COME BACK TO THE RAFT AG'IN, HUCK HONEY!
tor, or liberator, he will be rejected, refused-he dreams of his ac–
ceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream
so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate that it redeems our concept
of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy.
In each generation we
play
out the impossible mythos, and we
live to see our children play it, the white boy and the black we
can discover wrestling affectjonately on any American street, along
which they will walk
in
adulthood, eyes averted from each other,
unwilling to touch. The dream recedes; the immaculate passion and
the astonishing reconciliation become a memory, and less, a regret,
at last the unrecognized motifs of a child's book. "It's too good to
be true, Honey," Jim says to Huck. "It's too good to be true."
671
