
Re: Huckleberry Finn/ chapters 13-18
I suspect Mark Twain was playing with the racial attitudes of his time in this section. At one point Huck actually convinces Jim their separation during the fog was a dream. Jim even "terprets" warning symbols in the dream. Twain probably hoodwinked many of his contemporary readers as they blindly accept and laugh at Jim's extreme gullibility. But then Twain flips this around as Jim figures out Huck's game and calls him trash for putting "dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed". Twain rubs it in as Huck admits how bad this made him feel and says "It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a (n-word)" by apologizing.
A black man figuring out he had been fooled? A black man calling a white boy trash? A white boy apologizing to a black man? I expect these were shocking attitudes at the time the book was published and long afterwards...