Quote of the day:

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.
—From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

When I first tried to read Huckleberry Finn 35 years ago, I mentioned to my friend Frank Scott, who was Black, that I was having a difficult time with it.

“Oh,” he said, “because of nigger Jim?” 

He said it so casually that I was a bit taken aback, but yes, that was my problem. But not just Jim, the enslaved man that Huck befriends and resolves to set free, even though Huck, very much a creature of his time, believes he will go to hell for breaking one of society’s rules by helping a slave to escape. That offending word is sprinkled quite liberally throughout the entire book.

That offending word actually occurs a total of 212 times in the text. No, I didn’t count each occurrence; I took a copy of the public domain edition and did a search. 

I am strongly opposed to censorship, and I believe Huckleberry Finn is an important novel in many ways, but I can understand why some folks feel it ought to be suppressed or perhaps made available in an expurgated version.

How would you feel if you were the only Black person in a class filled with lily white students and a lily white instructor that was studying that novel, and they used the excuse of a free-wheeling discussion to bandy about that word with gay abandon?

Robert G. O’Meally, who once was such a Black person in a class of that sort but has gone on to teach the novel in his own classes, has defended Mark Twain’s use of that word:

In defense of Twain’s language, I would remind readers that we are getting Twain’s creation of Huck’s tale in Huck’s voice, and that, as many have argued, we should read Huck’s uses of “nigger” not only as evidence of authentic historical talk, however unpleasant, but as Twain’s relentless, well-turned irony. (With “irony” referring to an aside that is understood by reader and writer, and perhaps at times by a particularly knowing character like Huck, but not by most of a work’s characters.) One central irony here is that even a boy who strikes us as pure in heart and thoroughly genuine in his love for Jim uses the term in sentence after sentence—that’s how deeply ingrained the language of American racism was (and, sadly, is). In one of the novel’s most unforgettable scenes, Twain’s irony is most effectively pointed. In chapter 32, Huck, masquerading as Tom Sawyer, pretends to have just arrived on a riverboat that was delayed by an explosion on board. Aunt Sally asks,

“Anybody hurt?”

“No‘m,” is Huck’s quick reply. “Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky;” said Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt” (p. 201).

Even motherly Aunt Sally, who seems well-meaning enough, is at home not only with this term “nigger” but also with the news of the death of an African American, who in her language is neither a human being nor worth a sigh of remorse. Further, Huck’s use of “nigger” in this instance adds detail to his cleverly turned lie, and asserts a sense of (white) community with Aunt Sally to hide his real intention of freeing Jim. As Huck suspected, Sally and family have bought Jim and kept him hidden as part of their own plan to sell him down the river. Behind what at first seems like her wonderful good manners lurks the monster of race hatred, unabashed.

Clearly, if in this scene we change the racial designation to “Negro” or “negro” (the more common nineteenth-century usage), we would lose the violence of the word “nigger”; but it is also true that with the emendation we would sacrifice the deepest, most slashing irony that Twain turns against the word and the world of prejudice underlying it.

But that word is not the only difficulty with the novel. The entire book is written in dialect. I don’t have too much of a problem with Huck’s voice per se, as he is the narrator of the book, but when he starts reproducing the dialogue of some of the other folks that he meets, including Jim, Twain’s efforts to replicate the dialects often makes for very slow-going reading.

On the other hand, a lot of the novel is just plain hilarious. And then the scenes of hilarity are juxtaposed with scenes of extreme cruelty. It’s a very complex novel, but well worth taking the time to read at least once.

I just finished reading it a second time. Although to be fair, I did skim through a few passages here and there where the dialect got especially intense.

The reason I reread the book is I’m hoping to read the recent novel James by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of the story from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. The novel won the 2024 Kirkus Prize, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so there’s a good chance that it might be worth reading, right? I wanted to refresh my memory of the original and one thing I noticed is that there are several places where Jim is left alone for days at a time, so I suspect that there’s plenty of room for James to invent entirely new episodes for Jim that aren’t in the original.

I’d just like to close with a passage from Huckleberry Finn that made me chuckle, Mark Twain being famous for his humor after all. Huck has just sent Mary Jane to hide and now he has to improvise an excuse for the rest of the family not to go looking for her.

“What’s the name of them people over on t‘other side of the river that you all goes to see sometimes?”

They says:

“There’s several; but it’s the Proctors, mainly.”

“That’s the name,” I says; “I most forgot it. Well, Miss Mary Jane she told me to tell you she’s gone over there in a dreadful hurry—one of them’s sick.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know; leastways I kinder forget; but I think it‘s——”

“Sakes alive, I hope it ain’t Hanner?”

“I’m sorry to say it,” I says, “but Hanner’s the very one.”

“My goodness—and she so well only last week! Is she took bad?”

“It ain’t no name for it. They set up with her all night, Miss Mary Jane said, and they don’t think she’ll last many hours.”

“Only think of that, now! What’s the matter with her!”

I couldn’t think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says:

“Mumps.”

“Mumps your granny! They don’t set up with people that’s got the mumps.”

“They don‘t, don’t they? You better bet they do with these mumps. These mumps is different. It’s a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said.”

“How’s it a new kind?”

“Because it’s mixed up with other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain fever, and I don’t know what all.”

“My land! And they call it the mumps?”

“That’s what Miss Mary Jane said.”

“Well, what in the nation do they call it the mumps for?”

“Why, because it is the mumps. That’s what it starts with.”

And Huck goes on from there.