Huck Finn

People are still having lousy debate on the word nigger. Very strangely, some are concerned how terrible this word is, but they don’t give a damn how does a person who is discriminated may feel. This book is about Mississippi adventures & we all know what kind of a place Mississippi is. Discrimination sucks big time, but it’s going to stay till the end of time. When they don’t care about humans, we can’t expect them to think about work of art.

Huck goes into hiding from his tyrannical father & he escapes to Jackson’s Island where he meets Jim, a runaway slave. Huck & later Tom Sawyer help Jim & that’s the main story.

Very rightly Mark Twain says in the book:

“Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.”

Mark Twain couldn’t have depicted a very different picture. Things were bad at that time. Things have always been bad. This story is about helping a slave. If this message escapes idiots, nothing can be done about it. By removing a word, things are not going to alter.

Anyway I went through the book once again. Some of the passages are really very funny. I won’t call The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a masterpiece, but the humor is mind blowing.

I just loved this part when Huck Finn tells Tom Sawyer about Jim.

‘There’s one more thing – a thing that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that I’m a –trying to steal out of slavery - & his name is Jim – old Miss Watson’s Jim.’

He says;

‘What! Why, Jim is _ _’

He stopped & went to studying. I say:

‘I know what you’ll say. You’ll say it’s dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? _ I’m low-down; & I’m agoing to steal him, & I want you to keep mum & not let on. Will you?’

His eye lit up, & he says:

‘I’ll help you steal him!’

Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard _ & I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell, considerable, in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a nigger stealer!

I think it’s the spirit of these boys that count & how they were trying to help Jim. And it’s because of the humor, you don’t get depressed. I think it’s a marvelous story. The message is beautiful.

And it was damn hilarious when Tom asked Jim to raise a flower & water it with his tears, cause some other prisoners had done that & it’s the way it’s always done.

New edition removes Mark Twain's 'offensive' words

Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and “Tom Sawyer” will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in ”Huck Finn” and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the list of literary classics that Twain once humorously defined as those "which people praise and don't read."

"It's such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers," Gribben said.

Yet Twain was particular about his words. His letter in 1888 about the right word and the almost right one was "the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Another Twain scholar, professor Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia, said Gribben was well respected, but called the new version "a terrible idea."

The language depicts America's past, Railton said, and the revised book was not being true to the period in which Twain was writing. Railton has an unaltered version of "Huck Finn" coming out later this year that includes context for schools to explore racism and slavery in the book.

"If we can't do that in the classroom, we can't do that anywhere," he said.

He said Gribben was not the first to alter "Huck Finn." John Wallace, a teacher at the Mark Twain Intermediate School in northern Virginia, published a version of "Huck Finn" about 20 years ago that used "slave" rather than the N-word.

Some parents and students have called for the removal of "Huck Finn" from reading lists for more than a half century. In 1957, the New York City Board of Education removed the book from the approved textbook lists of elementary and junior high schools, but it could be taught in high school and bought for school libraries.

In 1998, parents in Tempe, Ariz., sued the local high school over the book's inclusion on a required reading list. The case went as far as a federal appeals court; the parents lost.

Published in the U.S. in 1885, "Huck Finn" is the fourth most banned book in schools, according to "Banned in the U.S.A." by Herbert N. Foerstal, a retired college librarian who has written several books on First Amendment issues.

Gribben conceded the edited text loses some of the caustic sting but said: "I want to provide an option for teachers and other people not comfortable with 219 instances of that word."

In addition to replacing the N-word, Gribben changes the villain in "Tom Sawyer" from "Injun Joe" to "Indian Joe" and "half-breed" becomes "half-blood."

Gribben knows he won't change the minds of his critics, but he's eager to see how the book will be received by schools rather than university scholars.