Finn

The paradox of Jon Clinch's Finn (2007) is that even though it is a "supplementary" novel, offering a backstory of sorts for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story drives towards erasure: erasures of the past, of family relations, of class differences, and, above all, of race.  Clinch notes in the afterword that his premise was partly inspired by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and his tale might have been subtitled "How Huck Came to be White."  Finn takes up with an adolescent slave, Mary, whose father had attempted to spark a slave rebellion aboard a river boat.  The two eke out a brutal but nevertheless symbiotic relationship--think Sikes and  Nancy--even after Finn's virulently racist father, Judge Finn, catches them together and chases them off his property.  This is not, however, to say that Finn models antiracist sensibilities; his desire for Mary, which develops into a twisted kind of attachment, emerges from what the novel represents as a widespread cultural assumption that African-American women (and children) can be reduced to sexual objects, available to any white man.  As it happens, this assumption will eventually get Finn killed--but not before he strangles Mary, shoots one man, drowns another, inadvertently causes the death of a third...and rewrites Huck's parentage.

Early on, Judge Thatcher tells Finn that "It does a man good to remember his beginnings [...] Even Satan remembers his beginnings.  And therein lies the root of his eternal torment" (40).  But "beginnings" are precisely what the characters try to suppress.  Their evasions and revisions are twinned in the novel's plot structure, which begins with Mary's unidentifiable corpse floating down river; the narrator relegates the murder itself to a single sentence (41), emphasizing instead the extent to which Finn tries to cover up its traces with a literal whitewash.  Finn's whitewashing reappears in his brother's manipulation of Judge Finn's ledgers, the better to keep Finn in cash; in Judge Finn's attempts to distance himself from his much-loathed son; in Mary's decision to "repudiat[e] her own history" (201) to save herself and Huck.  Although the last example would appear to be miles away from the first, the novel represents these "repudiations" as a symptom of a loathsomely diseased culture.  Mary must forget herself in order to survive the threat of being re-enslaved in Mississippi--her "choice" is no choice at all.  Similarly, she tells Huck that he must be a "poor motherless child" (238) in order to escape slavery, an erasure doubled by Finn a few pages later.  Much as he will whitewash the walls, Finn turns Huck's fictional dead mother "as white as this very snow" (246).  Although Mary makes it clear that her non-maternity is just a story, Finn insists that Huck's beginnings really lie with his imaginary white mother--and Huck believes his father.   Judge Finn had ordered his son to murder Huck in order to erase any sign of miscegenation from the family tree.  But within this world's inescapable racial constraints, "saving" the child means figuratively and literally killing the mother.   By the end of the novel, Huck may have a future, but he has no beginning; his whiteness is, in effect, the fiction of a blank page. 

Nevertheless, if Finn allows Huck to "light out" (283) at the end, it grants Finn himself no redemption.  There are no functional families anywhere in this novel, except one...and that one only by implication.   First by accident and then by choice, Finn is repeatedly drawn to a Black laundress, with horrific results.  First, he batters her son.  Then, he joins a sleazy preacher (the King from Huckleberry Finn) in what turns out to be a kidnapping raid: Finn murders the husband before the preacher kidnaps, rapes, and finally drowns the boy.  (Although Finn doesn't save the child, this crime clearly exceeds even his limits: he drowns the preacher in turn.)  After serving time in jail for another crime, Finn strikes up an odd friendship with the woman, but in the end Finn needs her corpse to double for Mary's. Seeking to duplicate his crime, he assumes that he can erase all traces of the woman's identity.  But despite Finn's attempts to whitewash his past as well as his walls, the room bears testimony to his actions.  Not only does the laundress recognize his hat, but she finds Finn's confession, drawn upon the wall: "And now that she has eyes to see there can be no mistaking certain of the mad scrawlings upon the walls either, least of all those depicting her wronged child and her throat-shot husband and her own beauteous profile untainted, certainly not those recalling the vulgar bare-rumped preacher having his hideous way and the familiar masked figure standing to one side with a pistol in his hand" (281).  Finn's "mad scrawlings" are indecipherable to every other character; although his suppressed past bursts forth in this strange mural, no character can read it save this one.  This moment of interpellation transforms the laundress into a Biblical avenger.  The bleak Biblical allusion ("eyes to see") ties this moment of revelation to the child's rape, with its obscene echo of Genesis ("and the skiff rocks unevenly upon the face of the black water" [111]).  And her discovery of the pistol that Finn used to shoot her husband is a "gift to her from some vengeful god in whom she has had no prior right to believe" (282). There's no tent stake, but Finn's death harks back to Jael and Sisera.   Whether the "hand of the children of Israel prospered" afterwards, however, is a question that the novel refuses to answer (Judges 4:24).