The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as interpreted by Tara Subtle Tingler

CHAPTER XI. (FORGET THE OTHER CHAPTERS. JUST ANACHRONISTIC SEXISM)

“COME in,” says the woman, and I did.  She says:  "Take a cheer.”

I done it.  She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says:

“What might your name be?”

“Tara Subtle Tingler. I am the social media director at the Chronicles of Geographic Palestine and the Levantine Shore. Where ’bouts do you live?  In this neighborhood?’

“No’m.  In Hookerville, seven mile below.  I’ve walked all the way and I’m all tired out.”

"HOLD ON! Did you just say the H-word??!! Are you slut shaming? I'll have you know that SEX WORKERS are human beings too. You stupid chauvinist pig! How does a child your age develop into such a degenerate male pig!!"

So then ten minutes later she had washed my mouth out with soap and finally calmed down.

“Hungry, too, I reckon.  I’ll find you something.”

“No’m, I ain’t hungry.  I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below here at a farm; so I ain’t hungry no more.  It’s what makes me so late. My mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to tell my uncle Abner Moore.  He lives at the upper end of the town, she says.  I hain’t ever been here before.  Do you know him?”

“No; but I don’t know everybody yet.  I haven’t lived here quite two weeks. It’s a considerable ways to the upper end of the town.  You better stay here all night.  Take off your bonnet.”

“No,” I says; “I’ll rest a while, I reckon, and go on.  I ain’t afeared of the dark.”

She said she wouldn’t let me go by myself, but her husband would be in by and by, maybe in a hour and a half, and she’d send him along with me. Then she got to talking about her husband, and about her relations up the river, and her relations down the river, and about how much better off they used to was, and how they didn’t know but they’d made a mistake coming to our town, instead of letting well alone—and so on and so on. She said that their moving here was perpetuating the unethical population of a subjugated nation, and began to wax dramatic till I was afeard I had made a mistake coming to her to find out what was going on in the town; but by and by she dropped on to pap and the murder, and then I was pretty willing to let her clatter right along.  She told about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars (only she got it ten) and all about pap and what a hard lot he was, and what a hard lot I was, and at last she got down to where I was murdered.  I says:

“Who done it?  We’ve heard considerable about these goings on down in Sexworkerville, but we don’t know who ’twas that killed Huck Finn.”

“Well, I reckon there’s a right smart chance of people here that’d like to know who killed him.  Some think old Finn done it himself.”

“No—is that so?”

“Most everybody thought it at first.  He’ll never know how nigh he come to getting lynched.  But before night they changed around and judged it was done by Jim, a runaway ni-- .”

“YOU FUCKING RACIST! I'll show you to disparage people by the colour of their skin."

And then she slapped me silly. I was stunned. "Miz Tara, I hope you are 'ware. We live in the antebellum South and certain terms that in the modern era are derogatory towards minorities were at one time turns of phrase that for better or worse reflect the actual cultural character of the time.

I stopped.  I reckoned I better keep still.  She run on, and never noticed I had put in at all:

“The person of colour run off the very night Huck Finn was killed.  So there’s a reward out for him—three hundred dollars. Now I hope that he won't be lurking around tomorrow night, because I'm about to get” she raises her hand in celebration "WASTED with the gals" she says in a song song voice."I'm telling you nobody's gonna get in the way of the Sisterhood of the Daiquiris. But if he just so happens to take advantage of me it would put me in an uncomfortable position of having to report a poor minority to the police, and I'm sooooooo not about that.

“Yes, I reckon so, ’m.  I don’t see nothing in the way of it.  Has everybody quit thinking the ni-, er person of colour done it?”

“Oh, no, not everybody.  A good many thinks he done it.  But they’ll get the person of colour pretty soon now, and maybe they can scare it out of him.”

“Why, are they after him yet?”

Thanks to the courageous efforts of Ms. Tingle, or the Intrepid TST to eliminate hate speech and end prejudice and misogyny, the Civil War was averted, the entire abolitionist movement was rendered redundant, and America became the transcendental racial Garden of Eden that we've all been dreaming of. Huck and Jim lived happily ever after and went on to help the Intrepid TST combat injustice and occupation the world over.

FIN.