One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(28)

“Are you talking about the word ‘nigger’?” said the editor, setting out again to shove his opponent off-balance by this blunt acknowledgment of the word his guest apparently considered so dangerous.

“That is exactly the word I’m here to talk about!” said the teacher. “Good, you saved us some time. Now, again I bring this up because I really do love the book, and I see it as my personal obligation to preserve the intention of Twain’s spirit for future generations—”

“As do I—”

“And I’m not even asking you to take this word out!” pleaded the teacher. “It’s the number of times the word is used in the book that feels so wrong to me. Did you know that this epithet is used in Huckleberry Finn two hundred and nineteen times?”

“Let me—please,” said the editor, pushing himself up from his chair to pace the room, upset at himself for having briefly gotten his hopes up for a less predictable discussion. “Let me end this conversation right now. There are uncomfortable words in Huckleberry Finn—no doubt. But it is our job to make sense of that. There is a well-earned cultural expectation that this book is not just a story of a boy and a raft but also a work that serves—in the way that only fiction can—as a truthful record, or at least a deeply truthful perspective, of the America of its time.”

“Yes, but times have changed—”

“Times always change! Our job is to make sense of this book in our own time. To try to wrestle with and understand the shades and meanings of its contrarianism, its ironies and ambiguities, its moral agenda and its amoral playfulness. For whatever reason they are there, the specific words of the text are inextricable from the spirit of the book, and my job,” announced the editor, surprised and a little moved to hear his purpose in life described in these terms, even by himself, “is to protect the spirit of Mark Twain. And so, while I am sorry that the word we are debating is such a tragic and loathsome and uncomfortable one, I refuse to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn that takes the word out or even uses it any less.”

“Oh, I don’t want you to use the word ‘nigger’ less,” said the teacher. “I want you to use it more!”


“At this point—and you said it quite nicely yourself, in fact—there is a quote ‘well-earned cultural expectation’ surrounding Huckleberry Finn,” said the teacher, now beginning to pace the room himself.

“And because of this, leaving the present number of the word’s appearances alone risks dooming the book to permanent irrelevance! Let me tell you why. In the case of Huckleberry Finn, the controversy so precedes the material itself that students are now delivered a book that is preloaded with two notions: on the one hand, it’s the most controversial book they’ll ever read in school—but on the other hand, it may well be our nation’s greatest masterpiece. These dual preconceptions have become so inextricably linked in the public’s mind that at this point to diminish one is to diminish the other. And the controversy over this word has escalated each year for as long as we’ve been alive—yet the number of times this word appears has not kept pace with the controversy! Therefore—to use a nautical metaphor we might both agree Sam Clemens would have smiled upon—the wake of expectations left by those who have rocked the boat has left us no choice but to add the word ‘nigger’ at least once or twice to every page.

“And imagine how that will improve the book! White students, African American students, foreign students new to this country—when they’re handed this book, they’re all expecting something explosive, something controversial, something they’ll want to talk about long into the night afterward, not because they are told to do so by a teacher, but because they need to, because their heart beats quicker or slower depending on whether or not their friends agree with what they think. That’s the impact of the book that stays with you, isn’t it? It was Twain, after all, who said something to the effect of ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education.’ Yes?”

Yes, the editor indicated, nodding without moving his head.

“Well! I would contend that nothing would make the reading of this great book feel less like schooling and more like a damn education than for students to discover the most charged word of our lifetime plastered all over the pages of the book they are handed in a classroom, to a degree that shocks even—no, especially!—the teachers who have handed the book out! Take a moment and imagine that! And in plenty of cases, there may be honest and enlightened teachers who have already confessed to having been not particularly offended the first time they read the book. Can you imagine their shock and shame at then finding a book absolutely packed to the margins with our most explosive and controversial epithet—page after page after page? Can you imagine the looks on those teachers’ faces—these teachers who had just moments earlier confessed to them that as they remembered it, the use of this word in this book wasn’t that big a deal? And, of course, the students will sense their teachers are off-balance—as students always have the uncanny ability to do—and will instinctively take that as their cue to lead the conversation—a conversation which rightfully belongs to them, wouldn’t you say?”

Each man stared at the other, trying to figure out to whom he was talking.

“I’m simply trying to protect the legacy of Mark Twain,” said the editor, scratching his face where a mustache would be.