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could that he is not free and will not be." Reversing himself on the free–
ing of the slaves and adopting the Reconstruction reading for good mea–
sure, Cox now declared that "deep down we know and know socially
every day that neither we nor Jim is free despite the fictions of history and
the Thirteenth Amendment."
Displaying the fervor of a convert, Cox went as far in his denuncia–
tion of America as any of the younger critics who had come to dominate
criticism in the eighties. He declared himself concerned with exposing
"the big national lie of freedom." The situation he saw - the year was
1985 - was one in which "we are at the threshold of George Orwell's
1984." The reason? Covert imperialism was stifling freedom. "All this
[military] defense," wrote Cox, "is being stockpiled to keep our national
freedom secure from the
slavery
of rival political ideologies." He contin–
ued:
Mark Twain recognized that the holy American nation, having fought
out the battle of good and evil along the lines and under the tenus of
freedom against slavery, was itself moving toward the goal of imperial
power.
Just what Mark Twain knew and just what the United States has be–
come in the twentieth century are legitimate questions. But James
M.
Cox was not really asking them. He was displaying his conversion to the
slavery-centered, anti-American reading of
Huckleberry Finn.
In contrast,
black critics once again saw the situation differently. In the essays for the
special issue of the
Mark Twain Journal,
they expressed no doubt about the
outcome of the Civil War for the slaves. David
L.
Smith observed that at
the time
Huckleberry Finn
was published:
more than twenty years of national strife, including Civil War and
Reconstruction, had established Huck's conclusion regarding slavery
as a dominant national consensus. Not even reactionary Southerners
advocated a reinstitution of slavery.
He might have added that only white academic cntlcs expressed such
doubts, and only white critics expressed a need to declare America a
fail–
ure. For black critics,
Huckleberry Finn
remained a work that "reaffirms the
values of our democratic faith."
In retrospect, it is possible to see that once
Huckleberry Finn
criticism
had been aimed in a moral and political direction by Leo Marx's emphasis
on antislavery, the forces were set in motion that would result in Cox's
