Bleaching ‘Huck’

While I fast concede that American education may never run out of Stupid, this move may come out on top. As a reader and as a teacher of American Literature and Culture for over forty years, I find useless, if not incredible the switching out of the 219 instances of “nigger” for “slave” in the recently published ‘Huck’ redaction by New South Books. I recoil  not simply because it rips up Twain’s intent and, in effect, creates a new novel. I find the move repugnant also because it assumes the abject and ongoing failure of teaching.

     What we teachers do, what we ought to do routinely with any potentially objectionable aspect of any novel, poem, play, essay, is complex and yet simple: we teach students to interrogate the text.

     Interrogate the text.

     This means we enthusiastically give students the literary, historical, linguistic, sociological, economic, and psychological tools to dig very hard beneath the surface of a text so as to surround and grasp how it may have been read and felt and understood in its own, original, broad set of contexts–there’s never only one or a ‘preferred’ context–as well as in ours and in others’. And we promote discussion and critique of how original texts are understood now and in how they impact a variety of communities.

     That is the only honest way to teach fraught literature.

     I have been ashamed to have had to listen to independent and public school colleagues –I taught nearly half my career in public schools — propose to remove The Merchant of Venice from syllabi lest one fellow Jew go home unsettled. As a Jew I think I know what anti-Semitism looks, sounds, feels, smells like. It’s at best crude; at its worst, like racism, it fosters murder. Still, I do not need to be protected from Elizabethan iterations of it nor did I need to protect any teen or college student from a historically authentic portrayal of Shylock. I taught ‘Merchant’ and ‘Huck’ well over twenty times in all manner of schools and socioeconomic, religious, and racial contexts. Never, not one time, did anyone associated with my efforts, colleague, student, parent, raise a question of appropriateness.

          Tom Sawyer (in his own novel) hornswaggled his peers into whitewashing that fence. And for Huck Finn’s fraudulent King and Duke swindling is breathing.  For Twain, America itself is a kind of grand Swindle with a series of low-level scoundrels, evil criminals, and victims. Twain is distinctly unsympathetic to swindlers of all stripes, from the tiniest would-be chore-shirkers to the Slaveholding class itself (for whom the King/Duke are stand-ins).

     I do not see solid ground, a useful middle position between censorship — and redaction is censorship — and doing our best to be good teachers with all I have said that requires. That we know many teachers are not adequate to the broad task must not throw us back to bans and more redaction. People who would consider using New South Books’ censored text are prepared to shirk the necessary, invigorating challenge of showing how interrogation of texts is done. They are willing to avoid the exciting, honest work teaching really is.