Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Jan. 10, 2011

Whitewashing Tom and Huck

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I loved to read when I was a kid. For awhile I was captivated by animal stories written by the likes of Ernest Thompson Seton, who wrote about all denominations of animals, including grizzlies, wolves, coyotes, mountain goats, foxes, and intestinal parasites; and Albert Payson Terhune, who mainly concentrated on dog stories like “Lad: A Dog” and “Buff: A Collie.” (He also authored something called “Lester: A Presbyterian,” but it was not a bestseller.) During my chivalric era (4th grade) I read Howard Pyle’s “The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood,” which naturally led to Tennyson’s “The Idylls of the King,” and Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe.” For one entire summer I was hooked on science fiction, and consumed a variety of stories by the likes of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. From there I graduated to a series of very well-illustrated, enlightening, instructional articles which my friend Scott found in several of his father’s Playboy magazines. Neither Scott nor I actually read any of the articles, but we could tell just by scanning the titles that they contained first-class stuff.

But there is just one author to whom I’ve returned time and again. The author is Mark Twain, and his first adventure book, “Tom Sawyer,” opened a whole new world for me. That book led me to Twain’s quintessential American novel, and I still agree with Ernest Hemingway’s assessment that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’ ... There was nothing before. There has been nothing good since.”

But maybe Hemingway was wrong.

For several years now, “Huckleberry Finn” has been an easy target for the intellectually challenged Politically Correct crowd (forgive the redundancy). Various school libraries have banned the book due to the word “nigger,” which was used by the book’s narrator, an impoverished, poorly educated small town lad who didn’t know any better. The word was in common use in the mid-19th century, part of the vernacular in rural Midwestern towns. As Twain spins the tale of Huck’s and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi River, the instructional part of the narrative deals mainly with Huck’s growing recognition of Jim’s decency and humanity, not the boy’s innocent use of the dreaded “N-word/” But the word is important; it’s a natural part of Huck’s vocabulary.

Without it we’d have an incomplete picture of how things were and how people spoke in those days. I may not have been the brightest kid in town, but I still understood the context when I read “Huckleberry Finn.” The book was not a racist book, nor was Twain a racist. And anyone with a particle of a brain who’d read the book understood that, too.

But that was back when common sense, not Political Correctness, was the order of the day. Now PC has reared its oh so sensitive, wispy-haired head in Alabama, of all places. According to a January 5 article in the UK Guardian:

“A new US edition of Mark Twain’s classic novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is to be published with a notable language alteration; all instances of the offensive racial term “nigger” are to be expunged.

The word occurs more than 200 times in “Huckleberry Finn”, first published in 1884, and its 1876 precursor, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, which tell the story of the boys’ adventures along the Mississippi River in the mid-19th century. In the new edition, the word will be replaced in each instance by ‘slave.’ The word ‘injun’ will also be replaced in the text.

The new edition’s Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth books, says the development is a ‘bold move compassionately advocated by the book’s editor, Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery.”

The good Dr. Gribben explained “that over decades of teaching Twain and reading sections of the text aloud, he had found himself recoiling from uttering the racial slurs in the words of the young protagonists.”

He recoiled? As we say here in northeast Alabama, “Bless his heart.”

I can just hear him now, tiptoeing ever so delicately around Huck’s statement “Miss Watson’s ni ... er ... N-word ... er, uh ... slave Jim had a hair-ball as big as your fist,” or Tom’s “—and as the doctor fetched the board around and Muff Potter fell ... Inj ... Inj ... oh, shoot ... NATIVE AMERICAN Joe jumped with the knife and —”
If the PETA folks ever corner Dr. Gribben, he’ll certainly feel compelled to expunge the section where Tom abuses Peter the cat with Aunt Polly’s pain-killer. And in that section in “Huckleberry Finn” where Huck puts on a calico gown and a sun-bonnet and masquerades as Sarah Mary Williams, cross dressers will surely ask for more revisions, if for no other reason than because Huck neglected to apply proper makeup and trade his shoes for a pair of bright, stylish patent leather pumps. And what will poor Dr. Gribben do when the environmentalists and the food police complain about that 200 lb. cholesterol-laden catfish Jim and Huck pulled from that vile, polluted old river while hiding out on Jackson’s Island? Eventually there’ll be nothing left of Tom and Huck but an old long-handled paintbrush and a corn cob pipe. NO, WAIT–the anti-tobacco lobby would eliminate the pipe, too.

My wife and I visited Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri a few years ago. It is the inspiration for Huck’s and Tom’s hometown, St. Petersburg. Many of the original buildings still stand, including the Sam Clemens boyhood home and its famous whitewashed fence, as well as “Becky Thatcher’s” house across the street. We both remarked on how small the rooms were in the houses of the mid-1800s, the diminutive beds, and the tiny steps on each staircase. Things remained as they were 150 years earlier. That was as it should have been, and will continue to be until the Politically Correct goobers like Dr. Gribben of Auburn get hold of Hannibal and decide it’s time someone replaced that old pump outside the Clemens home with a cooler full of purified, sanctified, sparkling spring water selling for $4 a bottle, added Spanish street signs, installed elevators in the Thatcher home, and added wheelchair ramps. You know, in case an elderly tourist were to trip on one of those tiny stair steps and decide to sue somebody.