We can find the answer to this question in Chapter Two of
this excellent coming of age novel. Having set up the gang, Tom says that you can only
enter it if you sign an oath saying that the families of the boys in the gang who told
secrets would be killed in revenge for the revealing of those secrets. This of course
presents a problem for Huck, as he has no family. It looks as if Huck might be not
allowed to join the gang because of this, but fortunately, Huck is able to come up with
a suitable alternative:
Well, nobody could think of anything to
do--everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I
thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson--they could kill
her.
With this solution, Huck
is able to join the gang as he has managed to think of somebody who could act as a
substitute family and could be killed in turn. The oaths of course highglightTom
Sawyer's remarkable imagination and the way that he is obsessed by adventure books,
which foreshadows his unnecessary complications of what could be a simple escape plan at
the end of the novel.
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