Dehumanization In Huckleberry Finn

During the latter half of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the titular character seeing an opportunity to leave behind two con men he rushes back to his raft to inform his traveling companion and runaway slave Jim. Only to see that Jim was missing, being deep in pro slavery south he urgently began to look for him with no success. Huckleberry in a burst of emotion shouts “Someone stole my nigger!” even as he uses the derogatory word, Huck has shown throughout the story what he cares for Jim more than just a piece of property. Later, when he arrives at the Phelps farm with the intent to find and steal Jim back, is welcomed in my Mrs. Phelps. Believing Huckleberry to be her nephew, Tom Sawyer, sits him down in which this exchange occurs:
“ ‘Don’t say yes’m-say Aunt Sally Where’d she get aground?’
‘It warn’t the grounding-that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.’
‘Good gracious! Anybody hurt?’
‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’
‘Well, it’s lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt.’ ”
These scenes taken in a literal interpretation are highly racist, and ignorant to the inhumane treatment of slaves. This conversation instead is an example of the Sam Clemens’s under the pseudonym Mark Twain, use of irony to comment on those topics. Satirizing

Just before continuing to show Huck what she considers a person, retelling the death of a white Baptist. Yet, because slaves were not considered people instead property, the death of a slave would be a great economic loss (Hearn pg. 354). In “Life on the Wester Rivers” in the chapter “Human Life Is Cheap” a reversal of Aunt Sally’s sentiments occurs when steamboat owners get word of someone had fallen overboard, panicked at the thought paying restitution due to a loss of a slave, when they are told that it was a white man they responded with a delayed “Poor fellow.” (John Habernehl ctd. By Hearn pg.