Over the years I have taken note of valiant and judicious defenses of the prevalence of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (where it appears 215 times) as proposed by eminent writers, editors, and scholars, including those of Michael Patrick Hearn, Nat Hentoff, Randall Kennedy, and Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua. 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).
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 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 because of the hurtful n-word. Here was further proof that this single debasing label is overwhelming every other consideration about Tom Sawyer as well as Huckleberry Finn, whereas what these novels have to offer readers hardly depends upon one indefensible designation. As vital components of the American identity and heritage, they should maintain their important places in classrooms and libraries.
Word Exchanges
My understanding about this situation crystallized into a definite resolve. Unquestionably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be enjoyed just as deeply and authentically if readers are not obliged to confront the n-word on various pages. Consequently in this edition I have elected to translate the nine usages 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 Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as springboards 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.
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. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.
The racially derogatory nickname for the murderer in Tom Sawyer is more problematical. In Twain’s telling, the river village knows most residents by their ethnicity. Its severe schoolmaster has a Scottish title (“dominie”), the villain disguises himself as a “Spaniard,” a boy of “German parentage” recites a prodigious number of Bible verses, Huck Finn summons “the Welchman” to help the Widow Douglas, and so forth. Within this context the skulking villain’s mixed ethnic identity seems crucial in comprehending why he feels alienated from the other St. Petersburg townspeople, and why this marginalized figure might be tempted to strike out at one or more of the villagers who look down on him. Twain may have been capitalizing on the popular “Indian” stock character on the American stage; in melodramas like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana the surviving remnants of Native American tribes had been portrayed as implacably vengeful and bloodthirsty if angered. The offspring of an interracial relationship, Twain’s character has been stranded by the receding Western frontier. He resembles an actual mixed-race alcoholic with whom Sam Clemens was familiar as a boy in Hannibal and whom Twain’s Autobiography would recall.
The editor’s decision for this edition of Tom Sawyer has been to render the sixty-eight repetitions of the outcast’s name as “Indian Joe” 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). This substitution does manage to salvage Mark Twain’s ethnic innuendoes regarding the motivation for Indian Joe’s animosity toward the town’s residents. Presumably a merely informative racial sobriquet will inflict less injury on the descendants of a native people. A total of five miscellaneous usages of the I-word have similarly been altered. For the same reasons the eight references in Tom Sawyer to “half-breed” have been converted to “half-blood,” which is less disrespectful and has even taken on a degree of panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).
Reasons to Read Tom Sawyer Before Huckleberry Finn
For a hundred years The Adventures of Tom Sawyer sold more copies than any of Twain’s other writings, and it has never once been out of print. Gradually that novel has become synonymous with our national literary reputation, even though midway through the twentieth century English professors imposed an implacable division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Part of the explanation for why Tom Sawyer nonetheless still holds a prominent place in the annals of American literature is that it contributed a fresh, flexible narrative voice to the art of novel-writing, replacing the stilted, artificial syntax of British fiction and the convoluted prose of American writers who emulated those cumbersome sentence structures. Twain had perfected this colloquial tone of addressing an audience in his preceding travel books and now applied that same relaxed, ingratiating style to his first solo novel. Chapter 7, for instance, deftly describes Tom Sawyer’s ennui in the schoolroom:
The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom’s heart ached to be free or else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.
This was also the book in which Twain developed his ability to narrate moments of effective suspense, as in Chapter 26 when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are trapped in a deserted dwelling after two outlaws enter and discover the boys’ treasure-hunting tools. Tom and Huck watch anxiously through knotholes in the planking of the attic floor