In the year just past, the unexpurgated, if somewhat bloated, Autobiography of Mark Twain was released, after the lapse of the 100 years he deemed necessary to safely publish it. But in the past few days we have learned that Twain will never outrun controversy, and never escape the narrow minded side of America that he so much loathed. Over at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates (or is it Jamelle Bouie, the authorship is quite unclear) bemoans the latest attempt to sanitize American history. In a nutshell:
Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the “n” word (as well as the “in” word, “Injun”) by replacing it with the word “slave.”
I know nothing about Gribben, though the publisher’s monicker, suggestive of an intent to whitewash Southern history, raises questions. While I agree with Coates that it’s never a good idea to sugar coat history, my objections to this desecration go much further.Twain was a brilliant writer, perhaps in no respect was he more brilliant than in his pitch perfect ability to replicate the speech of the people of the Mississippi, both black and white. What Gribben has done is the equivalent of putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa, a dress on the Venus de Milo, or a kazoo solo at the end of Beethoven’s 9th.
It may be, as Gribben states, that Twain has disappeared from America’s schools because they can not handle his language, but the answer to that problem is to elevate America’s schools rather than dumb down America’s greatest book.
I truly believe that most kids, black or white, can understand, with a little help from an able teacher, that Twain was replicating a reality that we have, hopefully, left behind, and that the use of the word “slave” in the place of “nigger” replaces truth with a fraudulent truthiness.
In his preface to the book, Twain insists that it has no moral, and, sadly, many people seem to have taken him at his word. Twain may or may not have had modern notions of racial equality, but he was light years ahead of most of his contemporaries, and Huck Finn, in particular, demonstrates that fact. Jim may talk funny, but he’s the only adult male in the book with integrity. Moreover, he’s the instrument through which Huck comes to a realization that he can no longer subscribe to the South’s peculiar morality.
All along, Huck fully intended to return Jim to slavery, since he was fully indoctrinated into the code of the slave society. To him, slavery was not evil. Assisting a runaway slave was evil. When Jim is turned in as a runaway by the Duke and the Dauphin, Huck’s initial concern is to make sure he is returned to the relative comfort of Miss Watson’s home, rather than to some harsher fate. But Huck metamorphizes:
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d got to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced. And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven,whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.”
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.
HUCK FINN.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.
How can anyone think that the man who wrote that was a racist? Is it really so very hard to teach the lesson of that passage, regardless of the presence of the offending word? And how could anyone dare to think they could improve on prose that good?
