Probably the most popular form of live entertainment in America during the whole period between the time Tom Sawyer was a child and the time MT began writing Huck Finn was the minstrel show, in which white entertainers put on blackface and "imitated" or "caricatured" (the distinction is crucial) the talking, singing and dancing of slaves in the South and ex-slaves in the North. This form first appeared in the early 1840s, in the cities of the Northeast. It outlasted slavery. It was as popular as ever in the early 1870s, when MT was shaping his public self. As I looked through newspapers from places like Newark, Cleveland and Peoria while following MT on his early lecture tours, I repeatedly found ads for or reviews of minstrel troupes right next to announcements and reviews about MT's performances.
In an autobiographical dictation dated 30 November 1906 MT remembers "the first minstrel show I ever saw," which he thinks came through Hannibal in "the early forties." Below is the earliest illustration of a minstrel company in the Barrett Collection: it dates from 1845; clicking on it will bring up the whole cover of the sheet music on which the picture appears:
In Tom Sawyer minstrelsy appears in both the text and the illustrations. After the company that visits St. Petersburg finishes its run, Tom and Joe Harper get up there own troupe and are, as the caption for the following True Williams illustration puts it, "happy for two days":
Recalling in 1906 the many minstrel companies he saw during his life, MT calls "the genuine nigger show, the extravagant nigger show, . . . a thoroughly delightful thing." Blackface performance remained popular with white audiences long into this century, as The Jazz Singer attests. Certainly throughout Samuel Clemens' lifetime, and the career of MT, the comic and sentimental "darkies" of the minstrel show significantly shaped the image of the African-American that would have been in the minds of many in MT's white audience. Many recent critics of Huck Finn have suggested that the minstrel show, and its racism, are essential sources for the novel's depiction of the slave.
What kind of source for Huck Finn was blackface minstrelsy? Does the novel enact its own version of the minstrel show? Does MT's representation of Jim reinforce or complicate or subvert those stereotypes?
One way to answer such questions is to compare the kinds of routines that audiences heard at the minstrel show with the kinds of conversations MT stages between Jim and Huck. Immediately below are two typical "Ethiopian dialogues," both taken from a 19th-century text called Minstrel Gags and End Men's Hand-Book (New York: n.d., Dick & Fitzgerald, Publishers). They are followed by links to two passages in Huck Finn, where it seems to me that in Huck's lines one hears the correct accents of Mr. Interlocutor, and in Jim's replies, the comic inadequacies of Mr. Bones.
Interlocutor.I say, Bones, were you ever in love?
Bones I wasn't nothin' else, old hoss.
Interlocutor. What kind of a girl was she?
BonesShe was highly polished; yes, indeed. Her fadder was a varnish-maker, and, what's better still, she was devoted to her own sweet Pomp.
Interlocutor.What do you mean by that? She must have been a spicy girl.
BonesYes, dat's de reason she was so fond of me. She was a poickess, too.
Interlocutor.A poetess, you mean.
BonesYes, she used to write verses for de newspapers
Interlocutor.Is that so, Bones?
BonesYes, saw. De day I went to de house, I -- golly! -- I dressed myself to kill, and my ole trunk was empty. Well, just as de gal seed me, she cove right in -- she was a gone coon. When I left, she edged up to me and whispered, "you're too sweet to live." Next day I got a billy-doo.
Interlocutor.How do you know it was a billet-doux?
Bones'Cause Billy Doo was de name of de boy dat brought it. It smelt all over like a doctor's shop. I opened it, and found dese words:
What lub is, if you must be taught,
Thy heart must teach alone!
Two cabbages wid a single stalk,
Two beets that are as one!
Interlocutor.Well, Bones, you responded?
BonesYes, sir.
Interlocutor.What did you say?
BonesYou see, her fadder was a gardener, so I wrote what I call very appropriate lines:
O you sweet and lubly Dinah!
Dare are nofin any finer;
Your tongue is sweeter than a parrot's.
Your hair hangs like a bunch of carrots,
And though of flattery I'm a hater,
I lubs you like a sweet potater!
Interlocutor.That was very nice, Bones.
BonesYes, I thought so. So delicate was ner constitution, dat it nearly killed her. So terrible was de concussion, dat de next time I went to see her was was dissolved in tears.
Interlocutor.What! weeping?
BonesYes, wid tears in her eyes and a big knife in the other. She raised it as I approached.
Interlocutor.Rash girl!
BonesYes.
Interlocutor.What was she about to do? Commit suicide?
BonesNo; she was peeling onions to stuff a goose wid!
Interlocutor.What are you thinking about, Mr. Bones? What is there on your mind this evening?
BonesI was jis' thinking 'bout dat business I was in some time ago. I started in de -- what you call dat business dat da hab free balls hanging out?
Interlocutor.Oh, you mean the pawnbroker.
BonesYes, I was a pawnbroker wen I went in de bis, but I was a dead broaker wen I came out.
Interlocutor.Let us hear of your experience as a pawnbroker.
BonesWell, having nofing to do I fout I'd start de broaking business; so I rented a room, got free balls what I found laying around loose in a ten pin alley, and hung 'em out.
Interlocutor.And what success did you have?
BonesI'll tell you. De fust man dat cum in had a big paper bundel under his arm; he looked all around, den begin to open de bundel, den he look all around agin.
Interlocutor.He was suspicious, I suspect.
BonesSpec he was. At las' he open de bundel and took out a ole hammer, an' wanted two dollars on it.
Interlocutor.And what did you do about it then?
BonesHammered him over de head wid a club. De next one dat come in was a Dutchman, wid a big hunk of Limburger cheese in his hand. He wanted to pawn it.
Interlocutor.What did you tell him?
BonesTold him to "cheese it" an' go. And de next man had a push cart.
Interlocutor.A push cart! What did he want to do with that?
BonesWanted to pawn it; it was all broke, and he wanted 'nuf on it to get a new one.
Interlocutor.What did you do with him?
BonesTook him up on de roof, put him in de cart, an' pushed him off. De nex' man had he leg ob a stove.
Interlocutor.A leg of a stove! What did he want to do with that?
BonesWanted to pawn it.
Interlocutor.Wanted to pawn the leg of a stove? What did you do with him?
BonesStove in his plug hat wid it. De nex' man dat come in was a woming.
Interlocutor.A lady, sir. And what did she want?
BonesShe wanted to pawn a chaw of tobacer, and I was goin' to chaw off her ear, but I seen she had a feller outside to back her. Den come a man wid fourteen suits ob old close, and dar wosent haf ob a suit in de hole lot.
Interlocutor.And what did he want?
BonesWanted to pawn dem, an' he wanted nuf on dem fourteen ole suits to buy seven new suits.
Interlocutor.What is that? Do I hear right? He wanted enough on the fourteen old suits to buy seven new suits?
BonesDat's it.
Interlocutor.And what conclusion did you come to in regard to the clothes?
BonesI concluded to close up shop, an' I did so, an' never ben in de biz sence.
Here are the two conversations between Jim and Huck that seem most clearly to echo these kinds of routines. Of course, these are not the only kinds of conversations they two runaways have, but they are the parts of the novel that MT first took with him on the "Twins of Genius" tour with Cable, and they helped shape the contemporary public's perception of the novel. Apparently when Richard Gilder heard MT perform Jim's account of his speculations and his diatribe against King Solomon, he talked MT into letting him publish additional installments of the novel in his Century Magazine. These colloquoys not only made up the entire installment that appeared in the January issue of the Century; the punchline of Jim's account of his "speculatin'" was changed to make it sound even more like a minstrel show routine (see Prepublishing Huck):
