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Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the 1880s, two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. Yet…Reconstruction, the plan to integrate freed slaves into the mold of society, was failing. The Jim Crow laws (segregation) were introduced, limiting the power and voice of African Americans more than ever—with a different approach. Because these “new” methods of racism weren’t as direct, they couldn’t be easily challenged. So, by Twain’s time, the majority of Americans—Southerners especially—still treated blacks with the same discriminative contempt as before. Therefore, it was ironic that perhaps the only character in Twain’s novel portrayed as a compassionate, caring, realistic, noble, loyal, human being is Jim, the black slave. Readers are forced to recognize Jim as a person, an equal, by the end of the novel. It is Jim that we inevitably sympathize with, consciously or not. It is in this way that Twain demonstrates to us the unjustness of slavery, and how Jim is more a free man than any character in the book.
In the first chapters of Huckleberry Finn, Jim is depicted as stupid and slow, with ridiculous superstitions. He has a “hair-ball oracle” which allegedly performs magic (Twain 17; ch.4). Things like catching young birds or counting what you are planning to cook before dinner are supposed to bring bad luck. The ideal belief system/religion, of course, is Christian—such is what Miss Watson, Sally Phelps, and Mrs. Loftus put stock in, and they are “good and moral” white people, after all. When you observe closely, though, they are in fact hypocrites. According to the Bible which they so devote themselves to, “We are all God’s children”, meaning that everyone is equal. Yet there’s one instance where this doesn’t apply; slaves, apparently, don’t count, so whites are free to be indifferent to their plight. When Huck meets Mrs. Loftus in chapter 11, she is sympathetic towards Huck when he makes...