In Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck spoke for Mark Twain
             when he made the statement, "You don't know about me...but that ain't no matter." The
             Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was not a sequel to his other adventure stories but a
             literary statement questioning how civilized our American society really was. Twain was
             not a racist but a realist. The perception of racism in the novel should be attributed to the
             historical setting and the effect it had on its characters. The story took place in the South
             before the Civil War. The South's economic structure depended on keeping the Negro in
             servitude. Many white Americans accepted slavery and believed the Negroes were inferior
             which resulted in racist attitudes and behaviors. Twain used the character development of
             Jim and Huck to demonstrate how these attitudes could change once Huck was able to see
             past the cultural stereotype of Jim being a Negro and recognize he was a person who was
             both noble and decent and deserved to be free like any other man whether he was black or
             Twain's early development of the character Jim has been controversial because of
             the apparent racism. In the early chapters, Jim was portrayed as a typical slave stereotype:
             superstitious, ignorant, and naive. On two separate occasions Huck delighted in
             exploiting Jim's superstitious beliefs to play a joke on him. In Chapter 10, Huck put a
             dead snake in Jim's blanket after Jim had warned him that, "it was the worse luck in the
             world to touch a snakeskin." Then Huck realized Jim wasn't really the fool he thought
             him to be when the dead rattlesnake's mate returned and bit Jim. Huck felt bad. Huck
             played his last trick on Jim after they passed Cairo and got separated by the currents. At
             first, Huck thought it was funny to pretend that they had never been separated, but he was
             humbled by Jim's reactions which showed both dignity and his strong sense...