This is an excerpt from a study guide I wrote for the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Many schools around the country either want to ban the book from their schools, or they want the “N-word” removed. The following is my argument against both.
Setting
The story begins in the fictional city of St. Petersburg, Missouri. During the novel, Huck and Jim travel as far as Arkansas, but there are really only two different settings: on the Mississippi River, representing freedom from society; and on land, representing the troubles and contradictions found within society, rooted in the nation’s culture, traditions, and beliefs. The story is set in the 1800s, prior to the Civil War. The country is divided into slave states and free states. All of the cities along the river that Huck and Jim visit are in slave states, and nearly everyone they meet is a slave owner.
Plot Summary
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn resumes where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ends. At the end of that novel, Huck and Tom have become wealthy. The Widow Douglas has taken Huck into her home. Because of his wealth and the Widow’s association, Huck has been “hurled” (as the narrator of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer describes it) into society. In his previous environment, he was free to rely on his senses and thinking skills. Now that he has entered society, Huck is confused because he doesn’t understand the rules by which these people live. He tends to be quite literal with the rules he is taught, which puzzles and frustrates him. There doesn’t seem to be any consistency when it comes to following the rules of society, yet the rules seem to make perfect sense to everyone else.
Huck’s father, a cruel man and the town drunk, shows up. He has heard that Huck is now rich, and he wants the money for himself, so Huck fakes his own death, Tom-Sawyer style, and flees down the river to Jackson Island where he runs into Jim, a slave who belongs to Miss Watson. Jim explains that Miss Watson had threatened to sell him to a plantation owner further south, which would split up his family. Huck and Jim decide to stay together, but because men are coming to hunt Jim and Huck down, the runaways leave the island by rafting down the Mississippi.
At first, life on the river seems peaceful, just as life on the island started out. But Huck and Jim quickly find that life on the river can be just as threatening as it was on the island.
A collision with a steamboat separates Huck from Jim. Huck swims ashore and is taken in by the Grangerfords, a family who is feuding with the Shepherdsons. When Huck discovers that Jim has survived the collision, too, he makes plans for them to get back together on the river. Before he is able to get to the raft, a battle between the two families breaks out, resulting in the deaths of many members on both sides, including Buck Grangerford, a friend Huck has made.
When Jim and Huck miss the turn up the Ohio River into free territory, they must follow the Mississippi deeper into slave territory, which is exactly what Jim is trying to avoid. When they make it to shore, they pick up two hitchhikers who attempt to outdo each other on their backstories. One professes to be a duke, and the other claims that he is the dauphin of France. While Huck sees through their stories, he chooses not to dispute them since he has learned from his father “that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.”
The duke and the dauphin perpetrate a series of scams in one town after another, each plot getting more and more sinister, until finally, the dauphin sells Jim as a captured runaway slave. Huck is able to determine that Jim is being held captive by the Phelps family until his owner can be found. When Huck arrives, the Phelps mistake him for their nephew, Tom Sawyer, who is late arriving for a visit. Huck is able to intercept Tom before he arrives, and Tom tells the Phelps that he is Sid, Tom’s younger brother.
Tom and Huck spend the next three weeks devising an over-complicated plan to help Jim escape. During the escape, Tom is shot in the leg, so Huck returns to the town for help.
The adults take charge of the situation, and Tom reveals that Jim had been freed in Miss Watson’s will, and the whole escape fiasco was for his own entertainment. Huck decides that he wants nothing to do with society and plans to head west.
Use of the word Nigger
The word nigger occurs 219 times in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To say this term is a loaded one is an understatement. It was used throughout the history of slavery and segregation in our country in a demeaning way to emphasize racial separateness and to connote inferiority. Students will, quite understandably, feel uncomfortable reading the word.
Some schools are so uncomfortable with the word that they choose not to teach Huckleberry Finn. Others use editions that substitute slave for nigger.
Neither of these approaches does students a service. Huckleberry Finn powerfully depicts a period of our history with valuable lessons. One of these lessons is answering the question: How could people who valued individual Rights condone slavery and allow an institution that systematically deprived Rights to millions of people to continue? Twain’s novel gives examples of how the word was used to illustrate how a large group of people regarded another group as inhuman. For instance, when Huck is telling his Aunt Sally about an explosion on a steamboat, and she asks “Good gracious! anybody hurt?” He says, “No’m. Killed a nigger.”
Twain was a humorist—writing to entertain—but this exchange gives us a key to understanding how people who believed in individual Rights could rationalize slavery. Nigger was not a synonym for slave, it was a racial slur that separated black people from humanity and put them on a lower plane. A nigger wasn’t considered a human; he was considered property. As property, the owner could treat him and dispose of him however he wanted. Not only could he work him all day long, but he could also beat him, sell him, torture him, and even kill him, all without any consequence. Could a man of traditionally accepted moral values do that to another human being? Of course not. But he could do it to a piece of property without any further contemplation on the matter.
To replace a word we find offensive today with one we do not is to engage in revisionism. In effect, it is to change history to make it more acceptable or to make it fit a certain position. One of Twain’s strengths as an author is his ability to accurately portray the beliefs and practices of the people of his time. He chose his words carefully. By substituting words, much of the effect is lost. A window that was open into how people of a certain time and place thought is closed. What was clear is made obscure.
When The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published, Mark Twain wasn’t criticized for the use of the word; he was criticized for how mildly he portrayed slavery. The slaves in his book weren’t plantation slaves. They weren’t subjected to the even crueler conditions suffered by the black population farther south. Today, the book is under condemnation for the use of the word nigger. While Mark Twain exaggerated many things in his book, he did not exaggerate this. Appropriately, Americans are sensitive to the word because it infers hatred, condescension, and separation from humanity. But rather than change history, it is important to look at it honestly and critically and to learn from it. As originally written, the book gives students an idea of how cruel and callous many Americans were during that time period.
History books only report facts and descriptions. They don’t convey the interactions between people, at least not in the way that literature can. Literature enables students to grasp how life really was back then—how people treated others. If that literature is censored or banned, then students miss an opportunity to learn how people treated each other in the past.
Romanticism, the predominant movement for American writers prior to the time of Huckleberry Finn, depicted idealized, fantastical worlds where imagination reigned. Amid post-Civil War social change and the urbanization and industrialization of the country, a new literature arose: Realism. Twain, as a Realist, endeavored to hold up a mirror to society so that readers could see the world as it was. The intention of the Realist was to effect change by matter-of-factly presenting everyday life, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions and, hopefully, take action. Thus, Twain used the term not as an endorsement of such language, but to expose a reality he hoped his readers would oppose.
Teachers should establish rules for the use of the word in class. Any rational person should feel uncomfortable using the word when reading aloud. A student may choose to skip over the word, but they shouldn’t replace the word with a euphemism. Likewise, the word should not be used out of context or outside of class. At all times, students must respect each other’s Rights.
Themes
Legality vs. morality—Legality refers to a legal “right,” privilege, or entitlement granted by the government to the people. Legal “rights” are different from Rights. Legal “rights” are entitlements decreed by the will of the majority by our elected representatives. Legality should never be confused with morality. Morality is a code of virtues that guide human action in a social context. Moral actions are actions that respect individual Rights.
Legality and morality are not always separate issues. They overlap in many cases, such as “don’t steal” or “don’t kill.” In other cases, they differ significantly. For example, legality might dictate that owning slaves is acceptable, but morality will always state that no one can own another person. Huck has never had to consider this. He has never had to worry about how to treat other people since he has lived primarily on his own his entire life. When he is plunged into society, he learns that in order to be considered a “good person,” he must conform to the rules of the society, where legality is considered moral—where good is defined by conforming to the habits, cultures, traditions, laws, and beliefs of the majority. This confuses and troubles him when he tries to do what is legally right, but morally wrong; or morally right, but legally wrong.
Integrity—Huck seems to have always known what is right, but his immersion into society has him questioning what he knows is right since he sees seemingly good and decent people doing terrible things to each other. At times, he convinces himself that changing himself to comply with the ways of society is the right thing to do. How could it not be? If everyone is acting the same way, it must be right. But whenever he is faced with that change, his conscience tells him that it isn’t right. Because he can’t conclude what is right and what is wrong, he has chosen to do whatever comes handiest to him at the time. By the end of the story, Huck chooses to return to living on his own outside of society rather than try to make sense of society’s silly code.
Ethan's Journal 