The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by American author Mark Twain,
is both considered one of the great American novels and one of the most
frequently banned and contested novels due to its use of the N-word and racial stereotypes.
This has launched many debates as to if the work should even be taught in schools.
And the larger questions of is Hucklberry Finn racist.
Today we are going to attempt to
crack the case: is Huckleberry Finn an anti-racist work? Or is it just plain ol’ racist?
Or, as in most things, is it a little more nuanced and complex. Let's get into it.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the second book in the Tom Sawyer
literary universe taking place after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Considered one of the earliest novels to be written in dialect, the story brings us into the brutal
world of Huck Finn, a young kid who finds out that his father Pap Finn, has returned to town.
Pap Finn is a rolling stone and has a history of violence and gambling, and Huck is worried that his return
means more abuse both physically and financially. Pap tells Huck to quit school and warns him not to put on an air of superiority with all of that book learning.
“I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated, too, they say—can
read and write. You think you’re better’n your father, now, don’t you,
because he can’t? I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such
hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?”
Huck continues to attend school just to spite his father with knowledge,
but Pap kidnaps him and takes him to a small cabin on the Illinois shore. There he is beaten
constantly, and so Huck fakes his own murder and escapes down the Mississippi River.
Huck Finn, the first Gone Girl.
During his escape he stumbles across Jim,
a runaway slave who left his “master” in order to avoid being sold “down the river.”
“Being sold down river” is a reference to when slaves would be taken to Louisville
to be sold to cotton plantations in states further south, via the Mississippi River.
In his 2010 history of the Mississippi River,
Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild journalist Lee Sandlin said "the
threat of being 'sold down the river' was seen as tantamount to a death sentence."
Both Huck and Jim are now on an adventure for freedom that ends with Jim being freed
because his former master released him in her will. Huck Finn ends the novel saying:
“[... ]so there ain’t nothing more to write about,
and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was
to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.” Honestly related because writing a book is hard.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain (ha see that, call back?) was a Missouri boy raised in
Hannibal, Missouri. When his father passed away at eleven, Twain became a printer's apprentice
and eventually upgraded to a Printer himself.
Despite all of this work in printing, his dream at the time
was to be a steamboatman and eventually got a chance to work on a boat before the Civil War.
Speaking of the Civil War, Twain served in the Confederate army but then quickly
left and saw no combat. This will become relevant later.
Eventually, Twain became a writer and publisher, being responsible for the
publication of Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, as well as eight novels of his own, including
four other novels in the Tom Sawyer extended universe (with several unfinished fragments),
dozens of short stories and essays, as well as his own auto-biography.
Because who knows you better than you?
Politically, Twain got a lot more radical the older he got.
It is noted that before 1899, Twain was an imperialist,
but that changed following the Philippine–American War,:
“I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ... Why not spread its wings over the
Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three
centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own,
put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific,
start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world.
It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of
Paris (which ended the Spanish–American War), and I have seen that we do not intend to free,
but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
Despite having been enlisted in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy,
Twain was against slavery but was notably not great about American
Indian rights in his early writings. But one of the things about him having written
so so so much is that we are able to see his thoughts fully evolve with the times.
All of this informs the way we read Huck Finn.
Huck Finn is probably, along with Tom Sawyer,
Twain’s most well-known and cited book because of the controversy surrounding it.
The character of Jim is a slave, written in a very stereotypical way
and the “N” word is used a lot in the text and he is referred to as N-word Jim in the book.
This has led educators and others to attempt to either censor the book or ban it outright.
It has also sparked questions as to whether the book is racist or not.
Let’s see what academia has to say about this very, very, very notable topic.
A lot of academics take
issue with Jim’s characterization in the last few chapters of the book.
Professor Forrest G. Robinson, at the University of California at Santa Cruz,
makes this observation:
“[...] more recent critics have been strongly inclined to contrast the submissive slave who
appears in the closing chapters with the more complete human being who moves through the central
sections of the narrative. Modern observers are in broad agreement that this simpler, more
passive Jim is radically out of character. [...] More recently, Joseph Sawicki has observed that
the Jim of the final chapters is "reduced to a stock character."”
For clarity towards the end of the book,
Jim is taken by plantation owners Silas and Sally Phelps. Their nephew is Tom Sawyer,
so Huck decides to pretend to be Tom Sawyer in order to help Jim escape.
That's part one.
Then, in part two , the real Tom shows up and then pretends to be his own older brother in order to help the ruse.
Long story short Tom comes up with a really convoluted plan and ends up getting shot.
Jim, rather than escaping, decides to stay by Tom’s side giving up a chance for freedom.
Professor of English Neil Schmitz points out that, “ Jim absurdly decides to
sacrifice his life (and the family he professes to love) for Tom's sake.”
What makes this worse, so much worse, is that Tom knows that Jim has been freed from slavery this whole time,
the whole time and rather than say anything
he comes up with this ridiculous plan because it’s more fun and he’s a dumb teenage boy.
And so the stakes are very low for him, even though they are the highest for Jim.
When that is revealed, Schmitz notes of Jim, “Denied the privilege of wrath, even resentment,
Jim hardens into a piece of statuary.”
Yet despite this writing for Jim, something that is acknowledged to be limited at times,
there are Black Academics who very much see Huck Finn as an anti-racist text.
David Smith, Professor of English at Williams College, said this of Finn:
“It is therefore ironic that Huckleberry Finn has often been attacked and even
censored as a racist work. I would argue, on the contrary, that except for Melville's work,
Huckleberry Finn is without peers among major Euro-American novels for its explicitly
anti-racist stance. Those who brand the book "racist"generally do so without having considered
the specific form of racial discourse to which the novel responds. Furthermore, Huckleberry Finn
offers much more than the typical liberal defenses of "human dignity" and protests against cruelty.”
This is not a universal take, as Dr. Bernard W. Bell makes the point about Twain:
“Born and bred in the antebellum Southwest,
a volunteer in the Confederate militia, and an advocate of the delightful accuracy of minstrelsy,
Twain, as we will see, struggles valiantly, like Huck, to reject the legacy of American racism
and to accept his personal share of responsibility for the injustice of slavery, but never in the
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does he fully and unequivocally accept the equality of blacks."
So, good intent but more work would could have been done in the book to make the politics clear.
In reading Huck Finn, the writing for Jim reminded me of the equally jarring
depiction of slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
another book that is anti-racist in it’s intention but still feels more minstrel than anti-racist in context,
especially in a modern-day era.
Depicting a character like Jim in an infantilizing way, the need to strip his humanity to let a white
boy get the best of him is, in a way, comforting to white readers at the time. Let’s not forget Finn came out
twenty years after the Civil War ended. So that was still fresh in white reader’s minds.
Even more so than today, when they still somehow forget that they lost, but...whatever.
It was a very big deal and even this much depiction of an enslaved person being freed might have still been seen as radical.
Ultimately these choices are made so that white people can feel empathy for the realities of
enslaved people. This is why the book is so hard for Black readers, especially in a school setting.
The late author Toni Morrison wrote the introduction to The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, for the Oxford University Press edition. In it she says:
“The source of my unease reading this amazing, troubling book now seems clear:
an imperfect coming to terms with three matters Twain addresses--Huck
Finn's estrangement, soleness and morbidity as an outcast child; the disproportionate sadness
at the center of Jim's and his relationship; and the secrecy in which Huck's engagement with
(rather than escape from) a racist society is necessarily conducted. It is also clear that the
rewards of my effort to come to terms have been abundant. [...] It has been extremely worthwhile
slogging through Jim's shame and humiliation to recognize the sadness, the tragic implications
at the center of his relationship with Huck. My fury at the maze of deceit,
the risk of personal harm that a white child is forced to negotiate in a race-inflected society,
is dissipated by the exquisite uses to which Twain puts that maze, that risk.”
The book is traumatic, but valuable something that students can take something out of. Yet,
I feel Mark Franek and Dr. Nyaka NiiLampti sum up the issue aptly in the following statement:
“We think that Huck Finn is an important work of art that should be available in every
library in the world, but we don't think that it should be required reading in any
predominantly white high school where African American students are in a small minority.”
In a way you risk marginalizing them even more to have all of these white classmates
be asked and required to show
a level of racial maturity when discussing the N-word. We can’t even get Congress to acknowledge racism.
in this county, and then we're going to ask teenagers to do it without give them the necessary tools to do so?
Reading Huck Finn is to actively teach the history of racism.
And that requires putting in a lot of work that puts the book in conversation with other works, and a time period.
Not simply rushing through it because it shows up on the SATs or G.R.E. as a required text in American reading.
It is an education experience.
I don’t believe in banning books, but I believe that if we are going to teach Huck Finn then that
means teaching the America that Mark Twain was writing about and the audience he was writing for.
I want to end with these words by Associate Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas:
“[....] When chattel slavery is focalized through the perspective of Huck instead
of Jim, we run the risk of allowing a single story to shape our classrooms.
When we teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and other classics of
American literature, do we provide room for contemporary voices? What would it
mean to pair Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass with selected excerpts from Huck Finn?
How about teaching the Scottsboro trial and screening speeches from Civil Rights-era thinkers
during our To Kill a Mockingbird literature units (Thomas, Reese, and Lesesne). Or is it time to
revisit the canon completely, rethinking how we tacitly narrate our national story through the
literature that we teach? Our collective answers to these questions have significance not only for
the contemporary moment but also for English teaching and learning in the decades to come.”