Huck Still in Danger—Run, Huck! Run!

NB: I write this post using language that I never actually say and never actually said in a classroom. I taught Huck for years, but only in NYC, and only to classes that were predominantly filled with African American and Hispanic students (Dominican and Puerto Rican) and eventually some Asian (largely Chinese) students as well. White students were definitely the minority at our school. I believe this made the teaching of this extraordinary book much easier for a white teacher—but that is a different blog post.

Each time we began the book I set the stage with a number of preemptive strikes:

1. I explained the controversial history of the book and offered students book covers so they wouldn’t be harassed on the subway*;
2. I explained that I would never say the N-word in class—it’s not “my” word or my generation’s word and I only ever heard it used in hate when I was young. It’s a word I personally abhor;
3. I explained that if anyone else in class didn’t want to hear the word while in class (I couldn’t help their reading it), all they had to do was drop an anonymous note on my desk or in my mailbox saying, “don’t wanna hear it—4th period” and we would all pause or say “n-word” or substitute “slave” in that class. However, with the “slave” substitution I added some further caveats which I’ll address in a moment.

Unless you’ve been out of the country, in a cone of silence, or under a rock, you’ve probably heard the hubub about the “new” version of Huck Finn. New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic – NYTimes.com. I quotationalize (thank you, Damany) the word new because this isn’tnew. We’ve had eviscerated versions before (thank you, John H. Wallace). They caused the same trouble and created a new—and I argue more dangerous—problem than the N-word did in the first place.

For those of you who haven’t read Huck, there are a couple of things you should know about him.

1. he’s White Trash (my husband’s students called him “Bart Simpson” in the early 90s);
2. he’s been told he’s good-for-nothing (his Pap certainly is/was) and Huck has been shown to always be in the wrong (and on the slippery path to hell) by the adults around him;
3. he’s superstitious and ignorant, but obviously smarter than everyone else, except Jim;
4. he’s a better person than everyone else, except Jim.

This is where all the irony happens. And irony is part of the problem. We just don’t DO irony very well any more.

Here.

Jim is a slave (that’s bad in our world) but someone bought him (that’s good in the Old South) but now someone’s bought his wife and child and he wants to go steal them (that’s good in our world but bad in the Old South) and Huck just wants to get the heck out of Dodge, so they head out together, but miss their turn (the Ohio river) and head right into the heart of slave-owning Arkansas (that’s bad for everyone).

Now, Huck has to decide whether or not to help rescue Jim and get him out of his temporary prison so he can get on with finding his wife and child. That’s the moral dilemma in most of the book, and after MANY adventures together it comes down to this passage (which still, actually, chokes me up):

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 suchlike 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 smallpox 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.

In our modern world, we can easily brush that last bit off—and sadly, I think most do. But Huck believed this. Yes, he’s ignorant. Yes, he’s massively superstitious. And yes, he really believes that by helping Jim escape he will burn for all eternity in hell. He’s been so twisted up by all the righteous folks telling him he’s bad that he honestly believes that saving Jim—following his heart—must be the wrong thing to do simply because it’s his decision, and he’s a bad kid. He couldn’t possibly be right. So. There, a young man consigns his everlasting soul to hellfire.

I think watching a kid go through a moral dilemma like that might be exactly the kind of book kids should read and talk about and wrestle with. And a kid who is willing to do that for a Black man—well, he’s certainly not a racist hater.

But this new expurgated version of the book does something far more insidious than dropping the N-bomb on kids (as though that’s a new term to them). Let me show you why I think this is such a bad idea—and why we always had this conversation in class before we started reading this book.

Late in the book—the beginning of the last third of which we can argue the merits some other day—we come across this passage. I’m going to italicize the part we’ll deal with in a sec. To set the scene, Huck has arrived at Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally’s farm, the Phelps’ farm, and (as you’ll see in a sec) messes up by admitting to be Tom. Huck is “late” and has to think fast, but also lie in a way that no one will check-up on or he’ll be found out. And he has to do it all to a pre-Civil War, slave-owning woman from Arkansas. Watch his footwork:

“It’s YOU, at last! —AIN’T it?”

I out with a “Yes’m” before I thought.

She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands and shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and she couldn’t seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, “You don’t look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law sakes, I don’t care for that, I’m so glad to see you! Dear, dear, it does seem like I could eat you up! Children, it’s your cousin Tom! —tell him howdy.”

But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and hid behind her. So she run on:

“Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away—or did you get your breakfast on the boat?”

I said I had got it on the boat. So then she started for the house, leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after. When we got there she set me down in a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on a little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says:

“Now I can have a GOOD look at you; and, laws-ame, I’ve been hungry for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it’s come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What kep’ you? —boat get aground?”

“Yes’m —she—”

“Don’t say yes’m —say Aunt Sally. Where’d she get aground?”

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up —from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on —or— Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding —that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

Horrible. Right? I mean, can you imagine? I always got sick to my stomach looking at the way Aunt Sally talked—talked to her servants, her kids, and talked about people—especially her slaves.

And that’s where this new book gets into trouble. For better or for worse, a slave at the time was 3/5ths of a man. A slave was property. It’s appalling and repugnant but it’s the truth of the time, and thank God, it’s a truth we’ve left behind. Nonetheless, it’s the truth of Mark Twain’s childhood as much as it’s the truth of Huck Finn’s world.

Now, when Huck says, “No’m. Killed a nigger,” he’s not talking about a slave. If he were talking about a slave he would have used the word “slave.” He’s talking about a non-slave, a free African American man. With that in mind, go back and look at Aunt Sally’s reaction.

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about that woman? Everything Twain wanted you to know about that woman? If you remove the language you remove characterization and subtext and… well… kind of the point of the book!

You can’t—you simply cannot—whitewash (pardon that) the past. It’s ugly. Yes. There’s lots of things happening right now that are ugly. Putting lipstick on a pig only gets you a scarily ugly, still-smelly, pig with lipstick on it. If we can’t confront and look honestly at the past then we can’t learn from it. And Huck has always been able to teach us a lot about ourselves.

When we have the guts to listen.

*After years of the book-cover gambit, we actually did have an incident. One of my girls was on the subway reading (sans book cover) and unknowingly sat by a NYC Board of Ed woman. This woman looked at my student and said, “Why are you reading that book? It’s banned!”
“No it’s not.”
“Yes it is. What school do you go to?”
My student brilliantly covered the school stamp on the spine and said, “None of your business.”
“Yes it is. I work for the Board of Education and that book is racist!”
Without missing a beat my student looked her in the eye and said, “Then I guess you don’t understand irony!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I loved teaching in New York.