Dear slithy toves: I think it is worth mentioning at this point current PC castigation of Mark Twain as racist is totally erroneous. In your quote, the callousness did not represent the author's beliefs. On the contrary; he knew that unconcealed anti-racist propaganda would offend just about everybody. When I was a teen-ager, I was really shook by the scene when Huck and Jim are going down the river on the raft, and Jim's crying because he misses his wife wakes Huck up, and for the first time Huck understands that Jim has feelings just as much as any white.