a baby cow and his momma.

“You did a good thing, out there. I’m sorry I didn’t want to listen to you.” You find a spot beside him in the hay and sink down, leaned against the wood wall with your shoulder pressed against his with how closely you sit. “You have every right to question me…you’re right, you know…I have no clue what I’m doing around here. Four years of school and the only thing I know how to do around here is the books, which is easy because were so broke.” Joel's heart aches for you, the sadness in your tone and the defeated look in your eyes. “I almost got us killed out there.”

Joel shakes his head and leans himself back against the wall too. “But you didn’t. You saved us a lot of money and saved his little life. I’d say that's a win.” He knows it doesn’t feel like one when everything else is coming down on your shoulders, but he can pretend it is for your sake. “Thanks, Joel.” You lean a little more, bumping his shoulder with a quiet yawn.

His pocket begins to burn again, but this time, it isn’t followed by the shame he’s felt all day. “I uhm…I hope it’s not weird, but I got you something…” he reaches into his pocket and starts to fish it out. “You didn’t have to do that,” you interject but he shakes his head. “I just saw it while I was at the feed store, thought of you.” He pulls out the blue box and holds it out to you. He tries not to read too much into the look on your face when you open the box, but he has to know. It looks like confusion, then shock and finally, sadness. “I was really rude to you this mornin’…and you had this in your pocket to give it to me?” You look over at him with big eyes, full of something Joel has never seen in them. “It’s alright—I deserved that.”

You shake your head and start to pull the necklace out of the box. “I called you a dog, Joel—you didn’t deserve that.”

He shrugs his shoulders, trying to rid both of you of the shame of that conversation. You hold the necklace up and admire it for a while, the little gold bee that’s going to lay against your chest, against your heart. You hold it out to him with a little quick of your lips. “Would you?” He takes it from you and you turn your back to him, using one hand to hold up your hair while he undoes the clasp and brings his hands around your neck, laying it around your delicate throat. It feels so intimate, sitting here in the hay beside a newborn baby calf in the middle of a snowstorm on christmas.

His knuckles brush against your neck gently when he does the clasp together, letting is hang from your neck, feels like a fucking brand on his skin. You turn back around, meet his eyes and smile carefully. There's a comfortable silence filling up the space between you, so Joel leans back against the wood and sighs to himself. “Let me walk you back to the house…it’s getting late.” His words are low and slow.

You nod at him and he stands, holding out a hand to pull you to your feet. He walks you out of the stables, through the blizzard and up to the porch of the big white house. “Where are you going?” You ask him when you get to the door. “Don’t know if I can make it back to the cabin in this. Might sleep out in the stable so I can keep an eye on the little guy.”

You don’t say anything, just stare at him for a long moment, then glance behind you at the warm house. “Come inside…Tommy took the guest bedroom but you can have the couch. It’s better than being out here in the cold.”

He wants to decline, but when will he get this opportunity again? To mend what's been broken between you? “Yeah—sure, that sounds better than straw poking me in the ass all night long.”

It makes you giggle and that makes Joel's stomach churn, his cheeks heat and his hands flex as he follows you inside. You get him a blanket, help him get situated in the low glow of the christmas tree in the corner.

When he kicks his boots off and settles down on the couch, you start to head for the stairs. He thinks you’re going to head up, but you pause at the bottom of the stairs before turning to look at him. “Thank you for helping me today.”

He hums, smiles and shakes his head. “It was my pleasure.”

There's another long silence, then you take the first step up the stairs. “Goodnight, Joel…Merry Christmas.”

He smiles back at you with tired eyes.

“Merry Christmas, Honey.”

#joel miller #joel miller fanfiction #pedro pascal #joel miller x reader #the last of us #joel the last of us #cowboy joel #pedro pascal fanfic

118 notes · View notes

thatscarletflycatcher · 1 month

Text

"He told the truth, mainly": what Paul Moses knew about Huckleberry Finn.

(Abridged from Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction)

Mark Twain had himself done a lot of ethical criticism long before he published his famous warning against morality hunters at the head of Huckleberry Finn ([1884] 1982). I am thinking not mainly of essays like the devastating “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” but rather of the criticism implicit in his fictions… In short, Mark Twain knew well enough what it means to “find a moral” in a tale, and he knew that every tale is loaded with “morals,” even if it avoids explicit moralizing.

What he was right to fear is the destruction that can result for any story, and particularly for any comic story, when a reader busily extracts moralities rather than enjoying the tale… When he mocked courtly romances in A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and adventure tales in Tom Sawyer and parts of Huckleberry Finn, he must have known that his perceptive readers would never again enjoy those originals quite so much. And as the kind of moralist who increasingly was to lay about him with a heavy cudgel, with fewer and fewer freely comic effects, he had good reason to know that people who put their attention on finding the moral in any human story risk destroying the fun of it. Critics like me who do find a moral are going to be distracted from the sheer joy of dwelling for many hours in the mind and heart of a great natural comic poet, that “bad boy,” Huckleberry Finn.

Even so, I suspect that Twain would have been surprised, and no doubt dismayed, at the floods of moral criticism evoked by the tale. Initially the moralists’ attention seems to have been entirely on the dangers to young people of encountering the aggressive “immorality” of Huck himself—his smoking, his lying, his stealing, not to mention his irreverent “attitude.”... Twain could easily have predicted— and no doubt savored the prediction—that the portrait of an appealing youngster openly repudiating most “sivilized” norms would upset good people…

The uselessness of “conscience” is dramatized with example after example of how Huck’s conscience, actually the destructive morality implanted by a slave society, combats his native impulse to do what he really ought to do—what Twain called his “good heart.” The most famous attack on the norms dictated by obedience to public morality—and especially by official Christianity '’—comes when Huck realizes that he is committing a terrible sin in helping Jim escape slavery. Almost two-thirds of the way through the novel, long after Huck has discovered his love for Jim and has been willing to “humble myself to a nigger” and apologize for a cruel trick (709; ch. 15), Huck sits down to think by himself, after hearing some adults talking about how easy it is to pick up reward money for turning in a runaway slave. Though the pages that follow are probably more widely known than any other passage in American literature, I must trace them in some detail, because they have always provided the evidence used by us liberals in opposing Paul Moses’s kind of indictment.

[I omit that part of the discussion, as it is widely known in how the text is taught in schools]

The Indictment

If Twain could have predicted such conventional distress, he could not have predicted Paul Moses’s response, the response, as we might say, of “good old Jim’s” great-great-grandchildren reading the novel from a new perspective—not Jim’s, not Huck’s, not the white liberals’ of the 1880s or 1980s, but theirs: the perspective of a black reader in our time thinking about what that powerful novel has for a hundred years been teaching Americans about race and slavery. It would surely have shocked Twain to find that some modern black Americans see the book as reactionary in its treatment of racial questions:

For black people and for those sympathetic to their long struggle for fair treatment in North America, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn spirals down to a dispiriting and racist close. The high adventures of the middle chapters, Huck’s admiration of Jim, Jim’s own strong selfconfidence, and the slave’s willingness to protect and guide Huck are all rendered meaningless by the closing chapters in which Twain turns Jim over to two white boys out on a lark. (Jones 1984, 34)

As a black parent... I sympathize with those who want the book banned, or at least removed from required reading lists in schools. While I am opposed to book banning, I know that my children’s education will be enhanced by not reading Huckleberry Finn. (Lester 1984, 43)

Such objections might well have seemed to Twain much more perverse than the cries of alarm from the pious. After all, the book does in fact attack the pious; they were in a sense reading it as it asked to be read—as an attack on them. But when black readers object to it, and even attempt to censor it from public schools (Hentoff 1982), are they not simply failing to see the thrust of scenes like the one I have quoted? How can they deny that Jim is “the moral center” of the work, that Twain has struck a great blow against racism and for racial equality, and that the book when read properly could never harm either blacks or whites?

So I might have argued with Paul Moses. So most white liberals today still argue when blacks attack the book. So even some black readers defend the book today. Many critics have objected, true enough, to the concluding romp that Tom Sawyer organizes in a mock attempt to free the already freed Jim. But most of the objections have been about a failure of form: Twain made an artistic mistake, after writing such a marvelous book up to that point, by falling back into the tone of Tom Sawyer. Not realizing the greatness of what he had done in the scenes on the river, he simply let the novel “spiral down,” or back, into the kind of comic stereotypes of the first few chapters. Though put as a formal objection to incoherence, this objection could be described as ethical, in the broadest sense: the implied standard is that great novels probe moral profundities; because the ending of Huck Finn is morally shallow, the book as a whole ought not be accepted as great.

Seldom is the case made that the ending is not just shallow but morally and politically offensive. Most critics have talked as if it would be absurd to raise questions about the racial values of a book in which the very moral center is a noble black man so magnanimous that he gives himself back into slavery in order to help a doctor save a white boy’s life. Why should this book, so clearly anti-racist, be subjected to the obviously partisan criticism of those who do not even take the trouble to understand what a great blow the book strikes for black liberation? Critics, black and white, are inclined to talk like this: [E]xcept for Melville’s work, Huckleberry Finn is without peers among major Euro-American novels for its explicitly anti-racist stance. Those who brand the book ‘racist’ generally do so without having considered the specific form of racial discourse to which the novel responds. (Smith 1984, 4)

In this view, all the seemingly objectionable elements, such as the use of the word “nigger,” are signs, when read properly, of Twain’s enlightened rebellion against racist language and expectations. The defense is well summarized by one black critic who seems enthusiastic about the book, Charles H. Nichols. Huck Finn, he says, is an indispensable part of the education of both black and white youth. It is indispensable because (1) it unmasks the violence, hypocrisy and pretense of nineteenth-century America; (2) it re-affirms the values of our democratic faith, our celebration of the worthiness of the individual, however poor, ignorant or despised; (3) it gives us a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society; (4) it dramatizes the truth that justice and freedom are always in jeopardy. (Nichols 1984, 14)

Accepting the first two and the last of these, with minor qualifications, must we not question the third? Can we really accept this novel as a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society?

It was in an effort to answer that question that I recently read the great novel again, asking what its full range of fixed norms appears to be, a century after its composition, and thus what its influence on American racial thinking is likely to be. While I found again the marvelously warm and funny novel I had always loved, I found another one alongside it, as it were. That novel looks rather different. Here is how a fully “suspicious” interpreter might view it:

“This is the story of how a pre-adolescent white boy, Huck, reared in the worst possible conditions no mother and a drunken, bigoted, cruel, and impoverished father—discovers in his own good heart and flatly against every norm of his society that he can love an older black slave, Jim—love him so strongly that he violates his own upbringing and tries to help Jim escape from slavery. Huck fails in his sporadic attempt to free Jim, but Jim is (entirely fortuitously) freed by a stroke of conscience (the same ‘good heart’?) in his owner just before she dies. (There is some problem of credibility here, since she presumably has good reason to believe, along with others in her town, that Jim earlier killed Huck Finn; but let that pass.)

“At the beginning and again at the end of the novel, Jim is portrayed as an ignorant, superstitious, boastful, kind but gullible comic ‘nigger,’ more grown child than adult. Naturally affectionate toward and uncritical of his white masters, he is almost pathetically grateful for any expression of sympathy or aid. During the central part of the novel he is turned into something of a father figure for Huck; we see him as a loving father of his own children (full of remorse about having beaten a child who turns out to be deaf); and as a deeply loyal friend (once he has found that his ‘only friend’ is the almost equally ignorant but less gullible white boy). He becomes, for large stretches, an ideally generous, spiritually sound, wonderfully undemanding surrogate parent. The implication is clear: wipe slavery away and you will find beneath its yoke a race of natural Christians: unscarred, loving, infinitely grateful people who will cooperate lovingly with their former masters (with the good ones, anyway) in trying to combat the wicked white folks, of which the world seems to be full. (There are no other black characters—just the one ‘good nigger.’) Only occasionally through these middle chapters does the author reduce Jim again to the role of stage prop. Whenever he gets in the way of the author’s plan to satirize the mores of small town and rural American society, he is simply dropped out of sight— and out of Huck’s mind: an expendable property, to be treated benevolently as part of the implied author’s claim to belong to the tiny saving remnant of human beings who escape his indictment of a vicious mankind.

“All the more curious then that we find, especially in a couple of chapters at the beginning and in a prolonged section at the end—al- most a third of the whole book—that Jim is portrayed as simply a comic butt, suitable for exploitation by cute little white boys of good heart who have been led into concocting a misguided adventure by reading silly books. There are moments in the novel when we expect that Huck Finn will discover behind the stereotype of the ‘good nigger- mistreated’ a real human being, someone whose feelings and condition matter as much as those of whites and who at the same time is not, under the skin, merely a collection of Sunday school virtues; a white prince in disguise (‘I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it” [905; ch. 42]). But we lose this hope early, and we are not really surprised, only disgusted, when Huck forgets all that he might have learned and allows himself to take part in Tom’s scheme to free the already freed Jim. Huck is in one sense invulnerable to our criticism here, because he thinks that he is still ‘wickedly’ freeing a slave, his friend. But the novel, like the mischievous Tom Sawyer, simply treats Jim and his feelings here as expendable, as sub-human—a slave to the plot, as it were. We readers are expected to laugh as Tom and Huck develop baroque maneuvers that all the while keep Jim in involuntary imprisonment. Twain, the great liberator, keeps Jim enslaved as long as possible, one might say, milking every possible laugh out of a situation which now seems less frequently and less wholeheartedly funny than it once did.”

”Twain’s full indifference to what all this means to Jim, and his seeming indifference to the full meaning of slavery and emancipation, is shown in the way he exonerates Tom for his prank and compensates Jim for his prolonged suffering. I italicize (superseding Twain’s italics in this passage) the moments that now give me some trouble as I think about what the liberal Twain is up to:

We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room; and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

“Dah, now, Huck, what I tell you?—what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan’? I tole you I got a hairy breas’, en what’s de sign un it; en I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin; en it’s come true; en heah she is! Dah, now! doan talk to me—-signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis’ ’s well ’at I ’uz gwineter be rich agin as I’s a stannin’ heah dis minute!” (911; “Chapter the Last’’)

All nice and clear now? The happy-go-lucky ex-slave, superstitious, absurdly confused about the value of money (he happily clutches at the gift of forty dollars while Huck, by the final turn on the next page, gets six thousand), reveals himself as overjoyed with his fate, and all is well. But just what is the “vision of love and harmony” that this novel “educates” us to accept? We find in it the following fixed norms:

1. Black people, slaves and ex-slaves, are a special kind of good people—so naturally good, in their innocent simplicity, that the effects on them of slavery will not be discernible once slavery is removed. Some few whites are like that, too—the Huck Finns of the world who miraculously escape corruption by virtue of sheer natural goodness.

2. Black people are hungry for love (essentially friendless, unless whites befriend them) and they will be (should be) obsequiously grateful for whatever small favors whites grant them, in their benignity.

3. White people are of three kinds: the wicked and foolish, a majority; the foolish good— essentially generous people like the Widow Watson who are made foolish by obedience to social norms; and naturally good people, like Huck, whose only weapons against the wicked are a simulated passivity and obedience covering an occasionally successful trickery. We may find also an occasional representative of a fourth kind, the essentially decent but thoughtless trickster, the creator of stories, like Tom— and Mark Twain. They will entertain the world regardless of consequences.

4. The consequences of emancipation will be as good as they can be, in this wicked world, so long as you (the white liberal reader) have your heart in the right place—as you clearly do because you have palpitated properly to Huck’s discovery of a full sense of brotherhood with Jim. You needn’t worry about his losing that sense almost before he finds it; after all, Huck, our hero, is not responsible for anything that society might have done or might yet do about the aftermath of slavery.

5. All institutional arrangements, all government, all “‘sivilization,” all laws, are absurd—and absurdly irrelevant to what is, after all, the supreme value in life: feeling “comfortable,” as Huck so often expresses his deepest value, comfortable with “oneself,” that ultimate source of intuition which, if one is among the lucky folk, will be a sure guide.”'

6. The highest form of human comfort is found when two innocent males can shuck off all civilized restraints and responsibilities, as represented by silly women, and simply float lazily through a scene of natural beauty, catching their fish and smoking their pipes. As Arnold Rampersad says, “Much adventuring is [like this novel] written by men for the little boys supposedly resident in grown men, and to cater to their chauvinism” (1984, 49). The ideal of freedom, for both blacks and whites, is a freedom from restraint, not a freedom to exercise virtues and responsibilities— which is to say, in the words of another black critic, Julius Lester, “a mockery of freedom, a void” (1984, 46). The final addition to that blissful freedom-in-a-void is to be (or to identify with) a rebellious white child cared for and loved by the very one who might otherwise be feared, since he might be expected to act hatefully once free: the slave, toward whom the reader feels guilt. If we will just let nature take its course, those we have en- slaved will rise from their slavery to love us and carry us to the promised land.

After Such Sins, What Forgiveness?

What can we reply to such a picture? Not, I think, that it is irrelevant to our view of the book. Not that such a suspicious reader “does not know how to read genuine literature, which is not concerned with teaching lessons.” And not, surely, that the fixed norms central to the power of this book are all to the good. The events of the past hundred years have taught us—since apparently we needed the teaching—that America after Emancipation and the aborted Reconstruction just did not work that way, though white northern liberals until this last quarter of a century tended to act as if it did, or should. Nor can we take what is perhaps the most frequent tack in defending Twain: “He rose to a great moral height in the middle of the book, then simply got tired, or lost touch with his Muse, and fell back into the Tom Sawyer gambit.” That line will not work because the problems we have discovered are not confined to the gratuitous cruelty and condescension of the final “evasion.” Though they are most clearly dramatized there, they run beneath the surface of the whole book --even those wonderful moments that I have quoted of Huck’s moral battles with himself.

In the critical literature about Huck Finn, | find three main lines of defense of the book as an American classic.” In all of them, the novel is treated as a coherent fiction, not as a work that simply collapsed toward the end.

The first is the simplest: the attribution to Huck, not to Mark Twain, of all the ethical deficiencies. Since Twain is obviously a master ironist, and since we see hundreds of moments in the book when he and the reader stand back and watch Huck make mistakes, why cannot we assume that any flaw of perception or behavior we discern is part of Twain’s portrait of a “character whose moral vision, though profound, is seriously and consistently flawed” (Gabler-Hover 1987, 69)? In this view, the problems we have raised result strictly from Twain’s use of Huck’s blindnesses as “an added indictment against the society of which he [Huck] is a victim” (74; see also Smith 1984, 6, IO).

Clearly this defense will work perfectly, if we embrace it in advance of our actual experience line- by-line: dealing with any first-person narrative, we can explain away any fault, no matter how horrendous, if we assume in advance an author of unlimited wisdom, tact, and artistic skill. But such an assumption, by explaining everything, takes care of none of our more complex problems. If we do not pre-judge the case, the appeal to irony excuses only those faults that the book invites us to see through, thus joining the author in his ironic transformations. Our main problems, not just with the ending but with the most deeply embedded fixed norms of the book as a whole, remain unsolved.

George C. Carrington similarly defends the ending as of a piece with the rest of the novel, and in doing so he also defends the novel as the work of a great moral teacher who “knew what he was doing.” But he discerns not so much a great conscious ironist as an author exhibiting great intuitive wisdom, a kind of sage. The questionable norms are indeed to be found in the work, but they are fundamentally criticized by it: the views and effects I have challenged are themselves challenged by the great art of Twain, an art that in a sense goes beyond his conscious intentions. The work’s moral duplicity in fact is a brilliant portrayal of the national dilemma following the collapse of Reconstruction. Twain “could not help paralleling the national drama-sequence,” Carrington says; the story of Huck is “rather like” the story of the northern middle class, many of them former Radical Republicans who had fought to free the slaves, [who had become] irritated by the long bother of Reconstruction, became tired of southern hostility, and were easily seduced by strong-willed politicians and businessmen into abandoning the freedmen for new excitements like railroad building. . . . The spirit that led the country to accept the Compromise [of 1877, that abandoned the goals of Reconstruction] might ironically be called ‘the spirit of 77.’ Absorbed in his work and his new life in Hartford, Twain shared that spirit. He thought the Compromise a very good thing indeed... . Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is thus not only a great but a sadly typical American drama of race: not a stark tragedy of black suffering, but a complex tragicomedy of white weakness and indifference. It is one of those modern books that, as Lionel Trilling says, ‘read us,’ tell ‘us’… about ourselves. . . . The meanness of Huckleberry Finn is not that man is evil but that he is weak and doomed to remain weak. . . . Twain did not shirk the presentation, but managed to avert his gaze from the subject’s Medusa horrors by looking at it through his uncomprehending narrator. .. . By experiencing and accepting the ending we can perhaps take a step toward a similar level of self-awareness. A novel that can help its readers do that is indeed a masterwork and deserves its very high place. (1976, 190-92)

While it seems remotely possible that an author with a mind as ironically devious as Twain’s could have worked, consciously or unconsciously, to ensure that some few readers over the centuries would read the work in this special way, obviously most readers have not done so—no doubt because the book itself offers no surface clues to support such a reading. Indeed, both of these defenses spring more from the critics’ ethical programs and ingenuity than from anything that the novel proposes for itself. On the contrary, a vast majority of the artistic strokes, especially during the “evasion,” seem explicitly de- signed to heighten our comic delight in a way that would make these interpretations implausible. They both depend on the wisdom and insight of a reader who has learned to see through the “surface” of the book and recognize that it in fact mocks naive readers who laugh wholeheartedly at Tom’s pranks. They thus leave us with the question, What then happens to the great unwashed, for whom so much of the book has proved totally deceptive? Well, they are going to identify mistakenly with a deceptive implied author who has in some sense worked to take them in. Meanwhile, the real author is above all this,

creating a work that a few discerning readers can make out, after weeks, perhaps years, of careful study. In short, the defense may work well if what we are thinking of is maximum fairness to Twain, but it doesn’t work at all for the critic who cares about what a book does to or for the majority of its readers, sophisticated or unsophisticated. A third influential defense, considerably more complex, has the virtue of leaving the reader able to laugh at the troublesome ending, though embarrassed by the laughter. James Cox argues that Twain set out, through the attacks on Huck’s conscience that lead to his great moment of decision to go to hell, to enact a conversion of morality into pleasure (1966, 171-76). The form implicit in such an ethic demanded an ending that celebrates pleasure and makes everyone “comfortable,” including of course Huck and Jim. But at the moment of choice, that same form requires not the election of pleasure but of another “conscience,” the northern conscience that combats the southern conscience of Huck’s upbringing: “In the very act of choosing to go to hell he has surrendered to the notion of a principle of right and wrong. He has forsaken the world of pleasure [his own eternal salvation] to make a moral choice” (180). It is that conscience which validates, in Huck’s eyes, his going along with Tom, even though he thinks until the end that Tom, who was brought up right, is unbelievably wicked in working to free Jim.

The result is that when we exercise a “northern conscience” that confirms Huck’s choice and find ourselves laughing at the burlesque, “we are the ones who become uncomfortable. The entire burlesque ending is a revenge upon the moral sentiment which, though it shielded the humor, ultimately threatened Huck’s identity [as a natural hedonist]” (181).

If the reader sees in Tom’s performance a rather shabby and safe bit of play, he is seeing no more than the exposure of the approval with which he watched Huck operate. For if Tom is rather contemptibly setting a free slave free, what after all is the reader doing, who begins the book after the fact of the Civil War? This is the “joke” of the book—the moment when, in outrageous burlesque, it attacks the sentiment which its style has at once evoked and exploited. . . . This is the larger reality of the ending—what we may call the necessity of the form. That it was a cost which the form exacted no one would deny. But to call it a failure, a piece of moral cowardice, is to miss the true rebellion of the book, for the disturbance of the ending is nothing less than our and Mark Twain’s recognition of the full meaning of Huckleberry Finn. (175, 181)

Again we see here a critic who saves the novel by rejecting the reading that almost every white reader until recently must have given it. Each reading considers “the reader” —the “we” of these passages—to be plainly and simply the white reader, and neither one considers closely the effects on the white reader who does not feel uncomfortable with the ending. But surely the most common reading of this book, by non-professional whites, has always been the kind of enraptured, thoroughly comfortable reading that I gave it when young, the kind that sees the final episodes as a climax of good clean fun, the kind in fact that Brander Matthews gave it on first publication:

The romantic side of Tom Sawyer is shown in most delightfully humorous fashion in the account of his difficult devices to aid in the easy escape of Jim, a runaway negro. Jim is an admirably drawn character. There have been not a few fine and firm portraits of negroes in recent American fiction, of which Mr. Cable’s Bras-Coupé in the Grandissimes is perhaps the most vigorous, and Mr. Harris’s Mingo and Uncle Remus and Blue Dave are the most gentle. Jim is worthy to rank with these; and the essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro have never been better shown than here by Mark Twain. . . . Of the more broadly humorous passages—and they abound— ... they are to the full as funny as in any of Mark Twain’s other books; and perhaps in no other book has the humorist shown so much artistic restraint, for there is in Huckleberry Finn no mere “comic copy,’ no straining after effect. (Matthews 1885, 154; qtd. in Blair and Hill 1962, 499-500)

If that is in fact what most white “liberals” have made of the book until recently, it dramatizes the inadequacy of the defenses we have so far considered. A book that thus feeds the stereotypes of the Brander Matthews kind of reader insults all black readers, and it redeems itself only by inciting some few sophisticated critics, many decades later, to think hard about how the story implicates white readers in unpleasant truths. That is surely not what we ordinarily mean when we call a book a classic. Even if we find a reading that at some deep level vindicates Twain for writing better than he knew, our ethical concerns remain unanswered.

Still hoping that I might someday see more merit in these defenses by others, I turn to my own efforts and find, to my considerable distress, that each of them seems almost as weak as those I have rejected. We might first use the “conversational” defense that worked for Lawrence: though Twain’s racial liberalism was inevitably limited, though he failed to imagine the “good Negro” with anything like the power of his portraits of good and bad whites, though in effect he simply wipes Jim out as a character in the final pages, he has still, by his honest effort to create the first full literary friendship between a white character and a slave, permanently opened up this very conversation we are engaged in. We would not be talking about what it might mean to cope adequately with the heritage of slavery, in literary form, had he not intervened in our conversation. There is surely something to this point, but unfortunately the argument fits Twain less well than Lawrence. Twain is not a great conversationalist, not at all “polyphonic”; rather, he is a great monologuist. We have seen here that he is not particularly good at responding to our questions: the critics I have quoted have had to do too much of the work. A great producer of confident opinions—many of them by the time he wrote already thoroughly established (for example, slavery is bad)—he never probes very deep. His positions on issues have not stimulated the kind of public debates that continue about Lawrence’s views. Instead we find collections of colorful expressions, like Your Personal Mark Twain: In Which the Great American Ventures an Opinion on Ladies, Language, Liberty, Literature, Liquor, Love, and Other Controversial Subjects (Twain 1969). Twain has opinions about many matters, but their intellectual content or moral depth would not give many TV shows serious competition. His mind takes me into no new conceptual depths; he is conventionally unconventional, so easily seduced by half-baked ideas that one would be embarrassed to offer him as a representative American intellectual.

Might I “save” him, then—or rather myself, because he is after all quite secure on his pedestal—by talking of the healing, critical power of laughter, the sheer value of comedy? Here is what I might say: “Let us celebrate Mark Twain’s preeminent comic genius, his gifted imaginings of beloved but ludicrous characters in a (quite ‘unreal,’ quite “unconvincing’) world of their own, a world in which I love to spend my days and hours and from which I emerge delighted that my world has included that kind of sheer delight. Samuel Johnson says somewhere that the sheer gift of innocent pleasure is not to be scoffed at, in a world where most pleasures are not innocent. Twain redeems my time by providing me a different ‘time’ during which my life feels quite glorious.

“It is true that in that world, in that time, there are dangerous simplifications and moments of embarrassment: it is a world inhabited only by good guys and bad guys, clever ones and stupid ones, and Twain tries to lead me too easily to think that I—one of the good and clever ones—can tell which are which. There are marvelously absurd clowns and villains, and I don’t have to reproach myself (as I do in life) for finding them clownish and villainous. I relish here good, honest, wholesome, intense sentiment; I relish an absolute sureness that everything will turn out all right and a freedom from the ‘uncomfortable’ burdens of conscience. Just think of that achievement. Twain has portrayed a world of cruelty and misery, a world of national shame, a world in which good people will in fact always be bested by the bad, and he makes us believe that everything must turn out all right! How many other novels can I think of that I can re-read again and again, teach to students and teach again, decade after decade, and still wish, after each re-reading, that they would go on longer? Huck Finn thus provides me with a kind of moral holiday even while stimulating my thought about moral issues. What a gift this is, this terribly misguided, potentially harmful work! If you try to take it away from me (you censors, black or white) I will fight you tooth and nail.

“How, then, you ask, does Huckleberry Finn differ from simple escape literature of the kind that we enjoy for an hour and then dismiss without a second thought? It does so in two ways, both of which we have hinted at already. The first is the quality of the escape: line by line, Twain simply rewards my returns with exquisite pleasures that are not so much ‘escape’ from life as the kind of thing life ought to be for. The second is a somewhat different form of our ‘conversational’ defense of Lawrence. Though Twain’s fantasy of the innocent boy discovering within his natural self the resources for overcoming society’s miseducation about ‘difference’ threatens us with the kinds of dangers I have described, it also moves us with a mythic experience that can lead to endless but fruitful inquiry into what kind of creatures we are. It is no accident that it is Huck Finn of all Twain’s works that stimulates controversy about the ethical quality of its ending and about its central situation. Somehow the fantasy/myth touches us at our most sensitive points.

In brief, long before Paul Moses and Charles Long had ever led me to think ethically about the book, it had already done its true work in this respect. The vivid images of that great-hearted black man crouched patiently in that shed, waiting while the unconsciously cruel Huck and the consciously, irresponsibly cruel adventurer Tom planned an escape that almost destroys them all— hose images haunted me even as I laughed, and they haunt me still.

“I can never know, of course, just how much miseducation the novel has provided while haunting me in this way. Who am I to say that simply thinking about the book can have removed the kinds of distortion that my black friends have pointed out. But I do believe that the mythic force of that book will be a permanent possession, a permanent gift, long after we repair black/white relations as we find them in the twentieth century. Just as Homer’s epics can now no longer harm our children in the specific way that worried Plato—shaking their confidence in the rationality and decency of the Greek gods—I suspect that Huck Finn will survive the longed-for time when racial conflict is no longer a political and moral issue in our lives.”

I seem to have grown warmer in this defense than in any of the others. But always at my back I hear the voices of those readers—including myself now—who see that the infatuation is not after all innocent. They remind me that the hours I spend in that world are after all fantasy hours; whether or not I see them as that, they have the power to deflect my imagination in dangerous ways. Jim is the “Negro” we whites might in weaker moments have hoped would emerge from slavery: docile, grateful for our gift of a freedom that nobody should ever have had the right to withhold, satisfied with a full stomach and a bit more cash than he’d had before. The picture of pre—Civil War America is a fantasy picture, in which all of the really bad occurrences are caused by caricatures of folly and evil, none of them by people who look and talk like people of our kind.” The battle in the novel for freedom from oppressive Christianity is a superficial battle, at best, and the encounter with the realities of slavery is even more superficial. The story thus offers us every invitation to miseducate ourselves, and therein lies the task of ethical criticism: to help us avoid that miseducation. The trick is always to find ways of doing that without tearing the butterfly apart in our hands.

It should be obvious that I am by no means “comfortable” (to use Huck’s word) about the incompatibilities that my project has led me to here. Having made my case against the book as honestly as possible, I now find a distressing disparity between the force of my objections (along with the relative weaknesses in the various defenses), and the strength of my continuing love for the book. My ethical criticism has disturbed a surface that once was serene. But instead of making the work and its creator look at least as great as before (Austen), or renovating a wrongly denigrated author (Lawrence), I have somewhat tarnished my hero, and since I cannot wipe from my mind the readings that black critics have imposed, I cannot, by a sheer act of will, restore Twain’s former glow. Still, though much of Huck Finn amuses me somewhat less when I read it now than it did in times irrecoverable (the recent reading was, like Cox’s, considerably more solemn than the one Twain himself obviously hoped for), the achievement still seems to me quite miraculous. On the other hand… Such a non-conclusion is disturbing to the part of me that used to seek unities and harmonies that others have overlooked, the part that once spent two years attempting to discern the form of Tristram Shandy, the part that still delights in having once “demonstrated” that Sterne actually brought that “unfinished” work to a close (1951), the part that has often earned its keep by teaching students how to see unities where others have seen only chaos. But should we not expect to discover irreducible conflicts of this kind, if each of our imaginative worlds must finally be constituted of manifold values that can never be fully realized in any one work or any one critic’s endeavor?

What is not in question is that the ethical conversation begun by Paul Moses has done its work: it has produced what I can only call a kind of conversion (both words come from the Latin convertere, “to turn or turn around”). Led by him to join in a conversation with other ethical critics, my coduction of Huckleberry Finn has been turned, once and for all, and for good or ill, from untroubled admiration to restless questioning. And it is a kind of questioning that Twain and I alone together could never have managed for ourselves.

9 notes · View notes