219 Times: Huckleberry Finn, Racism, and RDR2 Part II

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.
TW: This essay series discusses anti-Black racism, including chattel slavery. As a point of clarity, I’ve focused on anti-Black racism in this series because of the work of literature I’m discussing. The anti-Indigenous, anti-Chinese, and anti-Mexican acts that white people committed during the period in which RDR2 is set and the way the game deals with those are equally important and worthy of analysis.

Read Part I here.

Inner Truths

When considering race and anti-Black racism, Black perspectives are the most vital. That said, too often, we act as though being white is an automatic, default, or neutral position instead of considering the precise ways in which racism distorts white perspectives and beliefs. RDR2′s portrayal of the white perspective is unconsidered and obscures historical realities. Arthur’s demonstrable ignorance of white peoples’ prevalent attitudes in “Preaching Forgiveness as He Went” and “No Good Deed” denies the realities of the time and is totally unbelievable: in no way were white supremacist acts of violence, let alone beliefs, confined to the South. The opportunity to show Arthur confronting any of his own unconscious biases is lost. I don’t mean that he should have walked around saying the N-word or anything else that demonstrates embracing racist attitudes: what I mean is that society subtly embeds racist beliefs in our minds like splinters and warps our patterns of thoughts; correcting those problems is not a one-time act, but ongoing maintenance. It is difficult and humbling work. Showing Arthur perform it would be powerful; instead, we get the “golly gee, I had no idea” act.

As I’ve shown, Black characters are underrepresented in RDR2. One would hope that those who are included would be written with depth and insight. However, the failure to imagine even the exteriority of Black characters — their names — doesn’t bode well, and indeed, RDR2 demonstrates little understanding of the historical African American experience.

As I’ve shown, Black characters are underrepresented in RDR2. One would hope that those who are included would be written with depth and insight. However, the failure to imagine even the exteriority of Black characters — their names — doesn’t bode well, and indeed, RDR2 demonstrates little understanding of the historical African American experience.

When Lenny talks about his enslaved father — who I’ll call Mr. Summers, since the game doesn’t give him a name — the focus isn’t on Mr. Summers at all. Instead, the writers betray an anxiety to establish the existence not just of Good White People, but Good Slavers. In Lenny’s Companion Request, he says that one of Mr. Summers’s enslavers once stopped her brother-in-law from beating Mr. Summers, afraid he might kill him. The brother-in-law beat her, too. In response, her husband — the man’s brother — shot him. He gave Mr. Summers his brother’s watch. Later, he freed all the people he had enslaved and then hanged himself.

This is one of the few stories we get about what enslaved people experienced, and it’s not really about what they experienced at all. The focus of this story isn’t what Lenny’s father felt as he was nearly murdered, or how it affected him and his relationships afterward. This is a story Mr. Summers told Lenny, but we don’t hear it from his perspective. His agency and thoughts are totally unacknowledged; he takes no action. Even the beating is for no reason. All we hear is that he loved his enslaver, “in a way,” and hated the physically abusive brother. Only the white people take action: they beat, they protect, they kill, they give, they free. The story is theirs, and the White Savior trope is the real point: a white woman stopped the beating, and her husband — the loved, watch-giving, freedom-giving slaver — eventually freed him.

Lenny ends his monologue by saying he’s going to replace the watch Mr. Summers’s enslaver gave him, “to honor both my father and them folks that saved his life.” His father’s life was only ever in danger because they chose to enslave him. They treated him as property; it was as property, not as a person, that Mrs. Enslaver protected him. It isn’t necessary to know her thoughts or feelings to make that claim: she had the power to define their relationship, and those were the terms she chose. Having done so, any care she may have felt for him as a person was utterly compromised. Lenny says the man who almost killed Mr. Summers habitually beat and raped the slaves. “Them folks that saved his life” allowed this behavior. More than that, because they enslaved these people, they enabled the beatings, the rapes. Some of them would have been at their behest. They were culpable. Mr. Summers was given his freedom not for respect or love, but because his enslaver no longer had use for him. What a young man as sharp as Lenny could want to “honor” in such a man is bewildering.

Details in the story of Mr. Summers’s enslavers point to Rockstar’s lack of research. While some slavers allowed their slaves to learn to read, after Nat Turner’s uprising in 1831, anti-literacy laws became much more strictly enforced (Banks Ch. 1). Slavers were afraid that their slaves would use their knowledge to emancipate themselves or organize rebellions. Whites as well as Black people could be fined or imprisoned for teaching anyone Black, including free Black people, to read. Black people could also be whipped for teaching or learning.

Mr. Summers was young enough to have a son born c. 1880, which means he was highly unlikely to have been been born early enough to have openly learned to read. Yet in another monologue, Lenny says his father and his grandfather were tutors: “Meant nobody liked them. Not the whites and not the blacks.” Lenny is speaking specifically about the work that his family did; the implication is that not only did white people know Mr. Summers was educated, they allowed him to teach their own children, essentially broadcasting that they were breaking either the actual law or strict social codes. Certainly, many slaves taught themselves and others to read, but they did so in secret, at great personal risk, a defiant statement of self-definition that goes totally unacknowledged in Lenny’s monologues. If slavers detected an enslaved person’s literacy, they sometimes cut their right forefinger off so they couldn’t write (Span 32). Lenny’s dialog obscures these realities.

When Mr. Summers’s enslaver killed himself, he almost certainly would have left his slaves to his wife, not freed them. Harriet Jacobs writes in her memoirs¹:

[My mistress] had promised my dying mother that her children should never suffer for any thing; and when I remembered that, and recalled her many proofs of attachment to me, I could not help having some hopes that she had left me free. My friends were almost certain it would be so. They thought she would be sure to do it, on account of my mother’s love and faithful service. But, alas! we all know that the memory of a faithful slave does not avail much to save her children from the auction block.

After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read, and we learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister’s daughter, a child of five years old.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Like Mr. Summers’s enslaver, Jacobs’s mistress seemed to treat her very well — even affectionately — and this is what she did to her. Furthermore, Jacobs also describes how her mistress freed Jacobs’s grandmother in her will, but her mistress’s heirs decided they would sell her anyway. These acts are far more representative of slaver behavior as a whole than what Rockstar writes. Slavers all committed evil acts for personal gain, but they weren’t all equally malignant. The stories Lenny tells aren’t strictly impossible — people are different and complicated — but the picture they paint is highly atypical. Rather than offer insight into the experiences of the enslaved and encourage empathy, or confront the white player with the racist behavior of our ancestors, the game coddles us by offering these “Good White People” with whom to identify.

Nor is this the only time that the experiences of the enslaved are represented with strange inaccuracy. Speaking with Sean, Lenny says, “My momma was a slave. I was born free. But my momma was safe, whereas I walk into half these towns, and their idea of entertainment is lynching. So who should I hate? The slave owners, or the folks who freed us? . . . We was set free to suffer.”

There’s a lot to unpack here. To begin with, in other camp dialog, Lenny says that an overseer habitually raped his grandmother. His mother was born in a field and his grandmother forced to keep working. For Lenny to say that his mother was “safe” is pure ignorance, and yet in other interactions (with Dutch; with Hosea) Lenny is analytical and insightful. Mrs. Summers wasn’t “safe” from the very moment of her birth. Having survived that ordeal, she remained, at every moment, at risk of being sold away from her family, raped, mutilated, whipped, beaten to death. These were common occurrences. It didn’t matter if she had a “good” enslaver; “good” enslavers still died and left their enslaved people to worse slavers, or became impoverished and sold their enslaved people. Safety didn’t exist for an enslaved person. Asking whether slavery or Jim Crow was worse is a wrong question to begin with, but “we was set free to suffer” minimizes the suffering that the enslaved underwent.

Finally, white men wrote these lines as though Black people had no agency in attaining their own freedom: “the folks who freed us,” Lenny says. Who do Houser, Unsworth, and Humphries think is responsible for emancipation? Black people fought for their freedom here before the United States was even a country. In 1708 New York, a Black woman and Native American man killed the family enslaving them. (Just as Rockstar fails to name all but one Black female character, records fail to acknowledge this woman’s name: they only call her “Fiend.”) They, and other rebels like them, were executed gruesomely for insisting upon their freedom. Kidnapped Africans revolted on slave ships, even though it meant their certain death: “This type of resistance was so expensive and time-consuming for the slavers . . . historians estimate that it prevented at least a million more people from being captured and entering the slave trade” (Hall 149; emphasis mine). People like Harriet Tubman and Elijah Anderson risked their lives to help emancipate others. Self-emancipated African American writers like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass exposed how slavery brutalized the body and soul, counteracting widespread lies about the system that had made white Northerners complacent.

When the Civil War began, Black troops were vital:

Many African Americans, especially young men, had freed themselves by fleeing servitude and joining Union forces. . . . The War Department created the federal Bureau of Colored Troops, and one hundred thousand armed Africans served in the unit. Their courage and commitment made them the best and most effective fighters, although they had the highest mortality rate. At the end of the Civil War, 186,000 Black soldiers had fought and 38,000 had died (in combat and from disease), a higher death toll than that of any individual state.

Dunbar-Ortiz 146-147

Black people weren’t freed because white people benevolently decided they should be. They were freed because they fought for it tooth and nail. They dedicated, and often lost, their lives in pursuit of freedom for their people. The dialog those white men make a Black man speak is an insult to the memories of all who so struggled.

When people praise RDR2′s portrayal of marginalized figures, they usually compare it to the first game. This is an error. If we were teachers and Rockstar our students, certainly it would be reasonable to consider their improvements over time. But Rockstar is a multi-billion-dollar corporation; to judge them by their own prior performance is to allow them to set a standard they have no right to set. Our responsibility is to assess their text against who and what they claim to represent, and those comparisons make their failures plain.

Experiencing RDR2′s presentation of race and racism is like watching someone use a fork while wearing an oven mitt: they may more or less accomplish their task, but it’s not exactly done with competence or grace. And that’s no surprise: there’s no evidence that Rockstar’s writers familiarized themselves with Black perspectives, stories, or knowledge. Read Dead has identified more than 40 novels, poems, short stories, and plays that are definitely alluded to in RDR2. Every one of these literary works is by a white person. (This doesn’t include the works collected in the Bible, which was written before modern Western concepts of race were created.) Thus far, the only work by a Black author — or any author of color — that may be alluded to in the game is God’s Country by Percival Everett, but its influence is uncertain.

I hope this to be a failure of my own reading or research, but the game doesn’t give the impression that the writers have familiarized themselves with African American history or perspectives, or indeed any perspectives but those of white men. Whether the team consciously chose to pass over works by Black authors or their unconscious bias was at play or the failure is mine, using a racist text like Mark Twain’s for inspiration simply wasn’t necessary. Other books are available. Better books are available. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’s reputation as a “great American novel” rests on the fact that it tells an old, comforting lie that white Americans cling to like a child clutches a security blanket, filthy and threadbare though it may be: that we are, in our ignorance, innocent.

A Corrective Reading List

At this moment in time, it’s particularly vital for people living in the United States to educate ourselves about the country’s history. The government is erasing history from resources that belong to all of us.

Many eras of African American history are important to know about, but since RDR2 focuses on slavery more than anything else, here’s a short list of illuminating books I highly recommend. If you’re able, get them from your local independent bookstore or local library (remember you can suggest books for the library to buy)! Otherwise, I suggest bookshop.org.

• James by Percival Everett (historical fiction)
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (memoir)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (historical fiction)
• Wake by Rebecca Hall (history/graphic novel)
• Kindred by Octavia Butler (historical fiction)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (memoir)
• They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (history)
• God’s Country by Percival Everertt (historical fiction/western)

Allusions to Huckleberry Finn in RDR2

Themes

Blood feuds. On their trip down the river, Huck and Jim meet many people, including the Grangerford and Shepherdson families. These wealthy families feud like the Grays and Braithwaites. And like the Grays and Braithwaites, two of the young people from the families fall in love. While he’s staying with the Grangerfords, Sophia sends Huck to get her Bible that she “forgot” at church. It contains a note from Harney Shepherdson telling her when to meet him for their elopement — like Arthur, Huck carries messages between them, albeit unwittingly. Like the Grays and Braithwaites, both families chase after the eloping couple, leaving a trail of blood behind them, but Sophia and Harney escape to safety like Penelope and Beau do.

Outlaws. Huck’s friend Tom Sawyer wants to start a gang. When one of the members asks what they’ll be doing, “‘Stealing cattle and such things ain’t robbery; it’s burglary,’ says Tom Sawyer. ‘We ain’t burglars. That ain’t no sort of style. We are highwaymen’” (chapter II). This little conman’s line is likely the inspiration for Dutch telling Javier, “We are not criminals. We are outlaws” — a line Arthur will remember on his final ride back to camp if he has low honor.

Con men. Huck and Jim meet two con men who are escaping angry pursuers. The two decide to team up. Eventually, one of them claims to be Louis XVII of France. When Dutch and Hosea met, Hosea tried to con Dutch by saying he was an ambassador’s son and needed help getting back to Paris (camp dialog). (Dutch’s con man characteristics are primarily based on bandit Chris Evans, who was highly manipulative of public perception once his crimes were discovered.)

Names

Leviticus Cornwall. Describing the conman who claims to be the lost French king, Huck says that when puts on his act, he looks like “you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself” (chapter XXIV). This is where Leviticus Cornwall gets his name. Many books of the Bible are named for their authors, but “Leviticus” isn’t a name at all. RDR2 likes to draw parallels between its characters: Arthur and Hosea, Arthur and Eagle Flies, Dutch and Micah. This allusion pairs Dutch, who’s partly based on this conman, with his nemesis; Dutch himself compares them in some of his last words to Cornwall.

Miss Watson. When Huck’s father abandons him, Huck is taken in by the Widow Douglas. In the book’s original illustrations, her sister, Miss Watson, bears a striking resemblance to RDR2’s Momma Watson. Note the shape of their faces, their glasses and eyebrows, the shadow under the lower lip, and the frown lines at the corners of their mouths. Her outfit resembles the one worn by a Sunday School teacher, who’s a very similar character to Miss Watson, in another illustration.

Places

Catfish Jackson’s. When Huck escapes his abusive alcoholic father, he goes to Jackson’s Island and survives by catching catfish. In the game, Catfish Jackson’s is where a young man (Nate) lives with his abusive alcoholic father (Algie Davison). This family dynamic — alcoholic father; absent mother; single abused son — is exactly the same as Charles’s; since the fathers and sons in both cases are Black, the writers’ unconscious bias seems to be at play here. On the other hand, John and Arthur also grew up with abusive fathers and absent mothers. This is one of the problems with under-representing any group in a world as big as RDR2′s: what should be two small examples are overweighted with significance and become the entire picture.

Miscellaneous

Crashing a funeral. Taking advantage of some information they come across, the conmen go to a funeral and pretend to be the dead man’s relatives. At the campfire, Hosea tells a similar story of attempting to rob a house, only to enter and discover a funeral in progress. He pretends to be a great friend of the dead man’s to explain his presence.

Shakespeare. The con men stage some scenes from Shakespeare. The excerpted plays they include are Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Richard III. All three plays are alluded to in RDR2. The first two, and probably the third, are alluded to specifically in Lemoyne, the same general area of the country that’s the setting for Huckleberry Finn. This is another instance of the game’s nested allusions.

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1. Jacobs published her book as a novel, but recent scholarship has proven it to be an accurate record of the events of her life. ↩︎

Bibliography