Thomas Hart Benton
Writing about interracial friendships in yesterday’s post brings to mind the most famous interracial friendship in literature, that between Huck and Jim. The novel is once again in the news (is it ever out of it?) with a new edition of the novel where the n-word is changed to “slave.”
The edition is the brainchild of one Alan Gribben, an Auburn University English professor who is worried that the word is preventing one of America’s greatest novels from being taught in our schools.
The media and internet have exploded with opinions about the decision, most of them negative. What next, people want to know. If we go scrubbing ethnic and racial slurs from every masterpiece, we are going to hit a lot of great authors—who after all, were products of their time.
And besides, Twain isn’t even endorsing the use of the word—he is capturing the language of the poor whites of his day. He is being ironic.
I’ve written in the past about why I don’t think the book should be banned (here and here) and why I don’t believe that Twain was a racist. But let’s give Gribben the benefit of the doubt for a moment. What actually happens when a child encounters the work? Is there a damaging effect?
I have two life experiences I can report on, one when my father read me the book at age 10 or 11, the other when I read the book to my own children (Justin was 12, Darien 9, and Toby 7).
Neither my father nor I did what author Michael Chabon has done with his children, which is craft a compromise (the Chabon family substituted the word “Negro”). No, we both felt we should be true to the text. I did preface the reading, however. To this day Darien still remembers the lengthy talk I had with him and his brothers (he even remembers where he was sitting) when I warned them about how I was going to be reading the word and why they should never use it.
And that may point to one of the best arguments against Gribben’s edition. Because the word sticks in our throats like a bone, it prompts us to have these discussions with our children and our students. African Americans have other objections to the book–for instance, the way that Jim meekly allows himself to be turned into a toy–but those a reader can fairly easily glide over, at least if he or she is white. The n-word is a different matter.
I don’t remember my father prefacing the reading when he read to my brothers and me (I would have been 11, Jonathan 8, and David, if he was listening, 6). I would have processed the word differently than did my kids, however, because I heard it daily at school. That’s because I grew up in the Tennessee mountains in the small town of Sewanee, atop the Cumberlands.
But I already knew the word was bad. I learned that when I was 8 or 9 (this would have been when I was 9 or 10). My education in racial sensitivity (at least the education I remember) began with my reciting a rhyme I had probably learned on the playground at school:
Teacher, teacher, don’t hit me,
Hit that n— behind that tree.
John Mayfield, another child who was three years younger, had been properly schooled by his parents and started complaining, which caused me to recite it over and over to taunt him. The reason I remember this obscure incident is because, although the word meant nothing to me, I saw it take on great power in the eyes of someone else.
He ran off to complain to an adult, who gently got me to substitute the word “tiger” instead. Everyone was happy and I was on the alert. From then on I would distance myself from people who used the word.
I have written here how the book, in 1962, helped me handle the pressures of desegregation—pressures that were particularly acute since I was a plaintiff in a civil rights trial brought by four white families and four black on behalf of their children against the Franklin County Board of Education (for failing to comply with the 1945 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education). But as I think about it, it also taught me about class.
The kids who were most overtly racist in our school were the poor mountain kids. We either called them “bus kids” (unlike the town kids who could walk to school, they had to be bused) or “covites” (because they lived in the mountain coves). “Red neck” or “white trash” would be comparable slurs. But despite the characterizations, I remember thinking that they were similar to Huck and that maybe, behind their frequent use of the n-word, they had a special sensitivity. At any rate, it made me wonder if there was more to someone than his or her surface.
Incidentally, while I am telling these stories, let me share one about how my father started developing his own racial sensitivity. He says that, when he was a sickly boy, his family sent him to South Carolina (from Evanston, Illinois) for the weather. When he returned north using the n-word, my grandmother, Eleanor Fulcher Bates, was firm that he clean up his language.
And where had she learned better? Well, her father took the family to South Africa when she was one (in 1886), and they lived there for five years before returning to the States. He was an accountant for a bank, and the Fulchers were appalled at how the Boers treated the black South Africans. So badly, in fact, that, when the Boer War broke out, my great grandfather gave speeches on behalf of the British (many Americans sided with the Boers).
Incidentally, great grandfather Fulcher personally knew the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes and couldn’t stand him, both because of his ambition to build an empire from Cape Town to Cairo and because he took over the banks. Family lore has it that, in the small English community of Kimberly, they wouldn’t talk to each other, which in the end cost my grandfather his job.
Anyway, back to Huckleberry Finn. My father remembers laughing out loud when he read the book as a boy. Maybe there was a connection when, later in life, he found himself wincing as he heard his father refer to a Pullman porter as “George.” (He says he saw a shadow go over the man’s face.) Later he plunged himself into the Civil Rights movement in Sewanee, joining up with Highlander Folk School to help found the area’s first NAACP chapter. (One of the key members was the grandmother of Jeffrey Patten, who I talked about yesterday.) Who knows how much of his sensitivity had its roots in being introduced to racial injustice through Huckleberry Finn when he was a child.
So four generations of my family have read and loved Huckleberry Finn (well, except for my grandmother, who worried that its bad grammar would corrupt young readers). Rather than turning us into racists, it has helped strengthen our commitment to social justice. Of course, Twain couldn’t do it alone. We’ve had to read other authors, including many African American authors, to round out the picture. But the magical friendship between Huck and Jim was a start.
And if reading the book as it was written forces young readers and their teachers and parents to confront America’s ugly past–well, that sounds to me like the definition of education.