by the perfect picture of daybreak. I thought about the beauty of nature, how I love the fall and spring, and Twain as an environmentalist. I could see Huck lying in the woods on a bed of leaves and grass as the sunlight cascaded through the trees. But, it was the “thinking about things” in the opening lines of the chapter that sparked my own memory. This would be more evident as chapter eight began to unfold with Huck discovering that someone else was also sleeping on Jackson Island.
By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most gives me the fantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there behind a clump of bushes, in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight, now. Pretty soon he gapped, and stretched himself, and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson’s Jim! I bet I was glad to see him, I says: “Hello, Jim!” and skipped out.
When I read that Jim “gapped and stretched himself,” I thought of my sweet momma who always used the same language. She would say, “the baby is gapping and must be tired; he need to take a nap.” That brief memory shook my consciousness and caused a momentary lapse in my thinking—a lapse that made me cry as I thought about my own dear mother. The emotion had come out of thin air. It fell upon me like a bucket of warm milk.
Like Huck, Jim had also run away. Huck wanted freedom from his father and Jim wanted freedom from slavery. He didn’t want to fall into the hands of a “nigger trader” because he had overheard Miss Watson’s plans to sell him down the river. “. . . I hear ole missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’t want to, but she could git eight hund’d dollars for me.” Jim was no fool. He understood the meaning of chattel slavery. It was an evil system grounded in economics and commerce. Somebody needs to pay Black people for three hundred years of free and forced labor.
I thought to myself this is where the book really begins. The first seven chapters are all prologue. The situation and the story begin to merge right here in chapter eight, where Huck and Jim meet for the first time as runaways and form a pact that binds them together in the adventurous search for freedom. It was also the race issue. The nigger Jim and the white boy Huck on Jackson Island, an island that Huck had already said “I was boss of it,” speaking as a typical and privileged white American male. The boss.
This was the chapter where the use of nigger begins its ubiquitous forays into the story. And its use caused me to think about things in my own life—especially when I, as a child, was first called a nigger. I blurted out in class that I wore the marks and scars of America’s nigger, and Twain’s pelting use of the word felt more like the sharp jabs of a dagger than like the drops of rain winding down on the scalp of my bald head.
“Has anyone in here ever been called nigger?” I asked. The answer was a thundering silence so piercing that you could hear its palpable sounds only in the deep breaths that each body began to take. I knew before asking the question that silence was the only possible answer, so I felt guilty for making such a rhetorical flourish. It was a sophistry that I had mastered and grown to love although I knew it was probably unfair, and deceptive. My Black skin had, for once, given me the advantage to pose a question that not a single white person in the room could answer in the affirmative. While I took pleasure in the hovering silence, it provided no lasting consolation. This was my personal burden and my struggle, and I was not handling it too well. I had a long way to go and even further to grow to the point of recognizing how hurt and angry I had become. It was bad for my health because high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar ran in my family and at fifty-three-years-old I was already becoming a victim of them all. I was really a wreck. Race had played a major role in my health and while it was evident to me, no one else in the room had experienced the pressures of daily living in two worlds with two different consciences. Double consciousness was a state of being for me. I was a self divided. It is also the stuff that makes for some forms of depression, schizoid and paranoid behavior. And, at times, I’m a bona fide paranoid African American male thinking that everybody is out to get me—Black people included.
I was also agitated by the sharpness of my own memory. I thought to myself in a language that was not really my own: Memory is an awful son-of-a-bitch full of content and past transgressions. Memory is an untold mystery. It is a scathing, hideous bringing back to life of all that was dead and buried. Memory is a terror, much like a resurrection of Satan—Dante’s Dite.
It is like the Apostle Paul’s omnipresent evil, which is always raising its ugly head in the presence of the good and the beautiful. Memory is full of tears and sorrow. Sometimes, even a joy unspeakable, but more often than not, it is painful and unshareable. And yet, there are some things that we can never forget. Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s statement that “the past has no content” is provocative but absurd to me. An absurdity that surpasses Albert Camus and Frederich Nietzsche: The Stranger and Beyond Good and Evil. My own past is full of content. A past without content is like a future without hope. It is like a violation of memory’s power to imagine a future. Allow me to speak for myself: There are certain things about the past that I can never forget. So, for me, there is no contentless past and for that matter “the past is never past.” It’s always just a thought away from rising up and speaking for itself—spilling its guts on the ground like a deer hit by a speeding Ford 350 pickup truck.
I am surprised by its clarity still lingering in my conscience. No, somewhat bitter, but not really surprised. I can still feel the sweltering sun shining bright in a cloudless sky on that particular Monday morning in late May. I was six years old about to turn seven. It was the spring of 1959 on a narrow road in Southern Chesterfield County, Virginia—just a half mile from our small two-room clapboard house in Matoaca. Across the road was a large white plantation house sitting almost a half mile off the road, perched on a bluff, surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn, wheat, and barley. I was a child, but I understood the meaning of stark difference. That side of the road was pale white and rich-looking. You could tell by the sight of several brown and white palomino horses grazing, of irrigation waters flowing over the crop fields and the manicured lawn. The white folk were driving their glistening new Pontiacs and Cadillacs. They were the Bricolls, whose houses, land, and jobs represented white privilege. On the other side of the same road, the side where we lived, you could tell the difference in a moment’s glance. We lived in a box; a two-room barnlike structure built by my father’s own hands.
Anyway, my cousin and I were walking to the corner store during the coolest part of the scorching hot day. In order to get there, we had to pass through a clump of houses where several white children were playing in their yards. We were always told to stay on the public road and not to veer onto anyone’s property because white folk didn’t need much of an excuse to shoot and kill you, or cause some bodily harm to a Black boy, not during those days of Jim Crow. This was only a few years after fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s murder for saying “Hey Baby” to a white store owner’s wife in the Mississippi Delta. Two white men went on trial and were acquitted by a jury of their peers in less than an hour for a heinous crime that for much of the nation sparked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. This was four months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery Bus Boycott that helped to change the mind of the South and the nation. I remember these things because my daddy read the newspaper like it was the Bible, and he kept up with the evening news religiously. As a matter of fact, my daddy insisted that we not leave the “home place” while he was off at work. But, because boys will be boys, I was eager to join my cousin in our mile walk to Sadler’s country store. It was just over the hill at the end of the road. So close to where we lived; yet, it was a whole world away.
As soon as we reached the top of the hill we knew that we were in white folks’ territory. Over the hill was the danger-sign for us because it marked the clear boundary between leaving the area where Blacks lived and entering into the white zone. As we passed the little cluster of houses where poor whites lived, three little rascals, playing in the yard, saw us walking on the main road. They moved to the edge of their property to taunt and harass us: “Niggers,
