had vehemently opposed slavery long before the Civil War. Twain ultimately made an unreserved turnabout from his younger attitudes, so much so that in 1874 he wrote a profoundly touching account of how the slave system had cruelly split up African American families—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” A similar impulse led Twain to portray Huckleberry Finn as (in Twain’s summation in one of his notebooks) a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”—that is to say, someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice that he had a hard time seeing through its premises. This conception has become a heavier and heavier burden for the book to carry ever since the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s erased many racial impediments and sensitized succeeding generations of Americans to the manner in which language can affect thinking.
We might recognize Twain’s incentive as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, but abusive racial insults nonetheless repulse modern-day readers. Twain’s two books do not deserve ever to join that list of literary “classics” he once humorously defined as books “which people praise and don’t read,” yet their long-lofty status has come under question in recent decades. In this connection, it seems relevant to remember that Twain habitually read aloud his day’s writings to an audience gathered on the porch of his summer retreat overlooking Elmira, New York, watching and listening for reactions to each manuscript page. He likewise took cues about adjusting his tone from lecture platform appearances, which provided him with direct responses to his diction. As a notoriously commercial writer who watched for every opportunity to enlarge the mass market for his works, he would presumably have been quick to adapt his diction if he could have prophesied how today’s audiences recoil at racial slurs in a culturally altered country.
The Editor’s Story
Through a succession of first-hand experiences, this editor gradually reached the conclusion that an optional epithet-free edition of Twain’s books is needed today. For nearly forty years I have led college classes, bookstore forums, and library reading groups in detailed discussions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in California, Texas, New York, and Alabama, and I always found myself unable to utter the racist put-downs spoken by numerous characters, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I invariably substituted the word “slave” for Twain’s ubiquitous n-word whenever I read any passages aloud. Students and audience members seemed to find this expedient to be preferable, and I could detect a visible sense of relief each time, as though a nagging problem with the text had been addressed. Indeed, numerous communities have dropped Huckleberry Finn as required reading in public schools owing to its offensive racial language and have quietly moved the title to voluntary reading lists. The American Library Association lists this novel among the most frequently challenged pre-twentieth-century books across the nation.
Over the years I have taken note of valiant and judicious defenses of the prevalence of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as proposed by eminent writers, editors, and scholars, including those of Michael Patrick Hearn, Nat Hentoff, Randall Kennedy, and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua. Hearn, for example, correctly notes that “Huck says it out of habit, not malice” (22). Apologists quite validly encourage readers to intuit the irony behind Huck’s ignorance and focus on Twain’s larger satiric goals. Nonetheless, Langston Hughes made a forceful, lasting argument for omitting this incendiary word from all literature, however well-intentioned an author. “Ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy, it doesn’t matter,” explained Hughes. African Americans, Hughes wrote, “do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic. . . . They still do not like it” (268-269).
During the 1980s, educator John H. Wallace unleashed a fierce and protracted dispute by denouncing Huckleberry Finn as “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.” In 1984 I had to walk past a picket line of African American parents outside a scholarly conference in Pennsylvania that was commemorating, among other achievements in American humor, the upcoming centenary anniversary of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. James S. Leonard, then the editor of the newsletter for the Mark Twain Circle of America, conceded in 2001 that the racist language and unflattering stereotypes of slaves in Huckleberry Finn can constitute “real problems” in certain classroom settings. Another scholar, Jonathan Arac, has urged that students be prompted to read other, more unequivocally abolitionist works rather than this one novel that has been consecrated as the mandatory literary statement about American slavery. The once-incontestable belief that the reading of this book at multiple levels of schooling ought to be essential for every American citizen’s education is cracking around the edges.
My personal turning-point on the journey toward this present NewSouth Edition was a lecture tour I undertook after writing the introduction for a National Endowment for the Arts-funded “Big Read” edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer designed to interest younger readers in older American literature. As I spoke about the novel to reading groups of adults and teenagers in small towns and in larger cities, I followed my customary habit of substituting the word “slave” when reading the characters’ dialogue aloud. In several towns I was taken aside after my talk by earnest middle and high school teachers who lamented the fact that they no longer felt justified in assigning either of Twain’s boy books—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—because of the hurtful n-word. Here was further proof that this single debasing label is overwhelming every other consideration about Huckleberry Finn, whereas what this novel has to offer readers hardly depends upon that one indefensible designation.
Word Exchanges
My understanding about this situation crystallized into a definite resolve. Unquestionably Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be enjoyed just as deeply and authentically if readers are not obliged to confront the n-word on so many pages. Consequently in this edition I have elected to translate each usage of the n-word to read “slave” instead, since the term “slave” is closest in meaning and implication. Although the text loses some of the derisive spin that the n-word carries, that price seems small compared to the revolting effect that the more offensive word has on readers these days. Moreover, slavery is recognized globally as an affront to humanity.
I had come to believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers might welcome the option of an alternate edition of Twain’s novel that spares the reader all contact with a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol. Despite occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to appropriate it and well-meaning but usually futile (from my own experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against it by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history, the n-word remains inarguably the most inflammatory word in the English language. The synonym “slave” seems to express adequately the cultural racism that Twain sought to convey, as in Huck Finn’s report to Aunt Sally Phelps in Chapter 32 that a steamboat explosion had “killed a slave,” to which she responds heartlessly, “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
This word—“slave”—also usefully reminds readers of the historical fact that ten percent of the Missouri population in 1850 consisted of African American slaves. In the contiguous state of Arkansas (where the latter part of Huckleberry Finn is set) the percentage was twenty-six, and that percentage rose drastically in the Deep South, with fifty-five percent of the residents of Mississippi consisting of enslaved workers. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.
Similarly, the editor has rendered a racially derogatory label for Native Americans as “Indian” in order to assist in retiring another antiquated and insulting word (even though the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer, perpetuated by erring explorers and cartographers eager for a new trade route to India). Presumably a merely informative racial sobriquet will inflict less injury on the descendants of a native people who were endeavoring to survive the ravages of diseases and the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters that had decimated their ways of life during the era in which this novel was published.
Reevaluating the “Boy Book”
At the time that Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, first appeared, the