Mark Twain

The range of models critics cite when they probe the sources of Mark Twain Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is wide. It includes the picaresque novel, the Southwestern humorists, the Northeastern literary comedians, the newspapers Twain contributed to and read, and the tradition of the "boy book" in American popular culture. Twain himself weighed in with a clear statement about the roots of his main character, claiming that Huck Finn was based on Tom Blankenship, a poor-white outcast child Twain remembered from Hannibal, and on Tom's older brother Bence, who once helped a runaway slave. These sources may seem quite different. On one level, however, they are the same: they all give Twain's book a genealogy that is unequivocally white.

Although commentators differ on the question of which models and sources proved most significant, they tend to concur on the question of how Huckleberry Finn transformed American literature. Twain's innovation of having a vernacular-speaking child tell his own story in his own words was the first stroke of brilliance; Twain's awareness of the power of satire in the service of social criticism was the second. Huck's voice combined with Twain's satiric genius changed the shape of fiction in America .

Critics, for the most part, have confined their studies of the relationship between Twain's work and African-American traditions to examinations of his depiction of African-American folk beliefs or to analyses of the dialects spoken by his black characters. But by limiting their field of inquiry to the periphery, they have missed the ways in which African-American voices shaped Twain's creative imagination at its core.

Compelling evidence indicates that the model for Huck Finn's voice was a black child instead of a white one and that this child's speech sparked in Twain a sense of the possibilities of a vernacular narrator. The record suggests that it may have been yet another black speaker who awakened Twain to the power of satire as a tool of social criticism. This may help us understand why Richard Wright found Twain's work "strangely familiar," and why Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and David Bradley all found Twain so empowering in their own efforts to convert African-American experience into art.

As Ralph Ellison put it in 1970, "the black man [was] a co-creator of the language that Mark Twain raised to the level of literary eloquence." But his comment sank like a stone, leaving barely a ripple on the placid surface of American literary criticism. Neither critics from the center nor critics from the margins challenged the reigning assumption that mainstream literary culture in America is certifiably "white."

Mark Twain was unusually attuned to the nuances of cadence, rhythm, syntax, and diction that distinguish one language or dialect from another, and he had a genius for transferring the oral into print. Twain, whose preferred playmates had been black, was what J. L. Dillard might have called "bidialectal"; as an engaging black child he encountered in the early 1870s helped reconnect Twain to the cadences and rhythms of black speakers from Twain's own childhood, he inspired him to liberate a language that lay buried within Twain's own linguistic repertoire and to apprehend its stunning creative potential. Twain, in turn, would help make that language available as a literary option to both white and black writers who came after him. As Ellison put it in 1991, "he made it possible for many of us to find our own voices."