It was the hurricane coupled with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that caused me to think so much about race and what it was like for me and so many other Black folk in the South. The mind of the South was a terrible thing to run up against—there was no real redemption, and very little hope. I could feel the rumblings in my spirit as I began to write down my feelings. My imagination was on fire and my heart was sad. Reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had stirred up something I thought was under control. I had sublimated my seeping anger and distanced myself from the forbidden word. Surely no one had called me a “nigger” since long before I went to college. And yet every time Mark Twain’s characters used the word nigger to refer to Jim, the Black professor or slaves, I felt that I too was being called nigger. A whole heap of history was piling up on me. My knees were buckling under the weight of a word that was like an albatross around my neck. And when I couldn’t stand it any longer, “I lit out,” not in the way of Huck Finn but in the spirit of Huck; I found freedom not in “old rags” but in my own imagination because I know that this is the place where freedom first begins. My imagination belongs to me, and no one else can rule my imagination. Faith and love and hope are also part of the power of my imagination. While the class was discussing the merits of Huck’s relationship with Jim and Tom Sawyer, I began thinking and writing about how people—white, Black, and poor—continue to struggle and suffer. I put my pen to paper and began to write about the color of suffering. I could see it. I could feel it. This was a class that would last a lifetime.
I was already pretty rattled and unsettled because the weight of history was beating me to a pulp. It’s a miracle that I hadn’t lost my mind from thinking about all the mean and evil things folk had said and done to me over these fifty-something years. Thank God for spiritual restraint. And yet, Mark Twain made me angry and sad all over again.
We all drank from the river of silence. The mighty Mississippi River harbors the skeletons and bones of thousands of Black folk. Mississippi, the river or the state, is a metaphor for the power of destruction. It is a symbol of evil and a sign of injustice in America, but for Huck and Jim, it was a symbol of freedom. It is a cultural trope in American life. Not only that. I can also imagine the number of bones buried at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where slave ships carried human cargo for centuries.
The graduate class made a lot of assumptions: that the forbidden word could be said in my presence because it could be attributed to Huck, Jim, Aunt Sally, or Pap; that I was distanced enough to be objective; and that postmodernity meant that the age of postcolonialism was upon us. For me, all of these assumptions were wrong. There were enough masks for everyone to wear. Twain himself was always protected. Nothing negative could be attributed to him. As far as most of the white students were concerned, Twain was a god. And yet, I felt differently. In my mind, I placed Twain in the pantheon of Americans who in one way or another have sustained and emblazoned the forbidden word into America’s consciousness. In other words, the spirit of America is expressed in her use of the word nigger, and nobody uses the word as ubiquitously as America’s favorite writer, Mark Twain, which, for me, is the main reason for the acclaim of the novel. Not even rappers like Tupac Shakur or Snoop Dogg or Lil’ Wayne’s use of the word is any more excessive than Mark Twain’s. And he doesn’t use it “the same way we does,” say the rappers and hip-hop artists and other Black folk.
James Henry Harris
Richmond, Virginia
April 2012
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the many people at writers’ workshops and other places who read and offered valuable suggestions and corrections to the entire manuscript or excerpts from it during the past six years: Maureen Baron, Patricia Perry, Richard N. Soulen, Robert Wafawanaka, Jim Meisner, Jr., Jerry Gross, Sadia Shepherd, Sidney Offit, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Andrew Blossoms, Susan Hartman, Marita Golden, David Shields, Bruce Jay Friedman, Barbara Clark, Joanne Braxton, and Charles Marsh.
Thanks to Victor Fisher, Associate Editor of the Mark Twain Project and staff of the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley for facilitating the week I spent scouring their resources and examining some of the Mark Twain Papers in the summer of 2006. These materials have helped to broaden my knowledge and understanding of Mark Twain.
Thanks to all of the students in the Mark Twain Seminar, and family members who read portions of the manuscript. Paula Watson, Charlotte McSwine and my entire staff have read all or portions of the manuscript.
Finally, thanks to my sons J. Corey and Cameron C. Harris and my wife Demetrius for their continued support.
Chapter 1
For the first time in my life, at age fifty-three, I’m reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Imagine me sitting alone in the classroom on the first day, a good ten minutes early. This in itself is really out of character for me because I am usually a few minutes late for everything except Sunday morning worship or a funeral. And, even these holy rituals have not completely escaped my tardiness. I am not the best example. But, on this day I wanted to counterbalance this myth—to dispel the notion that Black people are so consistently late that they have a time-consciousness of their own.
I smiled, choosing a table and a chair where I can see the door. I have a phobia about having my back to the door. I always sit where I can see how to escape. On this particular day, I also wanted to see the young graduate students who would be studying with me as they walked in. I didn’t have to wait very long. The first one came strutting through the door about two minutes after I did. He was a short white male who looked to be about twenty-five years old, with shaggy hair and rimmed glasses that made him appear a bit older. I noticed a strange looking tattoo on both of his arms. His arms were long and his hands were big—like those of the boxer Oscar de la Hoya. I guess I noticed this because his hands and arms were disproportionate to his rather diminutive body. I didn’t want him to see me gazing, so I waited until he reached over in his backpack before I ventured another glance. The right arm had a tattoo of what appeared to be a flag on it. I leaned forward slowly to get a better look. Then, like a thief, I turned and looked out the window. I thought to myself, Is that the American flag or a Confederate flag? In Richmond, the confederacy is kept alive by statues on Monument Avenue. It is lined with statues of soldiers who fought for the South during the Civil War. I was just about to ask the meaning of his body art when a group of young students came through the door and rescued me.
There were about seven or eight of them, but they made so much noise I thought it was more than the room could hold. After a minute or so, a young white girl barely in her twenties walked in. She had spiked hair and carried a purple pocketbook. She looked like a member of a rock band. Next came an older woman with a leather briefcase. She looked like a teacher in her late forties. I later learned that she was a lawyer who drove fifty miles down to Richmond from Williamsburg just to take this one class on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
By the time the clock struck four, there were ten people sitting around four tables pushed together for the once a week seminar held every Thursday from 4:00 to 6:40 p.m. The professor must have come in shielded by the noise and a number of students who had descended upon the classroom just a minute or so before the seminar was scheduled to begin. He was directly under what looked to me like a portrait of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general. Or maybe it could have been Lee’s partner, Stonewall Jackson. They all look alike to me. It’s the horses they ride and the uniforms they wear. The room was, in fact, an old dining room converted into a classroom in a building that was an antebellum plantation mansion. In my mind’s eye the room became a mirror of old sins and transgressions. It began to speak of the past. I could see the slave master and his wife ordering breakfast and telling the Black servants that the floors needed to be swept and cleaned, and the pots and pans scrubbed, and the silver platters polished at least an hour before sunset. The images overwhelmed me. My mind became a matrix of past and present, and even the future