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“. . . Deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6: 13b—KJV)

“. . . They shouted back, ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’ ”

(Mark 15: 13–14—NRSV)

“. . . They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.”

(Jeremiah 4: 22c—NRSV)

“And if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be done by the commandments of the Lord . . .” (Leviticus 5: 17a—KJV)

Preface

The history and meaning of the forbidden word N-I-G-G-E-R in America is that of a vile pejorative slang term for a Black person. Nigger goes back to mid-eighteenth century English, which adapted it from the Spanish Negro for Black. In America, the word has been applied almost exclusively to persons of African descent. Mark Twain grew up in a white slave-holding society in which he probably heard the word more often than any other term for African Americans. His use of it in fictional dialogue reflects the Southern usage with which he grew up. It appears so often in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, more than 211 times, that it has fueled an unending debate over the question of whether Mark Twain was a racist. The NAACP and other groups have called for banning the book from schools and libraries. Film adaptations frequently omit the word completely.

This book is about my reaction to reading Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time as a fifty-three year old Black man participating in a graduate seminar focused entirely on the exegesis and criticism of this one book by Mark Twain. My book is also about the flashbacks and other conversations and dilemmas that were spawned by the use of the word nigger in a classroom setting where I was the only African American and the only non-white person.

The central dilemma of the American experience since 1619 has been race. And, for almost 150 years after the Civil War, the public discussion of race has gone underground. Even the election of the first African American President of the United States and the blabbering furor surrounding the mistaken arrest of Harvard’s most acclaimed Black professor have failed to evoke a national open-minded and critical public discussion of race. The discussion of race in America is as forbidden as the use of the word nigger. “You don’t know about me.” These poignant and revealing opening words of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn resonate in my own spirit. A whole lot of people have been battered, bruised, and burnt by the scorching tone and the scathing staccato emphasis on each letter of this two–syllable word,

N-I-G-G-E-R. This word plays with the mind and the emotions because its meaning and intent are grounded in racial hatred and white supremacy. It torments the soul of the Black American, who has a sense of history and culture. Those who don’t trust even Mark Twain or Huckleberry Finn to understand the feelings and experiences of Black people have a right to be suspicious. Benevolence can only go so far.

Throughout the book Huck, the adolescent narrator, is a very good liar to himself, Jim, and others. In particular, Huck is a persistent and indefatigable liar like so many when it comes to the freedom of Blacks. I really wonder about him and Twain. As I read the book, I don’t trust either of them because I’m a skeptic and a doubter by temperament. I’m very suspicious. I certainly “don’t know about him!” And, he doesn’t know about me, either, I think to myself.

I remember Hurricane Katrina’s power to expose how America still views Blacks as invisible long after Ralph Ellison’s gripping story about spooks and Hollywood ectoplasms. Katrina’s devastating effects upon millions of poor white and Black folks unable to escape the ravages of this storm and the antediluvian torpor of the local, state, and federal government. “Call this a gov’ment. O, yes, this is a wonderful gov’ment, wonderful.” In this case, Pap Finn was right for all the wrong reasons.

The hurricane’s effects were seen in the pain and suffering on the faces of Black folk who were dazed, some frazzled and frayed by the wind and the water and the knowledge that hopelessness and despair had engulfed them in the vortex of the swirling winds and crumbling levies. The old, the young, the poor, the sick. They were mainly Black, bound by the chains of indifference from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the White House. With all the water rising and people drowning and floating, I kept thinking of the Trans-Atlantic “Middle Passage” because New Orleans looked like the sea, the Atlantic Ocean carrying cargoes of Blacks to the point of no return. That storm caused a lot of pain in my soul and stirred my imagination about injustice in the free world. The city was a river, the mighty Mississippi. Those without transportation or money to escape to high ground, found no freedom there. At that very moment, I knew how Miss Watson’s nigger Jim must have felt—betrayed and bamboozled, unequal. The hurricane started me thinking about all kinds of atrocities and troubles. The truth about the levees was well known. The elevation of the city was known and the strength and power of Katrina were predictable. Nietzsche’s fundamental insight became mine: “There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.”

I was still caught in the middle of the past and the future. I was suspended in purgatory while the folks caught in the eye of the storm experienced the depth of Dante’s hell. On a Sunday morning when I should have been getting ready for church, I was in a rut, stuck in a place of powerlessness and pain. So, I grabbed my pen and paper and began to write about people, places, and things that conquered my troubled spirit. I remembered the ravages of segregation, racial hatred, and human nature. Segregation was driven by the inability to understand the other person. And so is forced integration.

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