I was in a dilemma. Sitting there that first day of class, I felt that the instructor of the class was as drunk as Pap, intoxicated by the language, the screen through which he recited these verses. But it was little comfort to know that he was the paragon of sobriety. I could not separate the forbidden word from Mark Twain, Pap, or the class professor. In my mind, they were all one. They were complicit in their denigration of an educated Black man. That was me they were talking about. I too was the Black p’fessor. And yet, the speaker in the written text and the person reciting the text were not the same—or were they? If Paul Ricoeur is right in saying that the “the text is mute” because the author is dead, then why was I so fraught with anger and pain upon hearing the word nigger over and over again? This text was not mute. It was loud, boisterous, and clear. While Twain is indeed dead, the professor of the class was not dead, and in my mind, these were also his words. He hid behind the text as I felt the searing pain and agony of each syllable every time the forbidden word was spoken. Was this fiction or not? I could not really tell. The text spoke oh so loudly—like a thunderstorm or even a Hurricane Katrina. I was the signified one.
This first class was a prelude to a semester that was full of grinding torture for me. I felt I was on trial for being a runaway slave or a falsely accused murderer. I was very race conscious. I am not exaggerating. I felt like I was “nigger Jim” or Jefferson in Ernest Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, whose defense attorney had called him a hog, an animal, a worthless inhuman being without the capacity to plan and think. That day at that hour, I could only remember hearing the one word N-I-G-G-E-R. Everything else was mute. How was I going to make it through a class where the forbidden word was not really forbidden, but rather was seen and heard on almost every page of Mark Twain’s book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? More than two hundred and eleven times. All negative. All used as a vile racial epithet: Condescendingly, with impunity, with malice and forethought, with evil intent, banefully, casually, symbolically, and thoughtfully cynical.
I heard the forbidden word, nigger, more times than I care to remember that first day of class, January 18, 2006, just a few days after the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This was the real irony. I thought I was in another world, transported back in time. I thought of the Middle Passage, which is the symbol of modernity and the meaning behind America’s understanding of democracy and capitalism. I thought of my ancestors who were on the slave ship bound for America—“freedom land.” I thought that everybody including Mark Twain, Huck Finn, Pap Finn, Miss Watson, and the class professor were all calling me “nigger” on the sly. While the professor and the rest of the class were talking, I was having an out-of-body experience. A perpetual anamnesis. A fifty–something–year–old Black man taken back to the time when he was seven- or eight-years old. My mind wandered. The forbidden word brought back pungent and painful memories that I thought had been forgotten.
The seminar ended at 6:50 p.m. I had experienced trouble of the mind and the soul. But, for now, I had survived the first round. The first day. The first class.
I realized I was caught in the clutches of alienation and despair. It was largely of my own making because nobody in the room knew me before I introduced myself that day. These were all young whites who very likely didn’t think of me the way I felt they did. And, they didn’t think of themselves as racists or bigots. And, neither did the professor do anything blatantly wrong except recite the word nigger from the page. But that was more than enough to alienate me from everybody else because I was already alienated by a grim social reality. For all I knew, nobody in that room or everybody in the room was prejudiced or racist. It’s hard to interpret the mind of the South. This was my struggle and my battle born of a tension in my inner history—a tension in my spirit and in my soul. This alienation taunted and gripped me from the moment the class began and from the moment the forbidden word was first seen on the page and read aloud. Hearing the word was more painful than seeing it. In its aurality, it harbored all the years of hate and evil that were invested in it. And, I didn’t know about anyone else, but I could feel the historical weight of the word around my neck, choking my breath away.
Chapter 3
I was already angry, but by the end of the first class, I felt flayed by the sharp edges of a single word. It was like the serrated blade of a knife cutting away at my self-esteem. And, to make matters worse, we were all assigned chapters for the next class meeting. The process was simple enough. We had to count off, like children learning their numbers, starting with the person to the left of the professor. Your number was your chapter to discuss during the next few class meetings. Mine was chapter eight or what I call “Sunrise at Jackson Island.” I was eighth in a sequence that spread throughout the semester—responsible for chapters eight, sixteen, twenty-four, thirty-two, etc. We didn’t get to my chapter until the third class session—three weeks into the semester. Most of the language in that chapter is so elegant and beautiful—descriptive and picturesque from the very beginning. And, yet, I am tortured by my own feelings—vacillating between love and hate from one page to another. As this chapter opens, Twain sounds like a poet and prose master:
The sun was up so high when I waked, that I judged it was eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade, thinking about things and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied . . . There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was little breeze up there. A couple of squirrels sat on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly.
I was captivated by the perfect picture of daybreak. I thought about the beauty of nature, how I love the fall and spring, and Twain as an environmentalist. I could see Huck lying in the woods on a bed of leaves and grass as the sunlight cascaded through the trees. But, it was the “thinking about things” in the opening lines of the chapter that sparked my own memory. This would be more evident as chapter eight began to unfold with Huck discovering that someone else was also sleeping on Jackson Island.
By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most gives me the fantods. He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I set there behind a clump of bushes, in about six foot of him, and kept my eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight, now. Pretty soon he gapped, and stretched himself, and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson’s Jim! I bet I was glad to see him, I says: “Hello, Jim!” and skipped out.
When I read that Jim “gapped and stretched himself,” I thought of my sweet momma who always used the same language. She would say, “the baby is gapping and must be tired; he need to take a nap.” That brief memory shook my consciousness and caused a momentary lapse in my thinking—a lapse that made me cry as I thought about my own dear mother. The emotion had come out of thin air. It fell upon me like a bucket of warm milk.
Like Huck, Jim had also run away. Huck wanted freedom from his father and Jim wanted freedom from slavery. He didn’t want to fall into the hands of a “nigger trader” because he had overheard Miss Watson’s plans to sell him down the river. “. . . I hear ole missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’t want to, but she could git eight hund’d dollars for me.” Jim was no fool. He understood the meaning of chattel slavery. It was an evil system grounded in economics and commerce. Somebody needs to pay Black people for three hundred years of free and forced labor.
I thought to myself this is where the book really begins. The first seven