Twain would have loved it

Twain and friend John Lewis, 1903.

The literary world is in a fine and dandy kerfuffle over a new edition of Mark Twain's Huck Finn that replaces the word "nigger" with "slave" and the word "Injun" with Indian.

Oh would the old man have loved the publicity!

Here are the facts, as we know them, from The New York Times.

A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has generated much controversy because it will replace the word "nigger," which occurs 219 times in the book, with "slave." (The edition also substitutes "Indian" for "injun.") Alan Gribben, an English professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, proposed the idea to the publisher because he believes the pervasive use of that word makes it harder for students to read or absorb the book. In an introduction to the new edition, he wrote, “even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative.” 

I'd give you my opinion, but why should you care? Instead, let me quote a few of the scholars posting on this at the Mark Twain Forum.

First, Twain expert Terrell Dempsey. A lawyer and long time resident of Hannibal, Mo., Twain's hometown, Terrell is the author of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World.

I am certainly no literary scholar or educator, but I do know a bit about slavery in the upper Mississippi Valley from 1840 until 1865. If one is to understand slavery, one must understand the dehumanization of the enslaved by the master class. The word nigger certainly does not equal the word slave. Slavery ended in Missouri in January of 1865. The niggerization of a substantial portion of the population continued for another sad century denying people social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. The word nigger still floats around Northeast Missouri. "Nigger work" is used by the rougher sort of white people today to indicate hard dirty work. Asbestos siding made to look like bricks is referred to as "nigger brick." The latter has roots in a whole class of cheap goods manufactured and sold to the master class for use by slaves. Of course, it is still used by some to refer to African Americans. Though today most whites do not use these terms in the presence of non-whites, I still hear them from my clients from time to time.

I think that Twain understood exactly what he meant when he used the word "nigger." It certainly entailed far more than "slave." A slave could be freed, but the person remained a nigger. Surely we have progressed far enough that our students can discuss this concept. It is not necessary to whitewash the institution and clean up Twain. I understand the power of the word and I still wince when I hear it. However, it always strikes me as ironic when I hear my older non-white daughter use the word with her boyfriend (a practice she did not have until she moved to New York.) I think Gribben is taking a very wrong and misleading step with his sanitized Huck.

My friend Brent Colley, an historian of Redding, Ct., where Twain spent his final years, has this to say:

This issue is that Twain used those words for a reason. He was holding a mirror up to society... post-civil war society ... and shouting "THIS IS WRONG!"

As Twain Scholar Dr. Cindy Lovell notes:
"In "Huck Finn" Twain pokes us with a sharp stick, makes us squirm, makes us highly uncomfortable. And it's effective."

This will make this reply super long... but it says it well because it's from Twain himself. I see it as proof that he wrote this book, this way, for a reason:

"In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing--the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly to betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime; carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible--there were good commercial reasons for it--but that it should exist; did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag; bobtail of the community; in a passionate; uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck; his father the worthless loafer should feel it; approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience--the unerring monitor--can be trained to approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its education early; stick to it."

I'm almost certain that Twain somehow masterminded this controversy. After all, he instructed that his autobiography could not be published for 100 years after his death. Anything to sell books.