PUTNEY — At the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck considers his options: stay with Aunt Sally and be “sivilized” or “light out for the territory.”
Readers often see this dilemma as a choice between the status quo and a life of freedom. If Huck stays with Aunt Sally, he'll have to take baths and go to school. If he heads out for the territories, he'll get to continue his wild adventures.
But that reading ignores the political conditions of the day. To be civilized on the Mississippi before the un-Civil War meant that you took on the responsibilities of being white. You did not converse with black people, and you did not listen to the hard truths of what they had to say (as when Jim finally tells Huck the truth about his father's deserved death).
A civilized boy could not benefit from the friendship of black people, could not learn about the ugly side of progress. “I can't stand it,” says Huck, having traveled for weeks with the runaway slave. “I been there before."
The territories were lands still in the making. In those unregulated places to the West, a white boy could imagine continuing his conversations with a black man. The North, it should be pointed out, held no advantage over the South, as it was equally corrupted by racial slavery. Article IV of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed that runaway slaves would be returned to their owners, even if they crossed the Mason-Dixon line. If you wanted to light out from slavery and its terrible laws, you had to head for the lawless land to the west.
* * *
I had a similar urge to head for the territories this past week when I saw the pictures of Boston Police looking for a young guy on the lam.
In the span of an afternoon, Boston went from being a sad city with a strong spirit to being a city under siege. The pictures of flowers and signs of support were replaced with Hummers and police troops in combat gear. The military techniques developed in urban Iraq were being put to use in the streets of Watertown. The IEDs of Monday were bookended with Friday's SWAT teams.
We have an urge to head to the territories when the options available in civilized lands are untenable. According to federal terrorist laws, suspects are enemy combatants and must be surrendered to the police state without hearing their Miranda rights. Under this military logic, streets can be locked down and civilians must stay indoors. Life in Boston can go back to normal only when the brutal young man is safely locked away.
The specter of runaway terrorists is so great that productive life, the heartbeat of a community, has to be sheltered inside. The public ways are reserved for the spectacle of state power.
* * *
A hundred and sixty years ago, as part of the Missouri Compromise, Congress gave strength to the fugitive slave clause in Article IV of the U. S. Constitution. Bostonians rioted after a marshal arrested a black man to haul him back to the plantation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson called the new act a “quadruped law,” in that it turned free people into beasts of burden. The old fugitive law, he claimed, was “fast becoming a dead letter, and by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative.” But the new act, brought in under the Missouri Compromise, “made it operative.”
Emerson hated the act because it required him “to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors.”
The comparison might seem odd. The suspect in the bombing was not a fugitive slave but a fugitive from justice. This young man and his brother had shown themselves capable of using the worst sorts of weapons in places guaranteed to exact the worst kinds of injuries. In those circumstances, shouldn't we use any means necessary to take him?
Emerson looked at the enhanced powers of the state under the Fugitive Slave Law and determined that slavery “was no longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous.”
* * *
A similar charge could be made for the federal terrorism acts implemented under Clinton and Bush. Claims of terrorism, which justify heightened state powers to address certain acts of violence, are becoming dangerously routine. These protocols require citizens to hunt, capture, and judge suspects who might or might not belong to the category (slave or terrorist) assigned to them.
I'd like to say that time will tell whether the bombing brothers were terrorists or more of those disaffected young men who are lately in the news, but that doesn't seem particularly likely. Once one is declared a slave or a terrorist, it is hard to scrub oneself clean of that accusation, particularly since the means for proving one's innocence are always beyond reach. Only citizens can prove they aren't slaves or terrorists. But then, slaves and terrorists can never be citizens.
It's problems like these that can make one want to light out for the territories.