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Sparkle (2)
Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly announced that the next print edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be without the words "nigger" and "Injun" (“slave” will replace the "N-word"). From the PW website:
Unsurprisingly, there are already those who are yelling “Censorship!” as well as others with thesauruses yelling “Bowdlerization!” and “Comstockery!” Their position is understandable: Twain’s book has been one of the most often misunderstood novels of all time, continuously being accused of perpetuating the prejudiced attitudes it is criticizing, and it’s a little disheartening to see a cave-in to those who would ban a book simply because it requires context. (Emphasis mine).
So, is this good news or bad news? Emotionally -- for me, anyway -- this is good news. But it's also very bad news, in the sense that a great opportunity to make a dent in eradicating racism has been lost.
The blogosphere has been atwitter over this news, and, surprisingly, a number of Black bloggers have also said that while on paper the nasty word will be erased, its meaning and its legacy will never be erased from our minds.
I was in fourth or fifth grade when we read Huckleberry Finn in class. As I was the only Black person in the class (and there were only three Black kids in the entire school), that experience was already bad enough -- without having to hear the word "nigger" repeatedly said by my teacher, who read the book aloud.
I was confused: Wasn’t that a bad word, a word that was repeatedly said to me by schoolyard bullies and the occasional person who yelled it at me and my older sister from the confines of a passing car? I do not remember the beauty of the story, the lessons that we could learn from the book. I only remember my hurt when the teacher said that word, looking at me as she said it. I can only remember my fellow classmates snickering as she did.
The adult me never wants another Black child to ever feel the pain I felt when reading that book.
In preparation for this post, I read the introduction to the 1996 Oxford edition of Huckleberry Finn by Toni Morrison, and she was able to articulate the powerful nuances in the book -- nuances that as a kid, I certainty didn’t pick up on:
In the early Eighties I read Huckleberry Finn again, provoked, I believe, by demands to remove the novel from the libraries and required reading lists of public schools. …..Embarrassing as it had been to hear the dread word spoken, and therefore sanctioned, in class, my experience of Jim’s epithet had little to do with my initial nervousness the book had caused. Reading "nigger" hundreds of times embarrassed, bored, annoyed -- but did not faze me. ….Although its language -- sardonic, photographic, persuasively aural -- and the structural use of the river as control and chaos seem to me quite the major feats of Huckleberry Finn, much of the novel’s genius lies in its quiescence, the silences that pervade it and give it a porous quality that is by turns brooding and soothing.
Reading Morrison’s introduction made me want to pick up the book again after about 30 years. It stresses Huckleberry Finn's importance, not only in the world of great literature, but perhaps in how we can look to the past in order to understand our present. As with Morrison, after repeated use, the word "nigger" has lost its power over me; I no longer feel small and unequal when someone directs it toward me. It is the accompanying actions, designed to make me feel small and unequal, that are more problematic.
Many rational people -- including those who wanted the book pulled from schools' shelves -- know that in the good old days, things were much different. In the time when the book took place, African American slaves were not seen as having the same human qualities as whites. “Nigger” was, in some strange way, not even seen as a derogatory word -- it rolled just as easily off the tongue of Jim as it did of Huck. Unfortunately, it was a way of life -- besides, Black slaves had more pressing concerns than being called the “N-word," like slavery, rape, beatings, lynchings and other disturbing ways of being murdered. Not to mention not having any dignity nor humanity. By removing "nigger," we're removing one way Twain denotes
