DAtwood+Episode

=Chapter VI - Political Economy=

In this chapter Huck is stuck in his Pap’s cabin. His Pap is trying to get Huck’s money that Judge Thatcher has. Pap is just waiting till he goes to court. Huck doesn’t want Pap to have the money because he will end up wasting it on alcohol. The Widow Douglas, whom Huck is living with when his Pap isn’t around, is trying to get custody of Huck. Pap feels that his own son shouldn’t be taken from him, but Huck doesn’t want to live with either his Pap or the widow.

During the day in the cabin, Huck is locked in the cabin where he has no way to escape. He is able to find a saw and plans to saw his way out in order to escape from his Pap and the Widow Douglas. Huck wants to get, “so far away that the old man nor the widow couldn’t ever find [him] any more,” (Ch.VI). He wants to go someplace where he doesn’t have to become civilized and doesn’t have to deal with a father who is drunk all the time. “I didn’t want to go back to the widow’s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized,” Huck thought about going to the widow (Ch.VI). Huck also got tired of his drunken dad, “but by and by pap got too handy with his hick’ry, and I couldn’t stand it” (Ch.VI).



When Pap came back one night and was drunk he started talking about politics. He was going off about how horrible the government was, and how he should leave the country. He was complaining about how the government could take Huck away from him. “Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him—a man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising,” (Ch.VI). Pap also went on about this free black. He was saying how he was wearing nicer clothes than he had, how he had an education, and how he could vote. Pap went on saying how when he went to vote in the election, “they told me there was a state in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote ag’in as long as I live,” (Ch.VI). Pap felt that a black man in this country should be a slave and not allowed to vote. He wondered why the free black wasn’t sold, but was told, “he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the state six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet,” (Ch.VI).

Twain in this chapter goes into the idea of segregation. The black man that Pap was complaining about was free, but Pap felt that a black person should be a slave. Pap is used to the separation between the black man and the white man. The black man is the slave working in the fields and the white man is the man controlling everything. Other people in the South where Pap was from felt the same way about blacks. Twain is able to give the view of someone who is for segregation between the blacks and the whites.

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