It seems that MT's contemporaries were not troubled about the last section of Huck Finn -- Chapters 33-42, where Tom Sawyer re-enters the narrative and takes over center stage. Only one reviewer I've found expresses a reservation of any kind about "the long account of Tom Sawyer's artificial imitation of escapes from prison": to T.S. Perry its humor seems "somewhat forced." Four other contemporary reviewers praise these Tom Sawyer chapters: the prestigious critic Brander Matthews, for instance, calls the Evasion that Tom directs "most delightfully humorous." (See also the Montreal Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York World.) The live audiences that MT performed for during his 1884-1885 reading tour to promote the novel loved this episode. We have MT's own testimony about that: in letters home to his wife, he said that "the episode where Tom & Huck stock Jim's cabin with reptiles, & then set him free, in the night" is "the biggest card I've got in my whole repertoire." (For more of how MT's tour and the ending of Huck Finn, see Touring with Cable and Huck.)

  Twain scholar Charles Neider performed a somewhat similar operation in his 1985 edition of Huck Finn, cutting about 8000 words from chapters 33-42. Most scholars, however, know the problem can't be evaded so easily. In 1942 Bernard De Voto, probably the leading MT scholar of the time, indicted the ending as a betrayal of the achievement of the book's first 31 chapters: "In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more chilling descent." In their seminal appreciations of the novel later in the decade, T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling, two of America's most most prominent critical voices, defined and tried to resolve the problem of the ending as an aesthetic one. By the 1950s, however, at the same moment that the novel first came under attack on racial grounds, the problem was reframed as a social and even a moral one. In 1958, for example, noted Americanist Henry Nash Smith declared that Tom's "Evasion" reduces Jim "to the status of a 'darkey' in a minstrel show."

As campaigns to remove the novel from the classroom became more frequent during and after the 1970s, there has been a kind of "growing consensus" within the community of MT scholars about how to read the ending. The quotation is from Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who for the last three decades has been the novel's most outspoken champion. According to this reading, which first appeared in the 1960s, when modern students react negatively to the way the Evasion chapters treat freeing Jim as a kind of farce, they are responding exactly as MT wanted readers to react. The ending is not a betrayal of the novel's anti-racist agenda, but part of it. Readers who object to the treatment of Jim at the Phelps plantation are being radicalized to resist what the white South did to its formerly enslaved population after the failure of Reconstruction, as state legislatures passed the Jim Crow laws that segregated the schools, disenfranchised black voters, and, by implementing the convict-lease system that sentenced falsely convicted black prisoners to labor for white landowners, effectively re-enslaved thousands of black men.

  It's fair to say that the more frequent became the attacks on the novel as racist, the more popular this reading became among MT's defenders. And it's easy to understand its attractiveness: it not only makes it possible for the teacher and MT himself to be on the same side as the alienated students, it also places all blame for the problem of the ending on American society: read as satire rather than burlesque, Tom's abuse of Jim's freedom is MT's protest against the white South's treatment of its African-American citizens. Even Toni Morrison, the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved and other works, accepted this argument. Although in 1992 she had attacked the novel's ending's "humiliation" of Jim, four years later she sees the ending as a commentary on "the collapse of civil rights for blacks" in the 1880s, when "the nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim's freedom in agonizing play."

  Elsewhere I have written at length against the attempts to recuperate the Evasion this way. Attached as I am to my own argument, this isn't the place to rehearse it. However, as I was gathering together all the illustrated editions of the novel between 1885 and 1985, it occured to me that it might be worthwhile to put together an exhibit of the way those last chapters have been illustrated by the various artists who were hired to re-present MT's text visually. That's what you can explore here: 87 illustrations for chapters 33-42, drawn by 9 different artists. I am unable to resist making some comments of my own about each of their "readings" of the ending, but you should make up your own mind about how the choices they make, and the details that appear in their drawings, might shape the way readers of each edition "see" the ending. And at the bottom of this page I'll come back to the issue of the novel's place in America's classrooms.

  The Evasion According to Edward Kemble — Kemble was the only one of the illustrators on this page whose work MT ever saw. In fact, as the publisher as well as the author of Huck Finn, MT hired him and had complete control over which of Kemble's drawings would appear in the novel. MT did reject one -- of the King at the camp-meeting in Chapter 20. There's no record of his thoughts about any of Kemble's 33 illustrations of the Evasion section. One thing that strikes me is how, while this episode revolves around Jim's fate, only 3 of Kemble's drawings include Jim. Visually, for instance, the episode opens with Nat, a considerably less impressive representation of the enslaved black man -- and when Jim does finally appear in this set of drawings, the impression he makes is ludicrous. When Jim tells Tom and Huck that he "doan' skasely ever cry" while he's cooped up in that shed awaiting his return to slavery, he is also telling them, implicitly, that sometimes he does. Kemble, however, develops Tom's plan to send Jim an onion so he can water his "Pitchiola" with his tears into a cartoon that makes even Jim's suffering risible. There are more images of enslaved people in these drawings than anywhere else in novel, but there's no suggestion in any of them that slavery -- or for that matter post-slavery racial injustice -- is something white readers should take seriously.

  The Evasion According to Worth Brehm — Jim disappears entirely in Worth Brehm's 3 full-page illustrations of the Evasion section, though two of them feature other enslaved blacks. The only "suffering" on display, however, is the comic tribulation of a slave-owner, Aunt Polly.

  The Evasion According to Norman Rockwell — Rockwell did only 8 full-page, full-color illustrations for the Heritage Press edition of the novel, so the fact that he only did one for chapters 33-42 is not significant. But it certainly seems significant that the one moment he chose to depict is Polly's discomfiture when Tom and Huck's rats get loose in her house.

  The Evasion According to Baldwin Hawes — This and the next two editions were published as books for children, so while it is worth wondering what it means that a work often described as "the great American novel" is also often seen as a children's book, it's important to keep that intended audience in mind while assessing the way Hawes, McKay and Powers illustrate it. Baldwin's focus is obviously on the boys' "adventure": Huck, Tom or both of them appear in 13 of his 14 respresentations of the Evasion. Jim is with them in 4. In two of those he is wearing a dress, but that is in accordance with MT's text. The second time Jim appears we actually see the chain that he wears in confinement -- a part of the story that Kemble omits in his only drawing of Jim in the shed -- and in another we see him with his hands tied behind him, also in keeping with the text.

  The Evasion According to Donald McKay — McKay's black-and-white drawings all appear at the start of new chapters. Jim is featured in 6 of these, as well as one of the two full-page color illustrations that appear inside the Evasion chapters. He often gives Jim a prominent place in the images, and includes details like the chains and rope Jim is forced to wear. But McKay's "Jim" -- as well as his "Nat" in the first and third images below -- are drawn with such exaggerated "Negro" features that they look, at least to my eye, more like the caricatures associated with minstrelsy than men. All the white characters, while drawn simply, look considerably more human.

  The Evasion According to Richard M. Powers — What strikes me about the illustrations Powers drew for the heads of the novel's chapters is how far they seem from MT's text. I think MT, for example, wanted his readers to smile at the Evasion, but despite all the smiles Powers draws, the story's characters aren't supposed to be in on the jokes. And note how Powers turns the "hut" into a very livable cabin, complete with fireplace and, apparently, a stove, and the place Jim sleeps into a pretty middle-class bed. The rope Powers puts around Jim's neck in the final drawing is not mentioned in the text either, though I am uncertain how that detail would strike readers.

  The Evasion According to John Falter — Jim appears in 5 of the 15 full-page illustrations that Falter drew for this Macmillan edition, which was part of a series marketed to "children, teen-agers, and parents." However, he's an invisible man in the pair of images Falter drew for the Evasion section, which focus instead on the two white boys at "work" (which is depicted as play) and the white mistress in distress (which is depicted as part of the fun).

  The Evasion According to Warren Chappell — The final two sets of illustrations here appear after the Civil Rights movement changed the legal place of African Americans in American society, and after the attacks on Huck Finn as racist began to endanger its place in the American curriculum. Both sets of illustrations almost certainly reflect those changes. Chappell's were drawn for a single-volume publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; there is no stylistic difference between the drawings he made for each text. Chappell chooses to represent the Evasion using some of the same moments as earlier illustrators -- Nat, Jim outside the hut helping move the grindstone, the wounded Tom being carried to the Phelpses -- but the heavy shading he favors make the events all seem somber rather than playful. On the other hand, there does not seem to be any effort to call attention to the way Jim is being abused.

  The Evasion According to Barry Moser — Finally, in 1985 the Pennyroyal Press, in collaboration with the Mark Twain Project at the University of California Berkeley, brought out a "Centenary Edition" of the novel with Moser's 49 wood engravings. Jim appears in 5 of these, including the first one below which is the first of his 9 illustrations for the Tom Sawyer chapters. In 4 of the 5 with Jim, Jim appears "Alone" -- as the caption for the the engraving below puts it. Since the entire story is told by Huck, "alone" is the one way we never see Jim in MT's text, but by stepping outside Huck's perspective Moser can give modern readers a "Jim" who is almost antithetical to Kemble's, a dignified and intensely human "Jim" whose very appearance gives the lie to the slave owners' attempt to label blacks as chattel. Moser's "Jim" is probably the version modern readers are most attracted to, but whether he is an accurate representation of MT's text is a good question. It is extremely telling that Moser's other Evasion illustrations make almost no attempt to represent the events described in those chapters. We could even say they evade the Evasion -- at least until the final one, which does refer to that "little hut" in which the Phelpses keep Jim as "Jim's Prison."

  To my eye it seems clear that none of these illustrators saw much, if anything, in the novel's ending that was calculated to make readers angry, or even impatient. But their agenda was shaped by the publishers who hired them, who wanted to satisfy readers rather than arouse them. Like Hollywood, they knew how to give an audience what it wanted. In the case of a novel by "Mark Twain," what readers especially expected was to laugh, so the illustrations emphasize the ludicrous. This was true even in the case of E.W. Kemble, the artist whom MT himself hired. The critics and scholars who read the ending as social critique think of "Mark Twain" as a great and canonical American novelist. To Hollywood and the publishing industry (including Samuel Clemens as the owner of the company that published Huck Finn with Kemble's illustrations) "Mark Twain" is a property. Humor, entertainment, even "Tom Sawyer" -- these are fundamental parts of the "Mark Twain" brand. Readers in MT's time had probably been expecting Tom to re-enter the story all along, and bring with him the comically playful mood of the novel MT had already published about his adventures. It wasn't the white South that denied Jim his humanity in the Evasion, but the white author who created him in the first place and the white audiences who for generations accepted the place he was relegated to. As Bernard W. Bell puts it, "Twain--nostalgically and metaphorically--sells Jim's soul down the river for laughs at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

But although I see the Evasion as a problem that cannot be resolved, I believe without hesitation that Huck Finn is an important book to bring into the nation's classrooms -- and in part because of the what the ending does to Jim, and beyond him what that says about the larger question of the legacy of slavery in our national culture. The narrative arc of MT's novel is uncannily similar to the larger story of American history. Huck and Jim's raft, where the black man's desire to escape slavery is paired with the white boy's struggle to outgrow his racist training, gives readers one of American literature's greatest symbols of our quest to form a more perfect union. By ending that quest with the Evasion, however, where Jim's captivity on a slave plantation is turned into a source of entertainment, the novel forcibly reminds us of how again and again white America has sacrificed those ideals and failed to face up to the truth about the nation's past to preserve its privilege and peace of mind. For Huck, as he says, "being Tom Sawyer is easy." For MT, turning Huck Finn into Tom Sawyer was the safest way to protect his popularity. Instead of trying to find what isn't there in the Tom Sawyer chapters -- an "anti-racist" agenda -- it would be better to acknowledge what is: a retreat from a reckoning with racism. On the other hand, by showing us so vividly both the best and worst about our culture, Huck Finn remains a great way to give 21st century students the opportunity to have that reckoning.