Despite the title of her forthcoming book, “Was Huck Black?”, Fishkin doesn’t mean that Huck is Jimmy in whiteface. She’s well aware, in fact, that Twain said Huck was an exact portrait of a boyhood chum named Tom Blankenship, the son of the town drunk in Hannibal, Mo., but she’s come up with a way to finesse that inconvenient fact: Twain doesn’t tell us how Tom talked. If this sounds like a bit of a stretch, you’d never know it from last week’s chorus of Eurekas. " It’s what we’ve all been looking for," said David E. E. Sloane, University of New Haven English professor and president of the Mark Twain Circle of America. “It’s like the missing link. This comes under the line of proof: now we know.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities, told the Times Fishkin had demonstrated “that it is the black American linguistic voice which forms the structuring principle of the great American novel, and that ain’t bad.” Novelist Toni Morrison, who has often called for recognition of an African-American strain in white as well as black American literature, welcomed Fishkin’s “understanding of the integral part black language and imagination had on Sam Clemens” (Twain’s real name). Justin Kaplan, Twain’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, was one of the few to betray disComfort with the slenderness of Fishkin’s evidence, but he gave her an A for effort: " I wish there’d been more proof. But she’s certainly done the best with what she has."

The centerpiece of “Was Huck Black?”, which Oxford University Press will publish next year, is Fishkin’s analysis of a cozily condescending piece called “Sociable Jimmy,” which appeared under Twain’s byline in The New York Times in November 1874. (He began writing " Huckleberry Finn" in the summer of 1876.) In it, Twain meets a “little darkey boy” (probably in late 1871 or early 1872). He finds him “the most artless, sociable and exhaustless talker I ever came across,” and listens “as one who receives a revelation.” The bulk of the piece is Twain’s transcription of Jimmy’s monologue. Critics have ignored it, and Twain himself seems to have forgotten it-no one reprinted it until 1943-but Jimmy made a powerful impression at the time. Fishkin has turned up an unpublished letter in which Twain told his wife, “I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy’s spirit would descend upon me & enter into me.”*

That’s approximately what happened, Fishkin argues in a draft manuscript she provided to NEWSWEEK-though it took four years for him to act on the “revelation.” During that time he wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” in which a comparatively bland Huck makes his debut. The reason “Huckleberry Finn” and not “Tom Sawyer” became (as Ernest Hemingway claimed) the foundation of modern American literature is Twain’s decision to write in Huck’s demotic voice and from his drastically limited point of view. Huck’s progeny includes characters as diverse as Faulkner’s retarded Benjy and Salinger’s hyperconscious Holden Caulfield. In claiming that still-echoing voice has a hitherto unacknowledged black component, Fishkin is subverting the assumption tacitly accepted by multiculturalists and traditionalists alike-that mainstream American literature is essentially white-bread. But how strong is her case?

Certainly it’s not implausible. Twain was an instinctive collector and regurgitator of voices, dialects and quirks of speech; when we come across a catchy bit of language, he once wrote, “we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; and it goes with the myriad of its fellows to the building, brick by brick, of the edifice which we call our style.” A practicing noveList like Toni Morrison isn’t surprised that four years might go by before Twain put Jimmy to use. “There’s something called novel time that has nothing to do with chronology,” says Morrison. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 10 seconds, 10 minutes or 10 years-you use what’s already there. It’s not like Twain forgot during those years. He just went to a place where it was fresh for him, and something clicked in the language of this child Jimmy.”

What’s wrong with Fishkin’s thesis is that Jimmy really doesn’t sound much like Huck Finn. Her manuscript compares their language for page after page, but most of the similarities she finds are unremarkable in semiliterate children of their time: they both say “drownded,” “powerful” (as in “powerful sick”) and “disremember”; both use double negatives and “nonstandard” verb forms like “I seen.” Twain’s statement that Huck Finn is “Tom Blankenship exactly as he was” would seem to preclude any but linguistic comparisons between Jimmy and Huck, but that doesn’t deter Fishkin from moving on to their personalities. She notes that they both have drunken fathers (has she disremembered old man Blankenship?), and that both are so naive they miss the point of jokes that the reader understands. But this was a form of irony we know Twain admired in other writers: he savored it in Jimmy, but didn’t learn it from him. Finally, she asserts that a dead cat Jimmy talks about “must have entered Twain’s mind at least on a subliminal level” when he introduced Huck for the first time in “Tom Sawyer,” carrying a dead cat.

No one can prove Twain didn’t get any or all of these things from Sociable Jimmy. But Fishkin hasn’t proved he did; nor has she attempted to argue that the speech patterns Huck does share with African-Americans make him unique. She merely notes similarities between Huck’s language and that of Jimmy and other blacks-but scholars have always known that the speech of white and black Southerners had common elements.

Fishkin writes that " if we ignore the role Jimmy played as a model for Huck, we distort the true nature of Twain’s imaginative talent." But in overselling Jimmy, she distorts our sense of how Twain’s imagination worked. Unfortunately, her theory is too timely not to catch on. And, equally depressing, those who dissent from it are going to look-to say the least-incorrect. As Huck would say, we been there before. ..L1.-

  • c 1992 by Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustee of the Mark Twain Foundation.

PHOTOS: A bit of a stretch: Huck and his creator (CULVER PICTURES)

But de res’ o’ de people, dey had a good time–mos’ all uv’ em had a good time. Dey all got drunk. Dey all gits drunk heah, every Christmas, and carries on and has awful good times … Pa used to git drunk, but dat was befo’ I was big-but he’s done quit. He don’ git drunk no mo’ now. Jis’ takes one nip in de mawnin’, now, cuz his stomach riles up …

Sociable Jimmy

Huck Finn