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in Huck: He loves Jim too much to make a speech about it. Like a true bluesman, Huck’s art is magnificently understated and full of stark but meaningful moments when there is nothing for words to say. His answer to Jim’s rebuke about Huck’s tricking of Jim after the storm had separated them is not direct; we only know that he was ashamed and that he crept back to apologize.
    It is Ellison who directly connects Huck’s resolution, the line in the novel’s famous last sentence—“to light out for the Territory”—with the blues of Bessie Smith, who, in the “Workhouse Blues” also declares that she’s “goin’ to the Nation, goin’ to the Territor‘.” In his collection of essays called Going to the Territory, r Ellison says that in her song, Smith’s will to take off for the “Territory” beyond U.S. borders parallels the journeys of slaves and ex-slaves, and their children, toward the broader freedom and multiplied sense of possibility associated not only with the North but with the Western frontier and, more generally, with the uncharted frontiers of the future. Jim, of course, “lights out,” too. Indeed, Mark Twain’s master-stroke is connecting Jim’s quest for freedom from slavery with the nation’s effort to grow up, morally, as Huck is able to do as he lights out for a territory we hope will be more humane and freer for all.
    Making this case about this novel as a sort of “Blues for Huckleberry” or “Huck and Jim’s Lonesome Raft Blues” does not depend on our straining to show that Huck is black. And yet it is intriguing to remember that, culturally speaking, all the boys and girls of that period (and of our own period) from all the towns like Huck’s home in Grant’s Landing, Missouri, whatever their specific racial bloodlines, known and unknown, were both black and white—as well as Native American.
    Here Bernard De Voto’s reflections on Mark Twain’s own boyhood can help us understand Huck’s “blackness.” De Voto observes that in the world of Mark Twain’s boyhood,
    black and white children grew up together.... They investigated all things together, exploring life. They hunted, swam, and fought together. ... So the days of Sam Clemens were spent among the blacks. Negro girls watched over his infancy. Negro boys shared his childhood. Negroes were a fountain of wisdom and terror and adventure. There was Sandy and the other slave boys who played bear with him. These and others preserved him sometimes from drowning. There was the bedridden old woman who had known Moses and had lost her health in the exodus from Egypt. There was Uncle Dan‘l who told the stories that Harris was to put in the mouth of Uncle Remus, and, while the fire died, revealed the awful world of ghosts. There were the Negroes with whom he roamed the woods, hunting coons and pigeons. There were the roustabouts of the steamboats, the field hands shouting calls over their hoes, and all the leisurely domestic servants of the town.... Olivia Langdon, whom he married, was to give him a principle for dealing justly with the human race. He ought, she said, to consider every man black until he was proved white. s
    De Voto also tells of Mark Twain/Sam Clemens’s love of Negro spirituals. As an adult in Hartford, Connecticut, he would sometimes stand under the moonlit night, singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and delivering the song’s final “Glory, Hallelujah,” “with a great shout.” “Away back in the beginning—to my mind,” said Twain, the singing of blacks “made all other vocal music cheap... and it moves me more than any other music can.” t
    While as far as we can tell, Twain never heard blues music as such, he heard the various American musics, including the Negro spirituals, that blended to become the blues. And there is a “nobody knows the trouble I see” as well as a “glory Hallelujah” shout in the blues. Both extremes of feeling find their way into this novel,