Speech, Performance, and Willful Ignorance Theme Analysis

Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night,

“Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

“But what are you going to say when she asks you about it?” I asked.

Lizzie cleared her throat. “Miss Watson, dat some cone-bread lak I neva before et.”

“Try ‘dat be,’” I said. “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.”

That evening I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson. These were indispensable. Safe movement through the world depended on mastery of language, fluency.

[…]

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’”

Then I wrote my first words. I wanted to be certain that they were mine and not some I had read from a book in the judge’s library. I wrote:

I am called Jim. I have yet to choose a name.

[…]

But I will not let this condition define me. I will not let myself, my mind, drown in fear and outrage. I will be outraged as a matter of course. But my interest is in how these marks that I am scratching on this page can mean anything at all. If they can have meaning, then life can have meaning, then I can have meaning.

At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.

I had already come to understand the tidiness of lies, the lesson learned from the stories told by white people seeking to justify my circumstance. […] And so, after all these books, the Bible itself was the least interesting of all. I could not enter it, did not want to enter it, and then understood that I recognized it as a tool of my enemy. I chose the word enemy, and still do, as oppressor necessarily supposes a victim.

“What you’re saying is that if someone pays you enough, it’s okay to abandon what you have claimed to understand as moral and right.”

“When you put it that way,” he said.

“When I put it that way what?”

“They wanted a constitution that would justify their behavior. If I hadn’t written it for them, someone else would have. What in the world would be different if that had happened?”

I looked at him. “You tell me,” I said.

I could believe it, I thought, pretending, in slave fashion, not to be there. After being cruel, the most notable white attribute was gullibility. As evidenced by Huck’s reaction. He said, “You fellers are amazin’.”

“Yes, but them people liked it, Jim. Did you see their faces? They had to know them was lies, but they wanted to believe. What do you make of that?”

“Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.”

[…]

“I reckon I do that, too,” the boy said.

“What say?”

“I kin see how much you miss yer family and yet I don’t think about it. I forget that you feel things jest like I feel. I know you love them.”

“Thank you, Huck.”

The Duke swung his belt and caught me at my knees. It did hurt. He laughed and did it again. I didn’t wince.

“You see that?” the King said. “I say, did you see that? They don’t even feel like no human man.”

[…]

“Don’t tear him up too much,” the King said. “We gotta be able to sell him. We cain’t get a dime fer him if’n he’s torn all asunder.”

“Hell, man,” the Duke said. “He ain’t no proper people. He don’t feel pain like we do. He need a lesson he kin remember. Nextwise, he’ll get it into his head to run again. That’s the way these creatures is built.”

“Why is that, Jim? I thought we was friends. I thought you trusted me.”

“I does trust you, Huck. Cain’t you see dat? I trusts you wif my life.”

[…]

“I understand why you talk the way you do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean it makes sense.”

I studied his face. He was talking with his eyes closed, as much fighting sleep as losing to it. There was a lot of this in that face. “You be a smart boy, Huck.”

“White folks watch us work and forget how long we’re left alone in our heads. Working and waiting.”

I smiled. “If only they knew the danger in that.”

“I don’t believe they even know we talk to each other,” Easter said.

“They can’t accept it. They won’t accept it. And they’re always surprised.”

I made eye contact with a couple of people in the crowd and the way they looked at me was different from any contact I had ever had with white people. They were open to me, but what I saw, looking into them, was hardly impressive. They sought to share this moment of mocking me, mocking darkies, laughing at the poor slaves, with joyful, spirited clapping and stomping. I looked at one woman who might have been intrigued by me or taken with me, the entertainer. I saw the surface of her, merely the outer shell, and realized that she was mere surface all the way to her core.

“We’re slaves. We’re not anywhere. Free person, he can be where he wants to be. The only place we can ever be is in slavery.” She looked at Norman. “Are you really a slave?” she asked.

“I am.”

“And you’re colored,” she said.

Norman nodded.

“Who can tell?”

“Nobody,” Norman said.

“Then why do you stay colored?”

“Because of my mother. Because of my wife. Because I don’t want to be white. I don’t want to be one of them.”

Massa Corey bring me cone bread,
Hoo Ya Hoo Ya!
Massa Corey bring me cone bread,
He makes da boat go.

I opened an eye and watched him awhile, then shut it again because I did not like the sight. Unfortunately, neither I nor the engine’s roar could block out the sound of his dreadful singing.

[…]

I imagined Norman upstairs, nervous, but perhaps physically comfortable, not hot and covered with soot, but no doubt more frightened than I was, more lost. I wondered if he was angry. I wondered if I had ever not been angry.

“Why me, Jim?”

Maybe because I was tired of the slave voice. Maybe because I hated myself for having lost my friend. Maybe because the lie was burning through me. Because of all of those reasons, I said, “Because, Huck, and I hope you hear this without thinking I’m crazy or joking, you are my son.”

Huck shot out a short laugh. “What?”

“You are my son. And I am your father.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Are you referring to my diction or my content?”

“What? What’s content?”

“Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. Believe I’m lying and move through the world as a white boy. Believe I’m telling the truth and move through the world as a white boy anyway. Either way, no difference.” I looked at the boy’s face and I could see that he had feelings for me and that was the root of his anger. He had always felt affection for me, if not actual love. He had always looked to me for protection, even when he thought he was trying to protect me.

“Liar,” he cried.

I took it.

“Why on earth would you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?”

[…]

“Are you going to kill me?”

“The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ’cided, Massa.”

I had never seen a white man filled with such fear. The remarkable truth, however, was that it was not the pistol, but my language, the fact that I didn’t conform to his expectations, that I could read, that had so disturbed and frightened him.

“I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night,” I said. “I am a sign. I am your future. I am James.” I pulled back the hammer on my pistol.