Event+from+H.F.

__**Bigotry Seems to Be Hidden Well in the United States**__
There are many episodes and characters throughout //Huckleberry Finn// that Twain uses to dwell on the hypocrisy of moral and intellectual teachings in America's society. Throughout reading the novel one comes the fully realize that much of America's history can be critiqued by some of the symbols.

One of the most important and evidential figures that Twain uses to influence his ideas of hypocrisy is Miss Watson. She is one of the two sisters that adopts Huck to help teach him the ways of “civilized society.” Nevertheless, Miss Watson feels that she is a very Christian woman who always “tried to be good...every way she knowed how.” (Huck Finn{91}) Miss Watson believes that every good and respectable person should be polite, just and well mannered yet this very woman who was so God-bearing and family believing was willing to separate the slave family that she owned. One of her slaves, Jim, who was both father and husband after discovering that Miss Watson wanted to sell his family ran away and this eventually leads to Jim and Huck's journey to freedom.

Huckleberry Finn the main character of the novel is a rebellious child who does not find following rules as a way of life and on his journey to the North meets Jim who is running away to save himself and his family, yet Huck being a white boy had a superior position over Jim and Huck knowing that Jim is a runaway reflects between what society has taught him and whether to help or turn Jim in.


 * “I begun to get it through my head that he was //most// free-- and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn't get that out of my conscience, no how no way... It hadn't ever come home to me before before, what this thing that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tired to make out to myself that //I// weren't to blame, because //I// didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, 'But you knowed he was running for his freedom and you couldn't 'a' paddled ashore and told somebody.'... Conscience says to me, 'What has poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single thing? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn your books, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you ever way she knowed how. //That's// what she done.' ”**

This event found in Chapter 16 of Huckleberry Finn is a stupendous illustration of what Mark Twain was critiquing. Twain uses this episode of Huck fighting between what society has defined as the right thing to do and what he believes he should do to express how corrupt society was in America. Even the best of Christians, like Miss Watson, were doing what is regarded as one of the harshest and worst crimes since the beginning of the United States.

African-Americans were oppressed by white people because of their color. Blacks were not regarded as people but merely property and when compared to anything it was to animals. At the time period when Twain wrote his novel America was in the midst of the Civil War in the midst of fighting for what some people believed was a crime and what some people (mostly Southerners) believed was their right.

When society has this affect on children like Huck who at the age of 13 didn't know what to do when society was telling him to destroy a good person's life or to help the man that through his enduring of abuse was still kind hearted and treated Huck with respect, whether that was due to the fact that Huck was white. Jim could've easily killed Huck and gotten away with it since the rest of their community believed Huck was a dead kid anyways and yet Him allowed Huck to play his games at a time when Jim's life was on the line.

This episode not only represents society's hypocrisy of trying to teach the younger kids between right and wrong and yet making them believe that they are better than a man because of their race. So then the big question is, how could society expect people to know what was right and just when society was what would define what people could or couldn't do?