Huckleberry

One of my favorite sentences in the book "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is: "I could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway."

When Mark Twain wrote "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," he regularly used the n-word about "Jim," whom he otherwise described in the kindest terms. Twain certainly had character flaws, but he was personally aware of many of them, and I don't think he should be described as a racist; by the standards of his time, he would be seen as astonishingly broad-minded and liberal. Nevertheless, knowing how the n-word has been used within a society afflicted by systemic racism, a person with any ordinary feelings of respect for fellow-creatures would refrain from using it today.

Yogi Bear drove the Jeep and Huckleberry Hound sat beside him.

I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.

Porter preferred prose to poetry. Prose seemed to him to be a concrete, practical form of expression. But poetry, as he informed a poet who signed his name “Evergreen,” was “a huckleberry beyond us.”

I'm your huckleberry.