Banning Huck

Read Time:4 Minute, 8 Second

My father grew up in a rural Oklahoma town. Everywhere in that town signs reminded African-Americans of what they could or could not do, and when they could or could not do it. There were signs indicating what water fountains persons of color could drink from, what restaurants they could enter, which restrooms they could use, and what side of the tracks they needed to be on when the sun went down.

Speaking of growing up white in the thick of such institutionalized racism in the Forties and Fifties, my Dad said, “You didn’t think anything of it. It’s just the way it was. Nobody told me it was wrong. If you said it was wrong, you’d get beat up.”

Growing up in Tulsa in the Seventies and Eighties, I don’t remember racism as being anything so “real” as that–pervasive, out there, and advertised. There were no racist injunctions hanging over water fountains, no signs hanging above the entrances to restaurants. But then, there were no black kids at my school. Except one.

Meeting this kid might have been the first time in my life when I was ever in arm’s reach of a human being of color. No one in my kindergarten class regarded him with fear or malice, but rather, with curiosity. Even the Jewish kids asked if they could touch his hair. Though his color was different, he ate lunch with us, and used the same bathroom as the other boys.

When I was seventeen, my Dad gave me a book that I would read many times thereafter. Ernest Hemingway said of the book, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

The part of this book that stopped me in its tracks is in Chapter 31, where Huckleberry Finn has to make a quick life-or-death decision. His choice is this: either turn in Jim, the run-away slave–or else save his good friend Jim, and suffer eternal damnation as a consequence.

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.”

Many years ago, when I first read that passage, I affirmed to myself that I would forever strive to eradicate any trace of social prejudice from my being–and that I would be a better person for doing so.

In the immediate years following the 1884 publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novel was ridiculed–and several schools and libraries tried to ban it–because of its irreverent tone, its disregard for authority, and Huck’s coarseness and lack of manners. But the most damning thing about the book was that it portrayed a friendship between a white person and a black one. You could say that the “sin” of Huck Finn, in the eyes of those who first demanded the novel be banned, was that he wasn’t a racist.

In my lifetime, the recurrent impulse to edit and black-list Huckleberry Finn has happened for a very different reason. Critics of Twain’s novel accuse it of being racist, claiming that Jim is a shallow caricature of an ignorant, superstitious slave. And, of course, there’s also the repeated use of the “n” word.

The most recent development on this front is the new publication of a version of Huck Finn that replaces the “n” word with the word “slave.”

Maybe that will be to some good purpose, and maybe it will be cause enough to get Twain’s book in the hands of people who would otherwise not read it. Maybe. But such an editorial replacement is a disservice to the original text–and to the author’s masterful development of his main character, who narrates his tale in the first-person vernacular of the Old South.

A few years ago, when my daughter was in the second grade, she asked me: “Daddy, why did white people do those bad things to black people?” It was Black History Month, and she was learning, for the first time, about America’s great shame. She must have been quite confused, as she sat with her classmates, half of them black, and learned about the monstrous things her ancestors did to other human beings.

I had to think out my answer, keeping in mind that I was speaking to an eight year-old. I thought of the economic circumstances of the time, and of the moral justifications for slavery, as wrong-headed as they were. I needed to keep it simple. So I answered, “Because they were stupid, mean and greedy.”

Soon I will give my daughter that same copy of Twain’s great American novel that my father gave me.