What I Learned From Reading

In “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” there’s that scene in which Huck and Jim become separated in the fog on the river one night, and when Huck finally makes his way back to the raft the next morning Jim is asleep. Huck wakes Jim up and tricks him into thinking he has dreamt the whole ordeal. When I first read this in high school more than 50 years ago my teen-age self thought that was some pretty funny stuff from Mark Twain, humorist. But then Jim, who has been beside himself with worry, catches on. All Huck was thinking about was “how [he] could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie,” that kind of behavior is “trash,” and “trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head of dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.” Whoa, not funny at all. And as the teacher pointed out to us, that’s a black man in the antebellum South standing up for himself to a white, asserting his dignity and demanding the respect he deserves, and there was never a moment like that in American literature before (and for my money, not many since). So then I have to locate the top of my head and reattach it and I’m just about done with that when Huck goes to apologize, which I kind of expect, but then Huck says that to do that it took him fifteen minutes to “work myself up to go and humble my self to a [n-word]” and I’m whip-sawed in another direction because there’s something not okay about Huck’s attitude. But wait, Huck’s just a kid, in a certain time and place. He can’t be expected to have a flash of moral insight and throw off everything he’s been taught in his world. What he did, if not the way he thought about it, was right. So I cut him some slack.

All this gave my teen-age self an inkling that the world was more complicated than I had thought. Things were connected in ways I had missed. And those connections could appear to be contradictory (humor could be serious) and have a kind of whip-saw effect. (This is funny- no it’s not funny. Huck’s an okay guy. No, not really. Well, yes really, but … it’s complicated.) And what’s more, amazingly, it all happens because one person made up some characters and a story in which those made-up people move through the world, and did it through language (those dialects!) (And I have to add here that other people, like my high school English teacher, can help (and have helped) me have these reactions/realizations.) It’s dizzying and exhilarating. And when it happens I’m opened up, open to these contradictions-not-contradictions, permanently opened up, and I keep that realization with me all the time …. Well, that last part, not exactly. It fades. But my best self remembers to try to be open. And I learned that from reading.