Forty-three years ago this month, libraries around the country observed the first Banned Books Week. Its co-founder, Judith Krug, was the director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. A First Amendment activist, she joined up with the Association of American Publishers to protest the growing number of books being taken off school and college curricula and out of libraries. Today, she would not be surprised to find that the list has grown but still includes Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Published in this country 140 years ago in February 1885, Huck Finn immediately ran into trouble – “challenged,” it was said – because of its use of the N-word, low dialogue, and “rough language.” Coming out in the wake of Reconstruction, a period that only hardened divisions over efforts to grant rights to freed Blacks, the book was set in the Antebellum South. Dedicated to his “Negro” butler and good friend, G.G. or George Griffin, as he called him, Twain uses the N–word over 200 times in the book. As years went by, objections to the N-word grew, and sensitivity training sessions were suggested for teachers. Objectors to the book today, however, may also include a different demographic than those who bridle at the use of the N-word. Namely, those who are uncomfortable with Twain’s critique of supporters of slavery who cite the Bible as support. When Huck instinctively decides not to turn Jim in, thus going against his Christian teaching and for sure meaning he will “go to Hell” -- it’s quite a moment for a God-fearing youngster brought up in the deeply religious South.
In 2017, Jocelyn Chadwick, then president of the National Council of Teachers of English, a Black scholar with a specialty in Twain, noted that the book “goes where Americans really don’t want to go.” We talk about diversity, equality, identity, she says, but “we really don’t listen and engage in a real substantive conversation.” Huck Finn, she concluded, would remain a burr under the saddle of so many people because it goes to the heart of what still bothers us to this day”-- the unwillingness of many Americans to confront “the nature of racial slurs.” In an Op Ed piece written in 2019 when he was working on a TV drama, novelist and screenwriter, the Black writer Walter Mosley spoke of how he had been summoned to a Human Resources office because he had been overheard using the N-word in the writer’s room. He was trying out dialogue. “I AM the N-word in the writer’s room,” he responded, furious at the secretive reporting and the superficiality of the charge. He quit.
I suspect that many people who argue for banning Huck Finn haven’t read it through. They rarely, if ever, refer to the book’s entirety, much of which consists of Twain’s often hilarious but satiric attack on the King and the Duke, malevolent grifters who appear early in chapter 19 of 43, and whose racist attitudes and con schemes find easy resonance. As for the final chapters of the book, a falling off from the Huck-Jim story, they are disturbing in a subtle way. They feature Tom Sawyer who cruelly prolongs release for a shackled Jim, wanting the “adventure” to resemble a historical novel. In fact, Jim had already been freed in the will of Miss Watson, who was about to sell him downriver. Huck sees how Tom’s antics terrify Jim, but he goes along with the cruel schemes. As Twain, the cynic, well knew, a singular act of moral courage does not necessarily transfer to universal behavior. At the end, in order to escape attempts to “civilise” him, Huck will light out for Indian territory, another American story being “challenged” as cultural history.
Mark Twain, an abolitionist, knew what he was doing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He would likely not have been surprised at all, at the time of his death in 1910, to learn that a more powerful and pervasive KKK was on the march – all over the country. To ban this book is to lose not only an important part of our literary tradition, but to deny a critical part of our history, alas, still evident today.
