The legacy of the past

The massed protests in Ferguson, Missouri, follow a standard pattern of heavy-handedness of a white police force towards an ethnic minority and the whole community rising up in anger at it.  We in Britain have had similar issues in the past, most recently the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metropolitan Police Force which sparked riots and opportunistic looting across London, Manchester and Birmingham, with incidents thereafter occurring in many parts of the country.  Michael Brown, the unarmed 18 year-old shot more than half a dozen times by one officer, allegedly with Brown holding his hands in the air, may, like Duggan, not have been a pleasant piece of work.  But this in itself should not carry a death sentence and the police releasing footage of Brown stealing some cigars and acting aggressively in a shop was reminiscent of all the police attempts in this country to smear victims of their own bungling; moreover, the cop who shot Brown was unaware of the shoplifting.  On police cars in this suburb of St Louis are the words "A planned progressive community" though these words seem hollow now.  An overwhelmingly white police force in a majority African-American area would always have issues of trust as there was not enough mix, but as Rev Al Sharpton correctly perceived, basic anger (like it was in Tunisia in 2011) derived from poverty.  It should not be forgotten that Missouri was a slave state that stayed in the Union in 1861 and the legacy of slavery continues to this day.
Mark Twain spent a good portion of his early life living in Missouri and though he didn't spell it out as such, this was where he based both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and (initially) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  15 years after purchasing it and after one of the key plot points was given away, I have finally completed reading the latter over the last couple of months, sometimes in bursts of four or five hours so compelling were the characters, the environment they inhabited and the narrative that drove them on down the Mississippi River.  One of Twain's overriding sentiments was the value of humanity and he shows not only how monstrous slavery is but how it warps the minds of otherwise decent people, Huck Finn included.
It would be fair to say that for those who have not consumed it, what I am about to relate now are in the manner of SPOILERS as I don't want others to be affected the same way I was reading the book knowing that Huck's tyrannical, jealous wastrel and drunkard of a father was the man they found dead in the floating house (only properly identified by Jim in the closing lines of the book), so if you've continued after seeing the keep-out sign I posted you have only yourselves to blame.
The prolific use of the n-word is quite uncomfortable but Twain intended for his more thoughtful readers to feel that way and the recent attempt to 'scrub' this word from editions to appear in American schools was ill-advised.  Though Huck often deploys the word himself, it's just what he has grown up with and had inculcated into him.  He bears no malice towards black people, indeed to save his friend Jim, the slave who had run away, Huck is prepared to jeopardise his mortal soul.  All the same, the perversion of slavery confuses him - believing it a sin to break the law, when Jim talks to him about setting free his wife and children, by spiriting them away if necessary without payment, Huck is shocked, mulling over that by his own actions Huck is wronging the slave owners who had not done him any bad; then when he hears about Jim's family, his innate humanity kicks in again and he is torn.  To hear from Jim how he beat his daughter for insolence before he realised scarlet fever had rendered her deaf and dumb is wrenching.  Later when Jim is locked up by the letter of the law of the South, Huck is once more uncertain of whether to observe the law (which the audience knows to be wicked) or set Jim free and once more Huck displays his good self in attempting the latter (assisted when Tom Sawyer makes a reappearance late in the book).
The feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons illustrates the barbarity man can perpetuate on each other over the most trivial of beginnings.  Law is absent, except in church when they grudgingly accept the presence of each other's clans.  The men are true Southern gentlemen, dressed in resplendent white but the audience knows the American Civil War is just about to burst and the young men will most likely to be recruited and possibly killed or maimed and Colonel Grangerford, the patriarch, will be ruined at the conclusion of it should he survive the conflict, because he relies so heavily for his lifestyle on slaves.  In the end, this is rendered moot when a Romeo and Juliet situation inflames passions to fever pitch and the Sheperdsons strike a decisive blow, wiping out the main branch of the male Grangerford line, leaving just cadet branches to continue the argument.  The desperation felt by Huck at this senseless violence came into myself as well as we had got to know the family very well.
The law of the land is missing later on when, in another town, Colonel Sherburn shoots dead a buffoonish alcoholic for repeatedly insulting him.  Sherburn gives Boggs, the clod, an ultimatum to cease with his attitude and depart but this is not law: "I'm tired of this; but I'll endure it till one o'clock.  Till one o'clock, mind - no longer. If you open your mouth against me only once, after that time, you can't travel so far but I will find you." (Liam Neeson in Taken springs to mind).  Boggs continues until suddenly he realises it is too late and pays the price.  A lynch mob gathers to string up Sherburn (cuase what law is there?) but he faces them down showing them to be the individual cowards they are.
The frauds who identify themselves as a duke and a king deprived of their right estates and dues are the most loathsome kind of people, duping kind-hearted people into parting with their money.  Their worst crime for which Huck reluctantly tags along (for they are brutal to him too, especially 'the king') is not just to steal from a family grieving at the loss of a father but to do so by hoodwinking the family and (almost) the entire community impersonating long-lost relatives who had been expected and who the king had come to hear about by chance (the real relatives had been waylaid).  Mary Jane Wilks, the eldest daughter, is a clear spit of Mary Jane Watson from the Spiderman comics, a beautiful, warm, red head.  The duke and the king eventually their comeuppance for doing the dirty on Jim and Jim revealing their true nature.  They are tarred and feathered and made to 'ride a rail' (the sharpness of which causes buttocks to bleed), yet though their actions are heinous, still Huck laments at man's inhumanity to man, which is the leitmotif of the whole novel.  Man's inhumanity to man continues 130 years after Twain's magnum opus.