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>Take it from the old stage manager
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who's seen 'em come and go . . . . When I heard about the new edition of Huck Finn that cleans up Mark Twain's pesky use of the word nigger, deja vu of a very real sort came over me. A similar bowdlerization happened at least once before, more than 25 years ago, and I reported on it in my guise as YA columnist for School Library Journal. Courtesy of Mark Tuchman at SLJ who graciously found and scanned the thing for me, here it is again. From the August, 1984 SLJ:
In the YA Corner
Roger Sutton
Children's Librarian
North Pulaski Branch
The Chicago Public Library
"Sivilizing" Huck Finn
Despite Mark Twain's notice that "Persons attempting to find a moral in this narrative will be banished," the woods surrounding his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are thick with thieves; the only thing being banished is this book. While in a gentler time Louisa May Alcott could remark, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them," the issue today is not coarseness, but racism.
My interest here is in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Adapted, published by John H. Wallace, (John H. Wallace & Sons Co., 1983). A letter accompanying the review copy states, "Very little has been changed. The term "nigger" has been exorcised, as have the stereotypical assumptions that blacks steal, are not intelligent, and are not human." Wallace, who is black, had attempted to ban Twain's book from the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax, Virginia. "I don't care about the First Amendment. I care about children," he was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times (April II, 1982).
Now, we care about the First Amendment, precisely because we care about children. But Wallace believes that children—particularly black children—are hurt and humiliated by this book. Since his unsuccessful attempt to ban it, he wrote a "sivilized" version.
But given Wallace's premise that the book is racist, can we say that his "edited" version has rendered it less so? I don't think it has. In fact, I believe he has taken Huckleberry Finn, a book containing some strong anti-racist sentiment, and turned it into a very different book, one that is racist "by omission" (to borrow a phrase from the Council on Interracial Books for Children). Wallace's changes are of several kinds. Most prominent is the complete expurgation (Wallace calls it "exorcism") of the word "nigger," replacing it most often with "slave," and occasionally "servant" or "fellow." Sometimes he omits phrases or sentences containing the offending word.
Wallace says, "Very little has been changed"—"nigger" is a word occurring countless times in Twain's book. It is (and was in Twain's time) an ugly word. "Slave," on the other hand, is only descriptive, carrying no value judgment or emotional freight. For the most part, changing "nigger" to "slave" doesn't distort the literal, narrative sense of Twain's book. For example, Wallace changes "By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers," to "By and by they fetched the slaves in and had prayers." Despite the change, readers still know, nominally, to whom Twain is referring.
Twain, however, used "nigger," not "slave," and he used it on purpose. Remember, Huck tells the story, and "nigger" is the word he would use. The point of the story is that Huck is an ignorant, uneducated racist who, when faced with a choice between his racism and helping a slave escape, says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," choosing to aid his friend Jim, a "nigger."
By changing "nigger" to "slave," Wallace rewrites not only Twain but history, fashioning Huck's society to appear less racist than it really was. Whites of that time did believe "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell," but not in Wallace's book—he deleted that sentence. With Wallace's removal of the "nigger," and his softening of white bigotry in Twain's book, readers can conclude that life wasn't so bad for blacks in the South. Indeed, they can conclude that blacks scarcely existed. By simply referring to them as "slaves," readers can forget why they were enslaved to begin with.
Wallace also changes Huck's relationship with Jim. Huck, by Wallace, doesn't believe "He was a mighty good nigger, Jim was." Instead, "He was a mighty good man, Jim was." In Twain's book, Huck, expressing approval of Jim, says, "I knowed he was white inside." In Wallace's, this becomes "I knowed he was good." Why is Wallace so eager to let Huck Finn off the hook? What was, in Twain, a telling exposure of how racism infects even the most sympathetic of characters becomes, in Wallace, just a coupla guys sitting around on a raft, talkin'. Huck is no Simon Legree. He does love Jim, but cannot escape his own racism entirely. That's the point. The world would be a lot simpler if we had bad guys and good guys, but what we do have is a whole lot of mixed-up, uneasy people positively bustling with ignorance. And that's Huck—us—the good guys.
Look at how Wallace sweetens up Aunt Sally. When Huck tells her a fabricated story of a steamboat accident, the old dear replies, "Good gracious! Anybody hurt?" And when Huck replies "No'm," she's relieved. "Well, it's lucky, because sometimes people do get hurt." Let's see this same exchange in Twain:
"It warn't the grounding—that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.""Good gracious I Anybody hurt?""No'm. Killed a nigger.""Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."
Different, isn't it? Aunt Sally, sweet Aunt Sally, doesn't care if it "killed a nigger" so long as "people" didn't "get hurt." It is as if she didn't hear Huck's response; like Wallace, she ignores the "nigger's" existence. Wallace reduces Twain's neat irony to a pointless exchange, like Aunt Sally, complacently ignorant.
I can say what I do about these two Huckleberry Finns only because (unlike the intended audience of Wallace's book) I have both books in front of me. I can see that in Twain's book the angels "hoverin' round" Huck's father are black and white, the ones in Wallace's are white and "yaller." (The white angel is still the good 'un.) I can see that Jim calls Huck "Honey" in Twain, but not in Wallace (and that change begs more questions than it answers). What I can't see is what Wallace expects students to get out of his book. Twain's stern moral vision, his irony—the reasons this book is taught—are gone. What's left?
What's left is ignorance. Wallace, who has called Twain's book "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written" (Chicago Sun-Times, May 25, 1984), has revealed his own; and through his "sivilizing" of Huck, seeks to pass it on.
"I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it." Me neither, Huck. Have a safe trip.
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Rita
>One of the best things about reading books is getting to know the mindset of the narrator. It's a great way to learn how and why people thought and acted how they did, especially in books like Huck Finn. In a book written a hundred years ago and set in the antebellum era, that aspect of literature is so helpful in understanding the time period. Before reading Huck Finn last year for a class, I'd never read anything by Mark Twain. I can't say that I care for Huck as a character, nor did I really enjoy Twain's style (much too episodic for my taste), but the vocabulary was a major factor in the book as a whole. Without the uneducated southern white boy using the language he does, how would readers today know that similar children in the South 150 years ago actually DID say similar phrases? It's a lesson in American culture, a culture that is still present (sadly) and should still be recognized. Changing the language would, to me, negate much of what Twain wrote.Posted : Jan 20, 2011 02:03
candlewycke
>Wonderful and insightful post. You are correct that Wallace is guilty of omission but what is worse is that he is guilty of the same sort of historical revision that created the myth of the the lost cause in the South and that diminished the importance of the issue of slavery to the Civil War to begin with. In one fell swoop Wallace has negated the importance of "that peculiar institution" to the history of America and to African Americans, he has reduced the worthy feat of forging a culture out of oppression to a curious happenstance with no lasting merit and most important of all he has tarnished the hard work of men and women of all colors who worked towards the freeing of Slaves and then towards true equality. The truth is that in their lives both Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King dealt with commonplace word "nigger" and it was their dealing with it, and the way theyd ealt with it that brought about positive change. We mus'nt forget that it was a little book written by the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe that began a transformation in the minds of many Americans in regards to Blacks, both free and enslaved and she used that word to great effect. It is no different than Twains use of the same. Remove the word from history and you remove the history that launched the word and that serves no one!Posted : Jan 19, 2011 03:45
Helen Frost
>Yes, I agree--while children are developing their sense of their place in society, it seems risky to offer them books where racism is portrayed as fact, without offering some emotional guidance. I don't mean didactic, and I can't find my copy of Elijah of Buxton that I mentioned as an example of a book I'd offer young readers instead of Huck Finn. But I remember that Elijah struggles with tears as he confronts the reality of slavery; there's an elder who speaks with great emotion and eloquence about the word "nigger." (I think Curtis may have made the whole thing clear without using the word himself. "What kind of baby do you think..." etc. Something like that.)And Roger, I want to say, when I made that first cryptic comment, pulling one sentence out of your thoughtful and truthful essay, it was out of a feeling of frustration that everywhere I turned people were coming down so hard on this new edition, talking about the stupidity of it without any discussion of the reasons someone might have thought it was a good or necessary idea. I was just trying to shake the tree a bit, and that sentence was where I grabbed the branch.
Thanks,
Posted : Jan 18, 2011 02:03
Debbie Reese
>Yes.Posted : Jan 17, 2011 09:22
Roger Sutton
>I haven't read the new edition, but if its effect is to make Huck's racism less racist, I question the value of teaching the book. Wouldn't it be better to introduce the real book later than to use a whitewashed one earlier?Posted : Jan 17, 2011 08:56