Huck Finn Jim Quotes

“Well, it’s all right anyway, Jim, long as you’re going to be rich again some time or other.”
“Yes; en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 8, Huck and Jim. Jim says he is worth eight hundred dollars because that is how much Miss Watson was planning to sell him for before his great escape. This quote is a devastating critique of slavery. It also foreshadows Jim becoming rich at the end of the novel.

And so, take it all around, we made a good haul. When we was ready to shove off we was a quarter of a mile below the island, and it was pretty broad day; so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with the quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a n***** a good ways off.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 9. As they head off in a canoe, Huck tells Jim to lie down in the canoe and cover himself to avoid discovery. In the beginning of their journey Huck thinks of Jim as different than him.

After breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he come to be killed, but Jim didn’t want to. He said it would fetch bad luck; and besides, he said, he might come and ha’nt us; he said a man that warn’t buried was more likely to go a-ha’nting around than one that was planted and comfortable.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 10. Huck wanted to talk about the dead man, but a superstitious Jim avoided the subject saying it would bring bad luck and the man could haunt them.

Jim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then he got out of his head and pitched around and yelled; but every time he come to himself he went to sucking at the jug again. His foot swelled up pretty big, and so did his leg; but by and by the drunk begun to come, and so I judged he was all right; but I’d druther been bit with a snake than pap’s whisky.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 10. Pap’s alcoholism has left Huck with only negative associations of alcohol. Huck is able to see, however, that everyone who drinks isn’t as harmful as his Pap is; he understands that his father is an extreme case.

This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed – only a little kind of a low chuckle.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 12. Hucks explains that while he and Jim float downsteam on their raft, the Mississippi is a
source of food and spiritual nourishment for them. They enjoy the freedom of being in the wilderness.

“I doan k’yer what de widder say, he warn’t no wise man, nuther. He had some er de dad-fetchedes’ ways I ever see. Does you know ’bout dat chile dat he ‘uz gwyne to chop in two?”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 14. Jim doesn’t care what the Widow Douglas told Huck about Solomon being the wisest man, he is not impressed with his child-chopping. This is an allusion to a Bible story in I Kings 3:16-28, in which the wise King Solomon resolves a dispute between two women over a child by suggesting to cut the child in two.

“Well, it’s a blame ridicklous way, en I doan’ want to hear no mo’ ’bout it. Dey ain’ no sense in it.”
“Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 14. Jim can’t believe that people speak different languages all over the world, since we’re all the same. Huck is trying to explain that even though people are different they should not be critiqued based on where they are. But Jim is reaching a deeper point, no matter the race, place, position or language you have in the world, you have a right to be considered the equal of anyone.

“Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain’ dead – you ain’ drownded – you’s back agin? It’s too good for true, honey, it’s too good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o’ you. No, you ain’ dead! you’s back agin, ‘live en soun’, jis de same ole Huck – de same ole Huck, thanks to goodness!”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 15. Jim is happy and thankful to see that Huck is still alive after they after they had lost each other in the fog on the river.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “Give a n***** an inch and he’ll take an ell.” Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this n*****, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children – children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 16. As they near the clear waters of the Ohio, Huck is shocked when Jim is gripped by freedom fever and even talks about stealing his children out of slavery. Children that Huck says “belonged” to another man.

“Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n’ for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de ONLY fren’ ole Jim’s got now.”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 16. Jim is certain that he will soon be free from the bonds of slavery. He thanks Huck for that and says he will never forget him. At this stage they have become close friends, they take care of each other and Jim is like a father figure to Huck, since his own father isn’t.

Then he showed us another little job he’d printed and hadn’t charged for, because it was for us. It had a picture of a runaway n***** with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and ‘$200 reward’ under it. The reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 20. Huck describes the wanted poster that the Duke had made for runaway slave Jim. This was so they could all travel buy day, and if anyone were to stop them concerning Jim, they could say they had captured him and were returning to his owners. Racism and slavery were very much part of society then.

He dressed Jim up in King Lear’s outfit – it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint and painted Jim’s face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that’s been drownded nine days. Blamed if he warn’t the horriblest looking outrage I ever see. Then the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so:

Sick Arab – but harmless when not out of his head.

And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five foot in front of the wigwam. Jim was satisfied.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 24. To avoid Jim having to be tied up on the raft every day (pretending to be a runaway slave), the Duke figures out a better solution. He paints Jim in blue and makes him wear a King Lear costume. Jim spends the rest of the river journey looking undignified and like a sick Arab. The passage is an allusion to the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, who has episodes of madness.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful n*****, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck wrestles with his conscience over the fate of runaway slave Jim, who has been sold back into captivity by the two conmen.

But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 31. Huck agonizes over whether he should turn in the fugitive slave Jim, as society’s rules demand he should. He tries to come up with something that will “harden” him against the runaway. But his bond of friendship with Jim is so strong and deep, he cannot.

“Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz HIM dat ‘uz bein’ sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, ‘Go on en save me, nemmine ’bout a doctor f’r to save dis one?’ Is dat like Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You BET he wouldn’t! WELL, den, is JIM gywne to say it? No, sah – I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place ‘dout a DOCTOR, not if it’s forty year!”

– Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 40. When Tom Sawyer takes a bullet for him, runaway slave Jim says they should get a doctor for Tom, since he says Tom would if the situation was reversed. Jim believes Tom would sacrifice his own freedom to save Jim.
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