He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat" (Twain, 37); "They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home" (idem). The white man who considered his white ancestry all it took to make him better than any black person, regardless of whatever qualities he or she may have had, is the very expression of a society that was gravely affected by the gangrene of slavery and would bear the scars of segregation for almost another century after the Abolition Act had been passed. Twain's choice for the time setting of his novel proved to be well thought and pointed at those who were still blinded by the slightest shade of dark on the skin of their fellow countrymen. Mentalities never changed over night and twenty years were by far not enough for people to understand the wrong doing of those who thought they could use other people as their personal objects and nothing more. When people like Huck's father are raged by the idea that black men could vote is understandable to a certain degree. Their ignorance and ill nature makes them suitable for those who one might expect to think and act in the way extremists do. but, when people like the good widow Douglas have slaves of their own and see nothing wrong in it, then the causes that led to the whole phenomenon appear much more complicated and aggravated. Twain is trying to emphasize the role children and young people will play in what it will take to change people's hearts. Twain's genius is often revealed in what apparently is a small thing, like the time for prayer...

Jim is telling his story about the fourteen dollars he once had and lost, first by making the wrong decision of investing ten of them in a cow who died. After he tells Huck the whole story of how he came to loose all of his money, he concludes: "Yes; en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'" (Twain, 65).
The comparison between owning a cow and owning oneself and Jim's consideration of being rich based on his former value as a slave and not on his value as a human being are words that should be engraved on the stone wall of every school. Twain was right to choose a period in history that left the American people with numerous things to be proud of, but also with one of the worst and most unfortunate aspects of its inheritance: slavery and after that, segregation.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Collier & Son. 1918