 Jim Thompson, Boseman High School English Department, will read to us from the adventures of Huckaburra to Jim and Cわいわいわいわい. Go on. The barrel. We wanted to get in the character. At the start of their journey down to mighty Mississippi, Huckaburra Finn is naive to runaway slave Jim's humanity and considers him, shall we say, Chad, just a piece of property. And so Huck toys with Jim's emotions and plays tricks on him, including in this scene when they've been separated by a storm and thick fog. Huck and a canoe finally is reunited with Jim, who had been asleep on the raft. And Huck almost fools the newly awakened Jim into believing that their separation was just a dream. That is, until Jim notices the storm debris, the trash, he calls it, scattered on the raft. Previous tricks on Jim have been physical. This time, though, Huck targets Jim's emotions. Consequence? To his surprise, Huck discovers that they may share a common humanity, one that is more than skin deep. It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got onto the raft, but it was clearing up again now. Oh, well, if that's all interpreted and well enough as far as it goes, Jim, I says, but what does these things stand for? It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft, and the smashed ore. You can see them first grade now, hit the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash again. He'd got the dream fixed so strong in his head he couldn't seem to shake it loose right away. He'd get the facts back into its place. But when he did get things straightened around, he looked at me steady, without ever smiling, and says, what did they stand for? I was going to tell you, when I got all more out of work and was calling for you, my heart was most broke because you was lost, and I didn't care no more what become meat and the rat. And when I wake up and find you back again, all safe and sound, the tears come, and I could have gone down on my knees and kissed your foot. I didn't know what you were thinking about, was how you could make a fool of old Jim with a lie. That truck dead is trash, and trash is what people eat. It puts dirt on the heads of their prints, and it makes a machine. Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam and went in there without saying anything to that. That was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kiss his foot to get him to take it back. It was 15 minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to an eager, but I'd done it. And I weren't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks. And I wouldn't have done that one if I'd known it would make him feel. Slipped from the American Library Association's top 10 most banned books to number 14, Mr. Twain would not be pleased. After all, he felt that banning his book was good for goodness. It will cause the purchasers of the book to read it out of curiosity, people with him. And that will sell us 25,000 copies for sure. Then they will discover to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment that there is nothing objectionable in the book.