Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Oxford Paperbacks)

1994
Author
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published in 1884, Huck Finn has become one of the most widely taught novels in American curricula. But where did Huckleberry Finn come from, and what made it so distinctive? Shelley Fisher Fishkin suggests that in Huckleberry Finn, more than in any other work, Mark Twain let African-American voices, language, and rhetorical traditions play a major role in the creation of his art.
In Was Huck Black?, Fishkin combines close readings of published and unpublished writing by Twain with intensive biographical and historical research and insights gleaned from linguistics, literary theory, and folklore to shed new light on the role African-American speech played in the genesis of Huckleberry Finn. Given that book's importance in American culture, her analysis illuminates, as well, how the voices of African-Americans have shaped our sense of what is distinctively "American" about American literature.

Fishkin shows that Mark Twain was surrounded, throughout his life, by richly talented African-American speakers whose rhetorical gifts Twain admired candidly and profusely. A black child named Jimmy whom Twain called "the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across" helped Twain understand the potential of a vernacular narrator in the years before he began writing Huckleberry Finn, and served as a model for the voice with which Twain would transform American literature. A slave named Jerry whom Twain referred to as an "impudent and satirical and delightful young black man" taught Twain about "signifying"--satire in an African-American vein--when Twain was a teenager (later Twain would recall that he thought him "the greatest man in the United States" at the time). Other African-American voices left their mark on Twain's imagination as well--but their role in the creation of his art has never been recognized. Was Huck Black? adds a new dimension to current debates over multiculturalism and the canon.

American literary historians have told a largely segregated story: white writers come from white literary ancestors, black writers from black ones. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. While African-American culture shaped Huckleberry Finn, that novel, in turn, helped shape African-American writing in the twentieth century. As Ralph Ellison commented in an interview with Fishkin, Twain "made it possible for many of us to find our own voices."

Was Huck Black? dramatizes the crucial role of black voices in Twain's art, and takes the first steps beyond traditional cultural boundaries to unveil an American literary heritage that is infinitely richer and more complex than we had thought.

Reviews

"An extraordinarily important book, potentially a catalyst for profound change. If enough English teachers at all levels read it and strove to meet the author's challenge, American literature would never be taught--and thus the history of this country would never be seen--in quite the same way again."--Magill's Literary Annual 1994

"A dazzling and highly persuasive bit of detective work."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

"Fishkin's claim is strong and simple...and, so far as I am concerned, she is right....She brings the material together with lucidity, elegance, and a non-polemical judiciousness and poise."--Tony Tanner, London Review of Books

"A major step in the emerging recognition of the interplay between black and white culture in the United States."--Arnold Rampersad, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Princeton University

"May revise the way critics look at American literature and define multiculturalism."--Chronicle of Higher Education

"Original and innovative, important, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written."--Louis J. Budd, Professor Emeritus of English, Duke University

"She's done a Samson thing on the whole damn church."--David Bradley, Professor of English, Temple University

"Scholars who have read [Was Huck Black] see it as a major addition to the understanding of a central work of American letters."--The New York Times

"Fishkin's argument is provocative, then dazzling and ultimately explosive....Shelley Fisher Fishkin's articulate and timely argument is a stunning piece of detective work. She breathes new life into Ralph Ellison's claim that 'the black man [is] a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence."--Michael Peterson, author of Imagined Places: Journeys into Literary America, writing in The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star

"Direct, brief, well-informed, and polemical....An exhaustive and provocative work, already creating a stir."--Kirkus Reviews

"Here is that rarity in criticism, a monograph almost sure to be definitive....Fishkin shows, with formidable scholarship, how black speech (and life) influenced white culture and how, in American literature, the Twain do indeed meet."--Library Journal

"Fishkin convincingly argues that Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was influenced by African American voices."--Publishers Weekly

"Her evidence is thoroughly and impressively presented; but what may make the book more truly revolutionary are the ways in which she proves the impact of African American culture on Twain and on mainstream Americam literature in general....Subtle and fruitful discussion of the interdependence of black and white artistic production."—Booklist

"Meticulous analysis and exhaustive scholarship....[Fishkin] writes in a clear, direct style."--Southern Quarterly

“ t"A fascinating new approach not only to Mark Twain but to American Studies in general."--Susan Gubar, Indiana University