Run and touch the knives: three of them.' So I did it” (Twain, 561). This quote is an example of Tom Sawyer dehumanizing Huck by essentially telling him that he lacks the human quality of understanding. This quote is strangely familiar. It actually looks pretty much the same as the following. «I see that it was useless to waste words: you can't teach a black man to argue. So I quit” (Twain, 373). There's a parallel of sorts here: Huck is to Tom as Jim is to Huck. It seems like Twain did this on purpose, as if he wanted the reader to realize this parallel. The choice to use the word learn, rather than teach, could just be a dialect issue, but I think differently. I think it was used in both cases to create the connection. Huck is dehumanizing Jim by saying he doesn't have the human qualities to learn and Tom is doing the same to Huck. Because of the connection, I'd say Tom is humiliating Huck twice as hard. Not only is he terrible at learning and understanding, but he is almost as good as a black man