“Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.”[break]
Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I GOT to do it –I can’t get OUT of it. Right then along comes a skiff with two men in it with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says:
“What’s that yonder?”
“A piece of a raft,” I says.
“Do you belong on it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any men on it?”
“Only one, sir.”
“Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night up yonder, above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?”
I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn’t man enough – hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says:
“He’s white.”
-- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book that reaches back into my childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, with memories of my father laughing out loud, reading sections in his armchair in the living room. The black and white photograph in his study of “The Mark Twain” steamship, the sweltering hot Missouri summers, and swimming in the two mile across Mississippi River by Hannibal (Twain’s boyhood home) are all connected to the novel and kneaded into the rich mud of my memories.
I love the warm humor and dignity of Jim, the runaway black slave, and the natural kindness and common sense of Huck, a white boy escaping a drunken father and tyrannical society, who ends up helping Jim escape down the Big River on a raft. At a moment of decision, when Huck raised in a racist society determines to turn Jim in, he ends up instead acting not out of his socially created conscience, but from his innate moral sense.
It is not the pretty writing in this section that appeals to me or even the humorously convoluted and boyish logic of Huck, but the sense that we can do right despite an upbringing that teaches hate. In the simple dramatic build of the section, Huck’s “He’s white.” stands as a triumphant statement that reverberates through the American psyche.
About Merola
A Ph D on Dramatic Art from University of California, Berkeley, Merola has been directing as well as teaching theatre. Also a senior Fulbright Scholar to Nepal for 2011, she has already directed six plays since then. As a theatre director and teacher, she often thinks how she might be able to access and transform “what I read onto the stage or into the classroom.” Merola says that she has looked through literature as a primary resource for the plays or performing arts. She mentions that she has emphasized more on original adaptations for that reason.
Merola shares her experience about reading a good book as being happy and always looking forward to 9 or 10 pm when she can finally read. Although as she approaches the novel’s end she has the habit of keeping staying up later and later. She especially relishes the build in a great novel to a moment that is fully arrived, inevitable yet surprising, and most often even if sad, triumphant.
Reading, she says, is a part of her world and opens another world for her. She exemplifies her understanding of a Muslim city in northern Turkey in Snow, Istanbul in The Museum of Innocence, both by Orhan Pamuk, and modern Japan in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami as such experience she had.
This year from Nepal, Merola says that she enjoyed reading Seasons of Flight by Manjushree Thapa and the non-fiction collection Telling a Tale, edited by Archana Thapa. She is also planning to make these collected stories into a play, with the girls and women telling their own tales in intimate spaces like bookstores and women’s homes as ‘Kitchen Dramas.’
Merola’s five picks
Ulysses by James Joyce
I love the Dublin world of Ulysses by James Joyce, read as an undergraduate at Berkeley, which I would like to reread now with more life experience.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez
My time in Mexico and Central America helped me thrill to the magic realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez from Colombia.
Into Their Labors by John Berger
The trilogy which includes: the poems, short essays and stories of Pig Earth, Once in Europa, made up of short stories and a longer novella by its title name, and Lilac and Flag, a novel. The trilogy traces the movement of peasant life in a small village in the French Alps into the modern, then postmodern age, with all the ugliness of technology, the horror of torture, and redemptive love. Reading the last pages of Once in Europa in a restaurant, I had the strange experience that I must literally flee to keep from uncontrollably sobbing. Paying my bill, my eyes filling with tears, I mutely pointed to the book and ran out.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
One of my more recent readings, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie made me exclaim out loud in wonder and enjoyment at this great Indian epic.
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Living now in Nepal, I read all the Nepali and South Asian literature I can get my hands on. Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, which takes place during the civil war in the 1980s in Sri Lana, like Lilac and Flag, is a stringent treatise on politics, love and justice. The book is not romantic or sentimental but it has a very powerful expression.
As told to Asmita Manandhar
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