Christine Jackson, Ph.D., is a guest writer to The Current. She is a professor in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches courses in writing and literature.
In “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain, Huck and Jim have to deal with abuse from Huck’s drunken father, almost drown in a flood, and narrowly escape being gunned down by a trigger-happy, feuding family. Now Huck and Jim face another harrowing adventure.
NewSouth Books, an Alabama-based publisher, announced the release of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn next month. The new version replaces more than 200 appearances of the N-word with the word “slave.”
That’s an improvement?
Without question, the N-word carries a heavy weight. Reading about the derision, hatred, and violence surrounding the word’s use in Huck Finn’s world can help people understand its many uses and abuses in today’s conversations on race.
The man behind this project is Alan Gribben, a distinguished research professor at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama. Gribben has completed scholarly work on Twain, and his academic background includes a Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley.
Gribben reasons that the changes make the book accessible to those who find the word objectionable and offer an alternative for grade school readers.
The saga of Huck and Jim requires maturity to absorb that grade schoolers do not have. Even high school literature classes would need guidance from teachers to help students understand the work’s historical and social contexts.
Gribben’s word surgery changes Twain’s work in countless ways and not for the better.
To select a random passage, let’s look at Chapter 42. Jim has helped an old doctor remove a bullet from Tom Sawyer to save his life. Men in the crowd want to hang Jim, but they settle for merely cursing him and beating him up. The doctor stands against the crowd in Jim’s defense: “I never see a slave that was a better nuss [nurse] or faithfuller, and yet he was risking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he’d been worked main hard lately. I liked the slave for that…”
With Twain’s original wording, we see the old doctor’s dawning realization that the color of Jim’s skin is separate from his admirable actions. In the expurgated version, the word “slave” clunks like a sour note. It downplays the doctor’s words and reduces Jim to his slave status, which by this time is not even accurate, since Jim was a runaway.
Interviewed by “Publishers’ Weekly,” Gribben mentions that he became involved in this project when “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was the book selected for “The Big Read.” Each year, the National Endowment for the Arts sponsors a classic for wide regional discussion. When “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was the selected title, Gribben gave lectures at schools, bookstores, and libraries all over Alabama. Local teachers felt they could not teach the book. “In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable,” they told him. “For a single word to form a barrier,” Gribben said, “it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs.”
Actually, Gribben’s edits involve more than just a single word. Apparently “injun” will also be changed or deleted. Now Tom Sawyer’s nightmare from the cave is just “Joe.” Has the slope already acquired a slippery sheen?
In the early 1800s, Englishman Thomas Bowdler published a family-friendly edition of Shakespeare’s plays to avoid offense. For example, Lady Macbeth shrieks, “Out, crimson spot!” Chopping up a literary classic usually makes the one wielding the cleaver look silly.
At the start of his story, Huck tells us that we readers first learned about him from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” “That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Changing Twain’s words alters the truth of his work — the way people spoke and thought about African Americans in the 19th century — and underestimates a reader’s willingness to absorb Twain’s fundamental message about the dehumanization of slavery.
