Peter Wilks, a fairly wealthy man whose nieces will inherit his large sum of money, in attempt to steal the family's riches. Several men gather around the brothers to mourn their loss. While spectating the scene, Huck thinks candidly: "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race" (163). Indeed, the spectacle demonstrates a very low point of human beings. The con men have started yet another one of their conniving scams, their new target a family who has just suffered a painful loss, which, for any family, should pose as a very low and dark part of each member's lives. The suffering also reaches past the family; several local townspeople share the family's feeling of loss as well, including the men who have gathered around the duke and the dauphin. So when the duke and the dauphin come to dupe such people at their low point for their own selfish wants, well of course the spectacle would make anybody cynical. .
The spectacle illustrates just how unsympathetic, immoral, dangerous, and utterly terrible people can be, so much so that it makes Huck overwhelmingly disappointed and embarrassed to the point of being "ashamed " of his own kind of people. Not coincidentally, too, the con men duping these people are white. Thus, the "human race " Huck mentions in his remark refers to whites. The scam has surely confounded Huck's idea of white "goodness," creating a gray area between the black-white paradigm: his perception of "right " no longer correlates with whites and "wrong, " with blacks. Huck makes a similar observation when he sees the duke and the dauphin tarred, feathered, and tied to a rail. In pitying the men, Huck remarks, "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another" " (231). The words, "can be"" make up the first words of a realization, a conclusion, as well as a negation of a previous belief, and needless to say, the awfulness of "human beings" to each other" clearly forms the following part of Huck's remark.