Was Huck Black? by Fishkin Shelley Fisher; & Fisher Fishkin

Author:Fishkin, Shelley Fisher; & Fisher, Fishkin [Shelley & Fisher, Fishkin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195089141
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2015-03-19T10:11:03+00:00

Huck’s speech, unlike Jimmy’s and Jim’s, has none of these features. But even from a phonological standpoint, I would argue, several elements make Jimmy’s dialect closer to Huck’s than to Jim’s. Jimmy and Huck say “considerable” while Jim says “considable.” Jimmy and Huck usually preserve the final t in contractions even when the next word begins with a consonant, but Jim usually drops it. As James Nathan Tidwell observed, for example (based on his analysis not of the manuscript or first edition, but, as Blair and Fischer note, on the “heavily styled Harper’s ‘Mississippi Edition’”), “Jim tends to drop the final t of a contraction when the next word begins with a consonant (as in ‘ain’ dat’), but to retain the t when the next word begins with a vowel or is emphatic …” (Tidwell, “Mark Twain’s Representation of Negro Speech,” 175; Blair and Fischer, “Textual Introduction,” 508). Jimmy, by way of contrast, usually keeps the final t in contractions followed by consonants: “we ain’t got no cats heah,” “J wouldn’t like to count all dem people,” “Dey ain’t got no bell,” “De bell … don’t make no soun’, scasely,” “I don’t think.” (The one exception to this rule in Jimmy’s speech is “I don’ never git drunk.”) Jimmy and Huck say “an”’ or “and”—in fact, Jimmy says “and” nine times, while Jim almost always says “en’.”

43. An occasional quality that Bridgman and McKay isolate as characteristic of Huck’s speech, and that I have shown to be characteristic of Jimmy’s speech, may also be found in other vernacular speakers Twain created. On 18 December 1869, for example, Twain published the story of Dick Baker’s cat in the Buffalo Express (he would include the story in Roughing It in 1872). It was a revised and expanded version of an earlier sketch, which he had probably written in California (Twain, “Explanatory Notes,” Roughing It, 600). The original sketch, “Remarkable Sagacity of a Cat,” was written in standard English, but Twain’s 1869 revision told the story in a vernacular voice (Dick Baker’s), and included some of the qualities that Twain would later find or make central to Jimmy’s speech and Huck’s, including irregular verb forms, double negatives, “and” as a connector, and repetition (Roughing It, 390–91). Although these qualities are present on occasion in Baker’s speech, they are not as essential to it as they will be to Jimmy’s and Huck’s speech. Twain’s recognition in 1869 that the original “Cat” sketch held more interest and was more dramatic when told in the vernacular may be viewed as a step toward his recognition of the power of vernacular voices. Double negatives, “and” as a connector, and the use of “considerable” as an adjective are also found in Simon Wheeler’s speech in “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), and repetition appears in the speech of Coon in “An Unbiased Criticism” (1865). For all their vitality, however, the voices of Dick Baker, Simon Wheeler, and Ben Coon are not Huck’s the way Jimmy’s voice is Huck’s.

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