Our Pick
Posted on @rawstates
Huck Finn's journey
Published 1884
The Mississippi, Missouri to Louisiana
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The only route on this map that never happened. Twain sent a boy and a man he called property down a real river past invented towns, and the geography does the argument: every mile they drift carries Jim further from freedom, because the river runs the wrong way. The stops are placed on the reaches the book describes, and every invented one says so.
That was 1 of the hidden places.
Huck Finn's Journey: Twain's boyhood town and the St. Petersburg of the books, complete with the cave, the island and the whitewashed fence. He saw his first dead body here and watched enslaved people sold on the levee, and both end up in the writing. The boyhood home on Hill Street is a museum and the town has traded on him ever since. Jackson's Island, where Huck hides and finds Jim, is the wooded island just downstream; the island is invented, the town is not. · St. Louis: Passed in the dark, a smear of lights: the first real city on the river and the last one Huck names before the country empties out. · Cairo, missed in the fog: The turn up the Ohio toward free states, and the hinge of the whole book. They row past it in fog and cannot get back, so the raft carries Jim deeper into slavery instead of out of it. · The Grangerford place: The feud that kills Buck. Invented, placed on the Kentucky bank below Cairo where the narrative puts it. · Bricksville and the Duke and King: The shabby Arkansas town where the con men stage the Royal Nonesuch and Colonel Sherburn shoots Boggs in the street. Invented. · Pikesville: Where the King sells Jim for forty dollars. Invented, placed on the lower reach the text implies. · The Phelps farm: Where Jim is held and Tom Sawyer turns a rescue into a performance, and where Huck decides he will go to hell rather than give Jim up. Invented.
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