Chapters 17, 18 and 19

Summary

George Jackson, alias Huck, is rescued from the dogs by a man who is relieved to find that Huck is not a Sheperdson.  There is a local feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons and Huck finds himself in the middle of this conflict. He is taken back to Colonel Grangerford’s house out of hospitality and there they provide clean dry clothes for the bedraggled Huckleberry. They have a son the same age called Buck.

The Grangerford house is large, full of paintings and ornate decorations.  It is humorously tacky bedecked in strange finery. Some of the paintings are by their deceased daughter Emmeline, who had created maudlin pictures concerning people who had died.

The family offers Huck a home for as long as he likes and Huck is impressed with Colonel Grangerford, as he owns a very large estate with over one hundred slaves. Huck tells them an elaborate story in support of his claim to be an orphan and the Grangerford family takes pity on their guest.

Besides Buck the son, there is Bob the elder son, then Tom and finally two daughters Charlotte, aged twenty five and Sophie, twenty, both of them beautiful.  Three sons have already been killed concerning the feud with the Sheperdson family who are an equally grand family with a large neighboring estate.  No one is quite sure how the feud started, but in the last year two people have been killed. The two families attend church together with their rifles between their knees as the preacher makes sermons about brotherly love.

One day after church, Sophie asks Huck to return to the church to get her Bible, which she had left, in the pew. She is delighted to find a note inside the Bible saying “Half-past two”. When Huck gets back to the house, his slave valet asks him to go into the woods, as he wants to show him some water moccasins.  There he finds Jim. Jim had followed Huck to the shore on the night they were wrecked, but did not call out for fear of being captured. He has been busy in the meantime repairing the raft and gathering together supplies. Huck says that they will leave shortly once he has made his farewells to the Grangerfords.

The next day Huck learns that Sophie has run off with a Sheperdson boy.  Huck finds Buck and a nineteen-year old Grangerford in a gunfight with Shepherdsons.  Later two are killed. Huck is upset by all of this violence and he finds Jim and the two set off downstream on the raft.

Huck muses, “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft”.

Soon after this, they see two men fleeing from a crowd and they beg to be let onto the raft.  The two agree and the two men, one aged about seventy, bald with whiskers and the other aged thirty, are both dressed in tattered clothes. Apparently the two men do not know each other, but they are in a similar predicament. The younger man has been selling toothpaste with a special formula for removing tartar. Unfortunately, it also removes the enamel causing annoyance to the locals. The older man has been running a Temperance Revival Meeting but had to flee after he was found drunk. The two men are confidence tricksters making their living from obtaining money from the gullible.

The old man reveals that he is in fact the long lost son of Louis XVI, the Dauphin, not Dolphin, and the younger man says that he is a destitute English Duke.  Huck soon realizes that the two are liars, but to prevent any quarrels, he goes along with their story.

Interpretation

Twain is joking at the expense of the Southern Aristocracy depicted by the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons showing how their society is a mix of fine grand houses and bloodthirsty violence in the woods.  The gaudy Grangerford house with its walls festooned with ugly pictures and decorative fineries shows the lavish lifestyle that they can lead borne on the back of slavery.

These Southern Aristocracy families are portrayed as the equivalent of the European Royal families.

The Grangerford’s prize possession is a clock ornamented with painted parrots, dogs and cats that squeak.  They award themselves meaningless titles e.g. Colonel. Twain is here satirizing not only the plantation aristocracy, but also the nineteenth century art, which made a cult out of mourning and producing ludicrous poems and pictures. Beneath this fa'ade of genteelness, there is the bloody feud with the rival clan, the Shepherdsons.  No one knows how the feud started or can name any reason why it should continue. Perhaps it is a source of relieving the boredom, but the result is the senseless death of two boys not much more than fourteen years old.  Twain illustrates this deeply disturbing side of southern civilization, which is in stark contrast to the unprecedented hospitality shown to Huck when he first arrived at the Grangerfords.

We are first introduced to the characters of Duke and Dauphin who have been employed in tricking the locals out of their hard-earned money. They will have an important part to play in the future plot.