That One Time Being Offended Didn't Matter
For me it’s a question of comparing discernment to sensitivities.
One of the books you will almost always find on lists of what should be banned is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Of course this old American classic can be read as a somewhat nostalgic depiction of summer rafting on the mighty Mississippi when life was simple, the going was easy, and wasn’t our childhood wonderful after all, and blah blah blah. And I suppose you could read it that way, not see the point of the book, and go your merry way. Or you can stop at a certain word and freeze up, suddenly stifled by a litany of words that shouldn’t be said.
What controversy there is about Huckleberry Finn always centers on the name of the runaway slave in the story. Today we style it, if not totally obscuring it completely, as “N_____ Jim.” It’s only right to say that our sensibilities go on alert by what the character’s name would look like fully written out. But the very presence of that moniker has riled people up and led them, in honest indignation, to think about striking that book not only from the shelves, but also from the collective memory of American culture. And that would be a big mistake.
It should always be remembered that it was no less than Dick Gregory, the legendary black comedian and lifelong advocate for social justice, who stood against any kind of censorship when the subject turned specifically to Huckleberry Finn. He said that, the stereotypes still unconsciously present in Uncle Tom’s Cabin notwithstanding, this was the first time a black man was depicted in American literature as a concerned parent with deep familial loyalty for his children that any decent human being of any hue would easily recognize as honorable and relatable. Humanity as a part of his nature in a writer’s vessel of the “runaway slave.” Jim wasn’t a slave. He was a man.
And the story comes to a head when, after getting to know each other, Jim and Huck find themselves on a raft with a canopy at one end where Jim is supposed to be sleeping but knows he is being hunted by the slaver bounty hunters calling out to the raft. They yell - that fellow on the raft with you, is he black or white? And Huck thinks about what the preacher said would happen to him if he ever helped a slave, who was somebody’s property, escape, that the Bible itself would condemn him forever.
It’s important to note here that the Bible was used to support slavery in the slave states while other passages from the same book were used up North to oppose it, and the influence of preachers where Huck lived was decidedly pro-slavery. So, as the writer shows, Huck has an existential problem. On the one hand is the friend he’s made and the person he’s come to know, while on the other hand if he hides him from the slavers (who are executing a “legal” prerogative), he’ll rot in Hades. And he thinks it over, struggling for a little while as to which way to go, until he decides…
- alright, I’ll go to hell. And answers the slavers with, “he’s white.”
It’s undeniably the most powerful scene in the book and is exactly what makes it Mark Twain’s masterpiece, presenting a whole lot more than simple nostalgia.
Dick Gregory opposed any consideration of banning this book simply based on the presence of the word in question because, he said - a direct quote - “Mark Twain told the truth.” Tampering with this only deflates the intended power of the work.
We live in a moment where any perceived offense in a word could cause the deletion of the entirety of a book that explains its reality and thus speaks against the “institution of slavery” that fostered that word in a way that exposes its necessarily depraved nature once and for all and in no uncertain terms. And considering that HF was written in an age in which unapologetic, open racism was left ignorantly unconsidered in a largely inconsiderate and often mindless popular culture, it was one hundred years ahead of its time in its demonstration of how slavery was a particular, peculiarly Christian conundrum.
All I am saying is that, when the subject of Huckleberry Finn comes up on the list of possible deletions, as it inevitably will again sooner or later, maybe we should let that be the one time being offended didn’t matter. And take a longer, deeper look at the titles appearing above and below it.
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