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ahead all the time (p. 76).
    Confused by the swirling current and blinded by the fog, Huck hears calls in front of him and calls behind him, and finds himself in the territory of the blues. “I couldn’t tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don’t look natural nor sound natural in a fog” (p. 77). Huck keeps still and quiet, listening and waiting. “If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once—you’ll see” (p. 77). The hard truth is that in the storm and fog they have passed Cairo, the port leading to the North. They have been pulled south again and will have many more difficult scenarios to endure—in the hands of the king and the duke and then with the Phelps family—before they can light out for freer spaces. These travelers, like the great singer/guitarist Robert Johnson, have “got to keep moverin‘, the blues fallin’ down like rain, blues fallin’ down like rain.”
    This impulse to move on, even without a satisfactory destination or solution in sight, echoes a trainload of rambling blues. In the first chapter, Miss Watson needles Huckleberry about the way he sits and stands. She warns him about hell, “and I said I wished I was there.... All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change.” As for making it to heaven, Miss Watson’s goal: “I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going,” Huck says, “so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn’t do no good” (pp. 6-7). Once he decides to run away both from the widow (and her sister) and from Pap Finn, his plan is sketchy, but it is enough to go on.
    And in his bid to make his getaway, Huck is nothing if not a brilliant improviser, in the blues mode. q He invents a scenario that convinces the town that he has been killed. With things on the raft “getting slow and dull,” Huck decides to go ashore and investigate the talk among the villagers along the river. To hide himself, our restless improviser dresses as a girl and tells a woman whose house he visits that he is Sarah Williams from Hookerville, “all tired out” from walking all the way. Would he like something to eat? “No‘m, I ain’t hungry,” declares Huck, cooking up a story. “I was so hungry I had to stop two mile below here at a farm; so I ain’t hungry no more. It’s what makes me so late. My mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore” (p. 53).
    As the woman’s belief in his act as a girl falters, Huck makes use of her suspicion that he actually is a boy-apprentice on the run from a cruel workplace master, which would explain the desperate disguise and secrecy. Warming up to this new role as runaway apprentice, Huck supplies impromptu details:
    Then I told her my father and mother was dead, and the law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the country thirty mile back from the river, and he treated me so bad I couldn’t stand it no longer; he went away to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my chance and stole some of his daughter’s old clothes, and cleared out (pp. 62-63).
    Though the woman is too sharp to fall for his act as a girl, Huck does gain enough of her confidence to obtain the information he has come for—that a posse has a bead on Jim, and that the two of them had better move on quicker than planned. And note the themes of Huck’s invented tales: hunger, sickness, death, abandonment, separation, escape. These are the subjects of the blues; and just as Huckleberry’s larger story, within the fully orchestrated blues sonata that is the novel, is at bottom about freedom, resiliency, and heroic action, so are these, at bottom, the subjects of the blues: the improviser’s capacity, in spite of all disconnection, to connect and to make a break for freedom.
    To get help for a gang whose boat Huck has stolen (and because of which