Читать книгу The Forbidden Word - James Henry Harris - Страница 6

“Mr. Harris,” I finally heard someone say. The class was in full swing. Everyone had introduced themselves during my mental hiatus. It turned out that the voice belonged to a tall, balding white man who taught the class. He was a Mark Twain scholar and devotee of some notoriety. He appeared to be a little annoyed at me. “We are waiting for you to introduce yourself.” He mustered up a smile, and so did I.

“My apologies,” I began. “My name is James Henry. I am in the graduate English literature program here.” I thought I had offered enough information but the faces of the students showed that they were not satisfied with my terse response. Some smiled with anxious excitement; others frowned with concern and anticipation. They expected me to say more, but I didn’t know what more to say and, if the truth be told, I didn’t want to say much about myself. Minimalism was the order of the day for me. I cleared my throat and continued. “I am just here to learn.” This time I thought I had finished. The professor thanked all who shared words about who they were and what they expected from the course and asked us to open our books to one of his favorite passages.

I didn’t have my copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in front of me as the others did; nor had I, in my introduction, talked about my expectations from the class. I reached for my briefcase that I carried as a book bag. It had fallen under the table. I didn’t want to be too distracting, but when I couldn’t feel the book immediately, I had to pull it from under the table, open it, and look through it. I thought I had put it in a place where I could readily grab it. Papers ruffled as I fingered through my briefcase, which I should have cleaned out but had not. I caught the lawyer’s eyes glaring at me with what I took to be annoyed frustration. And my own skepticism and prejudice kicked into high gear. Another barracuda from William and Mary, I thought. A barrister, maybe. Everything about her looked slightly British to me. I could hardly wait to hear her speak. I was making it difficult for her to hear what page number the class was being asked to turn to. I pulled my book from my briefcase and put it on the table. It was a paperback book whose cover showed bent corners, and the first few pages were permanently creased because of the way it had been stuffed into my case. The class apparently had no time to wait for me. They were already following along as the professor recited his favorite passage from the book. I was tempted to ask the young redheaded woman beside me what page we were on, but I decided that I had already been too disruptive for a few folk in the class. So I opted to simply lean forward and sneak a peek over her shoulder. They were on page thirty-three. As I turned to that page, I heard nothing the professor was saying. When I looked up at him, I saw that he was not reading but reciting this section of the book from memory. I started to listen and to squirm. I became very fidgety. I felt nervous, and unsettled.

I couldn’t believe how I was feeling and how my mind and body were reacting to hearing the forbidden word, nigger, by a white man. Well, I’d thought it was forbidden. As the professor recited Huck’s father Pap Finn’s drunken palaver with what I interpreted to be a joyful glee, I struggled with my feelings. It had been so long since I had heard a white person verbalize the word nigger without hesitation. But it was right there, embedded in the text the professor chose to recite. I cannot eradicate this haunting introductory recital from my mind. The professor lifted his tall, lanky body from the chair and began to speak from memory. The front of the class was his stage as his presence filled the room. It felt as though Mark Twain had risen from the dead as Professor Wilson burst forth in his booming mimetic voice:

“Call this a govment! Why, just look at it and see what its like . . .

“Oh yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful.” Why looky–here. There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat and there ain’t a man in that town that got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest and old gray-headed nabob in the state. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was home. Well that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country coming to? It was ‘lection’ day, and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I wasn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a state in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I say’s I’ll never vote agin. Thems the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may not for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it a govment, and yet’s got to set stock still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger and—”

When the professor finally finished his performance of Pap’s invidious diatribe, I thought to myself how clever Mark Twain had been in capturing Pap Finn’s spirit and the spirit of America towards Blacks. Even the most despicable, low-down, drunken white man could glory in his superiority to Blacks. Twain had been right about that. And not just an ordinary Black. He was not a slave, nor a farm hand. Not a janitor or jackleg preacher. Not a busboy or butler. Not even a gifted musician or a dancer. But an educated and distinguished professor. A man of letters like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Michel de Montaingne, Wole Soyinka, or Henry David Thoreau. Like Johann Von Goethe or Gustave Flaubert. Like Frederick Douglass or Langston Hughes. Smart and proud like W. E. B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. A free human being of letters. A scholar and an intellectual of high social and moral character. And yet, Huck’s father, Pap, felt and displayed a condescending attitude driven by patriarchy and white privilege. Pap Finn was a worthless, scabrous scamp who possibly didn’t know a noun from a verb or a subject from an object. And yet he felt that he was better than or superior to the most educated and accomplished Black intellectual. If Pap were superior to a free Black professor, then the Black man was indeed an animal. A nonbeing. A piece of wood. A nigger. The nerve of my professor. The gall of him, I thought to myself as he brought his raspy mimesis to a close. My mind was still trying to process what I was witnessing with my eyes and hearing with my own ears. The professor’s unmitigated gall was decorated by a verdant coat of sincerity mixed with indifference and admiration, a posture that would persist throughout the semester. This was only the beginning. He wanted every person in the class to memorize and recite a passage from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a final course requirement. Well, blow me down. I didn’t think I knew myself well enough to do it. And besides, I was too weak to satirize myself with words written by Mark Twain. On second thought I said to myself: What the hell, I have ten to twelve more weeks to think about it.

Imagine my feelings. I was in the cavernous pit. No, I felt that I was caught in the infernal flames of Dante’s hell. I was burning up with anxiety and anger. I felt like screaming, and yet I kept my composure. I was being torn apart because I, too, was a professor. I was acquainted with the psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But, I felt like my identity was being battered and blasted by the power of the words of my professor for this course, of Huck’s father Pap, and Mark Twain himself. They were searing and stinging because for the first time I heard the powerful sound of them. I learned that very day the ear is more revealing than the eye: the tone, the cadence, the emphasis, the volume, the precision of language. For a moment, I could hardly breathe. I was choked by the sound. Hearing the word nigger was biting. Stifling. It drained my body of all energy. Reason had been cut off at the root. I needed some water, but I was afraid that water would make me vomit. I was having an allergic reaction to the sound of the word. To see the word on the page or to read it silently is not the same as hearing it recited out loud. Aloud the forbidden word was stultifying and suffocating. I could tell that the professor had spent years practicing reciting this particular pericope from the Holy Bible of English literature— Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No exegesis was needed for me to interpret this event. I thought of Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher whom I had studied. The dialectic between event and meaning was crystal clear to me now. It was painful enough to read the words on a page, but to hear them recited was more than I had bargained for. In the short paragraph that Professor Wilson would recite, the word nigger was used six times. Elongated. Emphatic. Enunciated in Southern intellectual style. Did I hear indifference and disinterest, or was it enmity and venomous hatred not muzzled by tepid respect, but boldly and limpidly stated and sanctioned by the “gov’ment.” And, I admit it’s a bit irrational, but no amount of whisky could obfuscate that fact. Pap knew exactly what he was saying and who he spoke for—even in his drunkenness. At least that’s the way I felt. I was convinced. In my emotional view, the class professor, Pap, and Mark Twain himself were all complicit in the use of the forbidden word. Believe it or not, I felt as if I was being lynched in a public square. I was being castrated by the cascading sound and the mocking tone of each syllable. Nig-ger. And yet, I knew that Mark Twain had produced a classic and wise meditation on race here. It occurred to me that he was a contrary old nabob!

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.