“It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” — Huck Finn

Mark Twain’s prescription for solving the national crisis of racism and slavery was to set a white, teenage boy (Huck),  infected with prejudice, and a runaway slave (Jim), a victim of prejudice, on a raft and float them slowly down the center of the country on the Mississippi River. Both are uneducated and full of stereotypes about the other. Both are perceptive and good-hearted and soon realize that their lives depend on their ability to work together and trust each other. Each is astonished by the other’s full humanity.

Because of their isolation on the river, Huck and Jim spend day after day naked on the raft, jumping in to swim or drift along when they need a bath or cooling off. Their physical nakedness is a metaphor for their emotional openness and vulnerability.

Through time, hardship, serenity, and reflection they come to love and trust one another. The flow of the river acts like an unceasing absolution from bigotry while it baptizes them into new selves.

Twain seems to suggest, by imaginative extension, that if we could take all Americans and float them 2 by 2 down that spinal cord-like river, we could heal the terrible wound of our racism. What a poignant, wistful, and impossible dream! But this story is a fable. Its moral about discovering our individual and common humanity is not a fable. It’s a necessity for spiritual and political survival. 

Again and again, Jim and Huck are tested – by weather, by snags,  big boats, by fugitive slave hunters – but they always manage to support and find each other, even after falling off the raft in dense fog. Their worst threat results from their attempt to help two men being chased by horsemen with dogs. Huck and Jim don’t ask why they are being chased; their kind instinct is to help them escape on their little raft. The men, though, are shysters, fleeing a con gone wrong, and they gratefully accept Huck and Jim’s protection. They pretend to be royalty -claiming to be a King and a Duke – while they scheme up a con they can use to rob the credulous people in the next little, downriver town. Twain has us spend considerable time with these lowlife grifters. He wants us to understand how common conmen are – as common as they are ruthless.

He wants us to understand that as Huck and Jim’s healing foreshadows a possible salvation from the curse of racism, the presence of conmen may engender an equally disastrous damnation for social equilibrium.

After one of the King and Duke’s successful cons, Twain comments:

Them rapscallions took in four hundred and sixty-five dollars in that three nights. I never see money hauled in by the wagon-load like that before. By and by, when they was asleep and snoring, Jim says: “Don’t it s’prise you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?” “No,” I says, “it don’t.” “Why don’t it, Huck?” “Well, it don’t, because it’s in the breed. I reckon they’re all alike,” “But, Huck, dese kings o’ ourn is reglar rapscallions; dat’s jist what dey is; dey’s reglar rapscallions.” “Well, that’s what I’m a-saying; all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.” “Is dat so?”

And later, Huck comments:

If they warn’t the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I struck. …It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

Twain wants to warn us that people in power – with or without pedigree – are likely to be rapscallions, delighting in their clever strategies for pillage, finding amusement and profit in the gullibility of most people, and using that gullibility to justify the pillage. Saying, in effect, if people are so gullible, you’d be remiss not to take advantage of them, and play them for fools while stealing their money.

Twain describes the King and the Duke with loving detail. I say ‘loving’ because of how precisely he has conjured them as American archetypes — both as real people and symbols. Clever types to be feared.  Arrogant types whose greed will lead to their inevitable downfall but not without considerable damage. 

It’s as though the mighty river of time is flowing in two contradictory directions at once: slow healing and compassion on the one hand, clever exploiting, and cruelty on the other. It should come as no surprise to anyone reading this that the King and the Duke have their contemporary parallels in Musk and Trump. Or, Trump and Musk. You choose. In Twain’s allegory, the raft symbolizes the body politic. Racism threatened its continuity. But the corruption of leaders may destroy it. Huck says:

. . . it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds.

The King and the Duke are last seen tarred and feathered, being ridden out of town on a rail by an angry, conned community. Cons always overplay their hand. Even those they have played for fools become wise to the game. Ain’t no raft can keep afloat tolerating them onboard.