Teaching 'Huckleberry Finn'

We didn't "do" Huckleberry Finn in school, but I read it, right after Tom Sawyer, when I was in fifth grade. I was shocked by the racial slur that was part of Jim's name, but I understood even then why Twain used it. Jim was seen as less than fully human, unworthy of respect, by "sivilized" whites. But they were wrong.

Teaching Twain's masterpiece has been problematic for a long time now. Should students read a slur-free version about "Slave Jim"? Should Jim's dialect be dialed down? Perhaps it should be paired with a book by a black author?

Once a staple of high school reading lists, Huck Finn is now considered too difficult to teach, writes Ruth Franklin in the New York Times. Only 77 of 4,000 teachers surveyed by the National Council of Teachers of English said they were teaching the book, and many said that they were the last of their colleagues to do so.

"Over the past few years, I’ve been speaking to teachers and students who believe that “Huck Finn” still has a necessary place in the classroom, because it is uniquely able both to convey the structures of racism embedded in American society and to model how prejudice can be overcome," Franklin writes.

But no teacher wants to say the "n-word," which appears very, very often, writes Franklin. And some students are so distressed by it they can't focus on anything else.

Samantha Goodwin, who teaches at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, contextualizes the slur by teaching her very advantaged students about satire. In a class discussion, a white student said, “It’s supposed to anger you. You feel like Huck has been taught that Black people aren’t human.”

Despite her teaching skill, "Goodwin can’t persuade all her students of the book’s value," writes Franklin. "At the end of every school year, when she asks them — anonymously — whether it should still be taught, some say no: 'It’s just racist'.”

English teachers are teaching fewer novels than in the past, and increasingly they're urged to pick young-adult literature written very recently. The books are easy to read. All the sympathetic and point-of-view characters have approved views, even if the book is set in another time or place.

"The disappearance of Huck Finn is a worrisome sign that wrestling with a difficult book and emerging with one’s thoughts invigorated is no longer a given in the high school classroom," writes Franklin.

The book has a lot to say that's relevant, she believes. "Its larger theme transcends race: the need for each person, thinking and acting as an individual, to determine their own moral code."

When Huck decides not to turn in Jim as an escaped slave, he believes he's comitting a mortal sin. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he says. Do high school students really not get it?

If Twain's book survives at all, it may be due to Percival Everett, a black author who re-imagined Jim as a self-educated man in James, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Everett's character "holds erudite fantasy conversations with Enlightenment philosophers," writes Franklin. "When he uses dialect, it’s a canny survival strategy, giving white people a version of Black people they can feel superior to." He partners with Huck to save his wife and daughter from slavery.

Is "James" worthy of respect because he's educated? I like to think it's because he's a human being.

English teachers who still teach novels will pair Twain's book with Everett's, I predict. Or perhaps, they'll teach James and some students will go in search of Huckleberry Finn.