The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The group travels south for days. They try and fail at a variety of schemes in the southern villages, and soon the party is out of money. Huck becomes nervous as the scoundrels begin to plot in secret, and so Jim and Huck make their own plot to escape. However, after a set of distractions in a town called Pikesville, Huck returns to the raft to find that Jim is missing. Down the road, he learns that Jim was caught as a runaway fitting the description of the duke’s false handbill, was sold for $40, and is now being held in the barn of a man two miles downriver named Phelps.

Huck wrestles darkly with his soul and the right thing to do. He considers writing Miss Watson with the complete story to save Jim from slavery among strangers far from the North. He weighs the crime of his “theft” from Miss Watson to the bonding friendship he’s formed with Jim. He decides, in his limited way, that he’d rather “go to hell” than prevent Jim from attaining freedom, and that he “never thought no more about reforming” (215).

Huck hides the raft on a small island near the Phelps-owned sawmill. He scouts the outlying barns and is walking toward town when he sees the duke putting up handbills for a new Nonesuch performance. They have a threatening exchange in which the duke demands Huck stay silent and attempts to convince Huck that Jim is many miles out of town. With that, Huck is satisfied that he’s given the scoundrels the slip.

Huck scouts the Phelps property again with particular emphasis on the slave quarters, when he is beset on all sides by a pack of barking dogs. This draws the attention of a Black woman and her two children, who keep the dogs at bay. Then a White woman named Sally comes around and throws her arms around Huck, mistaking him for her nephew Tom. Improvising, Huck plays the part.

Huck, continuing to improvise, must account for his early arrival and the fact that he has no luggage. He gets nervous as Aunt Sally asks specific questions about family up north, but then her husband Silas arrives. As a prank, she decides to hide Huck from Silas, only to reveal him by surprise. In this reveal, Huck realizes that he’s imitating his friend Tom Sawyer, an incredible coincidence that leaves him both flabbergasted and reassured.

When he hears the steamboat in the distance, he goes up the road to waylay his friend and fill him in.

Huck meets Tom halfway up the road. Like Jim before him, Tom requires convincing that Huck isn’t a ghost. Soon, Huck fills Tom in on everything, and the two plot a way to fool Aunt Sally and steal Jim back, though Huck worries for the state of Tom’s soul in doing so, as he once worried about his own.

Tom, true to form, has an elaborate way of doing things. Rather than just pretend to be Sid Sawyer—another out-of-town cousin—instead he pranks Sally by pretending to be someone else before revealing himself as Sid. He is welcomed with good cheer and a hearty dinner.

During dinner, Huck learns through Silas that Jim has already spoken about the Nonesuch, and that word of its counterfeit nature has spread around town. That night, Tom and Huck sneak out toward town and come across a mob of people carrying torches, riding the tarred and feathered duke and king out of town on a rail. Huck feels an unwanted pang of conscience for the men.

Tom and Huck see dinner brought out to a particular hut with a padlock on it and conclude that this is Jim’s makeshift prison.

Huck has a simple plan to free Jim by stealing the padlock key and getting him to the river. Tom rejects the plan as too simple and develops a more stylish and adventuresome plan. Huck finds a window for Jim to crawl through, but Tom rejects such a portal as being too obvious. Tom won’t be satisfied with anything less than a weeklong tunnel-digging escapade. In preparing for the escapade, Tom and Huck befriend Nat, the servant who brings Jim his meals. The servant brings the boys to see Jim. They are overjoyed to be reunited but must backtrack to conceal they know one another.

They secretly inform Jim of their plan to free him and leave.

Tom is dissatisfied with their plan, noting how easy it would be to simply walk Jim out the front door of his prison. He tries to invent complications for their plan, including a saw to take the leg off a bed post that could simply be lifted to release Jim’s chain. He also mentions cutting off Jim’s leg, and a romantic plot whereby Jim writes letters for months using a makeshift pen and a pot of ink. They steal a shirt for Jim, on which he can write woeful confessions. After breakfast, they discuss the morality of stealing objects to break free a prisoner and collect their materials. Finally, they gather materials to dig a hole with a set of handy shovels, which Tom rejects, bidding Huck to fetch a set of dull case knives for the work so it’s more in keeping with romantic adventure fiction.

The boys begin digging, with Tom committing them to a “thirty-eight year job” of it (246). Soon they tire, however, and Tom admits that digging with case knives will take too long. They return to picks and shovels, then give up on the hole altogether.

Next, they take items from Sally’s pantry to assemble makeshift writing implements and to create an unnecessary rope ladder for Jim’s floor-height shack. Tom intends to disguise these implements in Jim’s food, such as the rope ladder he plans to bake into a pie to smuggle them into Jim’s cabin. Though Jim expresses his preference for a chisel to free himself from the shackles, he agrees to be patient and wait for Tom’s plan to unfold. Soon after, he hurts his tooth on a cornpone laced with wood splinters.

When Nat, the servant who brings Jim his meals, sees the cabin full of the Phelps’s loose dogs, he believes they are witches. Tom uses this information as leverage to ensure Nat keeps bringing Jim his doctored meals.

Sally notices a missing shirt and a few other objects that Tom and Huck stole. She blames Silas and the household vermin for their disappearances, and demands he stop up the rat holes in the house. Tom and Huck decide they owe Silas for taking the blame for their theft, so they secretly stop up the rat holes for him, which sows further confusion in the house. They next concoct an elaborate shell game to confuse Sally into letting them steal a spoon.

From a stolen bedsheet they produce their promised rope ladder, though they have to cut it considerably short to fit it into the pie. Jim plays along with their scheme.

Next, the boys concoct a coat of arms for Jim to scratch onto his cell wall. They finally settle on one representative of slavery and enchainment, with a Latin motto meaning “the more haste, the less speed” (259). Next, Tom concocts a mournful inscription on Jim’s cell wall. Since the walls are made of logs, Tom and Huck go to the trouble of stealing a grindstone from the mill to have a proper stone on which to carve, briefly freeing Jim from his shackles to help with the labor.

Tom imagines that Jim’s prison requires more vermin to authenticate it. Tom says “prisoners ain’t ever without rats” and suggests Jim play music to soothe them (262). Tom then suggests that Jim grow a flower on his prison floor and water it with his tears. Jim protests that he doesn’t like vermin and that he “doan’ skasely ever cry” (263).

Huck and Tom catch more than a dozen live rats in a trap. They gather spiders, too, but when they gather a dozen garter snakes, they all get out during dinner and scare Aunt Sally. After three weeks, Jim’s prison is full of such animals.

Silas has been sending out inquiries to slaveowners to cash in on Jim, and his letters are beginning to reach St. Louis. In the meantime, Tom sends a series of “nonnamous letters” full of warnings and bloody portents to the Phelps family. The final letter refers to a “desperate band of cutthroats” coming from the north (269). He also plans an elaborate but nonsensical ruse in which they will dress straw up in Jim’s clothes and dress Jim up in stolen women’s clothes.

The Phelpses are nervous after receiving the letters, and so Huck and Tom carefully plan the evening’s escape. In assembling their road provisions, however, Tom admonishes Huck for forgetting a large slab of butter and won’t start the escape until Huck secures it. Sally catches Huck in the cellar, and so Huck hides the butter in his hat as Sally commands him to stay put in the setting room, where 15 farmers are also sitting, each with a gun and eager to go catch the cutthroats on the road. As Huck begins to sweat, the butter drips from under his hat. Sally catches him and shoos him away with an admonishment. The boys assemble in Jim’s cabin and are escaping through a hole under the bed when the armed mob breaks the padlock and barges in. They make it to the perimeter of the property pursued by the men, who fire their guns. The mob lets the dogs out after the boys, but the dogs recognize them as friendly, and so the boys keep moving toward the river. They reach the canoe and then the hidden raft.

They realize, to Tom’s delight, that Tom has taken a bullet in the leg. Huck goes back down the river in the canoe to find a doctor while the other two wait in hiding.

Down the river, Huck finds a doctor. Not trusting the canoe to carry two people, the doctor takes it himself, leaving Huck. Huck oversleeps behind a woodpile. Panicking upon learning that the doctor hasn’t returned, he runs back down the river only to find Silas, who’s been out looking for the boys. Huck invents a story that keeps Silas and Huck sidetracked at the post office; they don’t return to the Phelps home until dinner.

Many farmers and their wives are in the Phelpses’ home getting served dinner and comparing stories about the evening’s adventures. From the strange things they find in the escaped Jim’s cabin, they conclude that he must be insane and must have had several other rebellious slaves helping him escape. Sally mentions the number of items that have gone missing in the last three weeks and wonders where Tom is.

Tom remains missing into the morning hours, with Sally keeping watch for the boy all night.

That morning Silas is about to read a letter from Tom’s Aunt Polly, writing from St. Petersburg, when the doctor, a group of men, and a hogtied Jim arrive bearing Tom on a mattress. The men are ready to punish Jim when the doctor speaks up on his behalf, noting his care for and loyalty to Tom.

The Phelpses are preoccupied with caring for Tom to the degree that they don’t ask obvious questions about Huck’s involvement in Tom’s inquiry. However, when Tom wakes up, he inquires cheerfully as to whether they’ve pulled off their escape scheme. Sally is confused, so Tom fills her in on every romantic detail. He’s crestfallen to learn that Jim remains a prisoner, at which point, Tom says, “he ain’t no slave; he’s as free as any cretur that walks the earth!” (288). He reveals that Miss Watson died two months ago, and that she granted Jim his freedom as a final request.

Suddenly, Aunt Polly appears after a long trip from St. Petersburg, revealing the identities of Huck and Tom. A confused Phelps family forgives the boys for their ruse, though Tom reveals that he has been secretly stealing the letters announcing Polly’s arrival. Huck raises his moral estimation of Tom: “I couldn’t ever understand, before, until that minute and that talk, how he could help a body set a n***** free, with his bringing up” (289).

Tom reveals the rest of his aborted plan to Huck: that they would ride the raft to river’s mouth, having adventures along the way, only to reveal to Jim his freedom at the end of their journey, at which point Tom would pay him for his lost time and provide him with steam fare home. As it stands, Tom gives Jim $40, which Jim takes as a sign of good luck. Huck mentions that he’s now without money, since he assumes his father has “drunk it up” by now (292). Jim reveals that the dead body they found in the collapsed house early in their adventure was Huck’s father.

In conclusion, Huck says he’s happy to no longer be writing a book, and that he intends to go west rather than endure further civilizing efforts from Aunt Sally.