Chapter One
The Trespassers
I
On September 4, 1957, National Guard troops ringed Little Rock's Central High School, which had been ordered to desegregate. They had been called up by the governor, who predicted, or promised, that "blood would run in the streets" if black children tried to enter. When eight of the children arrived, accompanied by two black and two white clergymen, they were confronted by the troops and a howling mob of men and women. The children were pushed and shoved, then informed by a National Guard captain that on orders of the governor they would not be allowed to enter. Escorted by the president of the State Conference of NAACP branches, a black woman, the children proceeded to the offices of the United States Attorney and the FBI.
A ninth child had not been informed that the students were to come as a group. When she arrived alone, there were shouts from the mob, which now numbered about five hundred: "They're here! The niggers are coming!" "Get her! Lynch her!" The student tried several times to pass through the troops; on her last try, she was stopped with bayonets. The mob yelled, "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school." With the troops standing by impassively, someone screamed, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree." A white-haired woman fought her way through the mob, shouting: "Leave this child alone! Why are you tormenting her? Six months from now you will hang your heads in shame." The mob hollered, "Another nigger-lover. Get out of here!"
The woman, a professor at a Little Rock college, stayed with the child until she could get her away on a bus. Joining with her to protect the child during the wait was the New York Times education editor, who was threatened as a "dirty New York Jew." In the next weeks, there were attacks on black men and women and on their homes, as well as assaults on black and white journalists. Finally, confronted with the Little Rock black community, which refused to surrender to the authorities or the mob, and also challenged by national and world opinion, the president acted to enforce the desegregation order; he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and directed the secretary of defense to send in regular troops as needed.
The incident at Little Rock had myriad consequences, explicit and tacit. One of the latter appears to be an action taken by the New York Board of Education. Just eight days after the confrontation at Central High, the New York Times reported, in a front-page story, that the board had "quietly dropped" Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from approved textbook lists for elementary and junior high schools. The novel, the Times also related, could still be purchased for school libraries and used as a textbook in high schools. The story linked the board's action to objections from the NAACP. The NAACP denied having protested to the board, but acknowledged that it "strongly objected to the `racial slurs' and `belittling racial designations' in Mark Twain's works."
Although there is no evidence that the NAACP protested directly to the board, objections from one or another source certainly reached the board. But the official in charge of curriculum development stated that no objections had come to her attention. She said the novel had been taken off the approved textbook list because, as the Times put it, it was "not really a textbook." In giving this explanation, which was notable only for its surrealism (a book approved as a textbook was removed for not being a textbook), New York City school officials apparently believed they had converted a controversial move into an administrative correction, and so could escape responsibility for their own action.
That there was little resemblance between an official story and the truth is hardly news, but the extreme ineptitude revealed in this story raises questions. Why was the board of education so utterly unprepared to offer even a remotely credible, let alone factual, explanation for its action on Huck Finn? One answer seems to be that school officials had been readied for the wrong battle, that is, for a skirmish essentially won by the time Huck Finn became required reading.
II
"Once we understand how they arose, we no longer see literary canons as objets trouvs washed up on the beach of history," observes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The point is aptly illustrated by Huckleberry Finn's journey into the schools' literary canon. The journey, which spanned more than two decades, began with a study whose stated aim was to determine "the most effective ways of utilizing" the novel in junior high schools. The study was followed, in 1931, by an edition published especially for junior high schools. In the introduction, the editors-speaking with the quaintness then deemed appropriate for addressing children-wrote: "In those early days Huck had but one friend who dared openly to seek his company, ... Tom Sawyer. But today how different! ... Then the parents tabooed Huck as a companion for their sons, but today the most respected of mothers open their doors to welcome in this wanderer."
Since these lines descend from a supposedly more innocent time, it might seem they really were intended for children. But not only is it quite illogical to expect that children would be delighted by Huck's newfound respectability, it also seems odd to contrast the novel's respectability in the eyes of real parents with Huck's lack of it with fictional ones. Clearly, when the editors spoke of Huck's ostracism in his "early days," they had in mind not Huck's status in Tom Sawyer, but Huck Finn's expulsion from the Concord Public Library in 1885 as the "veriest trash," "rough, coarse, and inelegant," unfit for "our pure-minded lads and lasses," and the copycat expulsions that followed.
The editors were Emily Fanning Barry, an English teacher at Teachers College, and Herbert B. Bruner, who headed its Curriculum Construction Laboratory. Under the aegis of the publisher, Harper & Brothers, they conducted the study, which involved "thousands" of reports obtained from an unspecified number of teachers and pupils. The editors describe the student participants according to class, nationality, and location. Since they do not mention race, it is quite safe to assume "children" meant "white children."
That this study undoubtedly included white children only does not mean the editors consciously sought to exclude black children. Their apparent absence from the study simply mirrored the exclusion of blacks from vast areas of American life. And even if the editors had been amazingly ahead of their time and wondered how black children might feel about Huck Finn, there would have been no reason to pursue the daring thought. Certainly it would have had no value for the publisher, given that black schools were likely to receive books handed down from white ones.
While the study, the classroom edition, and growing support from educators laid the groundwork for Huck Finn to become required reading, something more was needed to bring the effort to fruition. This arrived in the form of essays by Lionel Trilling (1948) and T. S. Eliot (1950) that provided the novel with the "academic respectability and clout" that assured its entry into the nation's classrooms, points out Peaches Henry. Trilling, who launched what Jonathan Arac calls the "hypercanonization" of Huck Finn, spoke of it as "one of the world's great books and one of the central documents of American culture." Eliot termed it a "masterpiece." Both, however, were concerned with defending it against the by now largely anachronistic morality charge. Eliot made the point fairly subtly by stating he had not read the book as a boy because his parents considered it unsuitable, while he also spoke of things in it that would delight boys. The matter is, though, handled quite explicitly by Trilling, who remarks that Huck is "really a very respectable person."
Trilling also explicitly defended the novel against the "subversion of morality" charge. Huck Finn, he wrote, is "indeed a subversive book-no one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck's great moral crisis will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question" the "assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives," nor see any distinction between the supposed "dictates of moral reason" and the "engrained customary beliefs of his time and place." In Trilling's essay, engrained customary beliefs did not include whites' attitudes toward blacks; perfunctory in his approach to slavery, he was oblivious of its legacy.
As for the educators who advocated Huck Finn for the classroom, they surely believed they were taking a bold step to replace vapid children's books with a novel of many wonders. The wonders of the river. The wonder of a fictional boy whose voice "strikes the ear with the freshness of a real boy talking out loud." A boy who is not merely a "bad boy" in the old, conventional sense, but one who can beat the grownups at their own dangerous games. So there seemed to be something in Huck Finn for every child. But there were also things the decision makers had not noticed. Nor did they seem to notice that, as time went on, racial matters had entered a state of acute flux, while their decision-making process had remained static, that is, monoracial.
The effort to establish Huck Finn as required reading, launched at a time of de jure segregation, culminated when this form of segregation had suffered a major blow. The novel's "entrenchment in the English curricula of junior and senior high schools coincided" with the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Thus "desegregation and the civil rights movement deposited Huck in the midst of American literature classes which were no longer composed of white children only, but now were dotted with black youngsters as well," notes Henry. These youngsters, whose opinions of the novel had previously evoked zero interest, would soon become Huck Finn's "most persistent and formidable foe."
III
The day after it reported the New York Board of Education's action on Huckleberry Finn, the Times ran an editorial, "Huck Finn's Friend Jim." It described the novel as "one of the deadliest satires" ever written on "some of the nonsense that goes on with the inequality of races." Although the black character is introduced as "`Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim,'" that "was the Missouri vernacular of that day." Moreover, Jim is a "warm human being, lovable and admirable," whose goodness causes Huck to tear up his letter telling Jim's owner where to find her runaway slave. By contrast, the "swindlers, members of mobs and feudists" are white. "One might go so far as to say that Huckleberry Finn is not fair to white people. It should, nevertheless, be available for use in New York schools." The editorial added: "One is not so certain about the Central High School of Little Rock, Ark."
The Times did not explain why it cast doubt on Central High as a place for Huck Finn; evidently it considered the point so obvious that no explanation was needed. In retrospect, though, the meaning seems clouded. Was the editorial saying that "one of the deadliest satires" ever written on the "nonsense that goes on with the inequality of races" had no place in a Little Rock school? One doubts that was the intent. Nor does it seem likely that the editors were actually concerned about Twain's presumably unfair treatment of whites; on the other hand, they surely realized there might be a different reaction in Arkansas, which is home to some of Huck Finn's most disreputable and violent characters. In any case, perhaps the editors simply meant to imply that it would be impossible to teach Huck Finn at Central High during the eruption, given that the epithet used in the book was also being shouted just outside the classrooms.
Other aspects of the editorial also raise questions. Was it accurate to suggest, as it seems to do, an unequivocal distinction between Little Rock and New York? After all, the epithet that the editors describe as the "Missouri vernacular of that day" was also current, not only in Little Rock but, albeit unsanctioned, nationally. And what exactly was meant by "vernacular"? If "nigger" had been no more than an idiomatic expression in the slaveholding states, at what point did it acquire its contemporary meaning? And why were the editors so certain Mark Twain considered the epithet a mere colloquialism?
In any event, the assertion that the use of "nigger" in Huck Finn was merely the vernacular of that time appears to have been an after-the-fact justification. Before desegregation, when white teachers taught the novel exclusively to white students, school officials displayed no curiosity over the students' seeming lack of difficulty with the epithet. But what did the white children really make of it? Had their parents explained it was the rawest, most debasing word in the language? Told them it was a word nice people didn't use? Or provided models for their children by using the epithet themselves? And the teachers? How did they respond to unseemly reactions from students? The public silence ended only when African-American children, having entered schools where they were not wanted, encountered the epithet in the classroom and protested-with predictable results.
"Why is it so obvious to so many authorities that [African-American parents' and students'] complaints cannot be taken seriously?" inquires Arac. Among those who dismiss their objections is a professor of English, Joan DelFattore, who, in 1992, pointed to Huckleberry Finn's "ignorant, hypocritical, and narrow-minded slaveowners" and asserted: "Realistically, what should students think such people would say? `Invite the African Americans to come in from the fields'?"
If "nigger" were used only by the novel's slaveowners, little comment would be needed. The word is, though, used by almost every character (including black ones), as well as by a narrator who long ago entered our national mythology. That Huck Finn is not a book in which the epithet is confined to characters the reader is meant to dislike is reflective of its complexity. The question, though, is not whether Twain should have dispensed with the epithet (he could not have written the novel without it), but whether its ubiquitous use can be justified by one or another historicist or literary defense (as antebellum vernacular, as a synonym for "slave," as Twain's irony).
Blacks have also been derided for their objections to Jim. In what literary historian Donald B. Gibson described in 1968 as a "characteristic" response, Edward Wagenknecht declared: "When Negroes object to Jim ... one can only regret that they are behaving as stupidly as white folks often do, for surely Jim is one of the noblest characters in American literature." This comment was made in 1961. More than a decade later, Andrew Solomon asserted: "Though often camouflaged by a minstrel-show exterior, Jim generally gleams through as a sublime creation, and those black readers who are repelled by Jim's external tendencies to stereotype might well ponder ... Wagenknecht's remark." And a decade after that, Laurence B. Holland spoke of those "skinned in white" in Concord who did not or do not "want their children to know about young Huck Finn," and contemporary "collegians skinned in black who do not see, created in the antics of the Negro Jim, the aspirations of a people and the stature of a man."
Thus, according to these and numerous other critics, the issue was not the black challenges to a black character but the challengers' inability to comprehend what was so obvious to the critics: that Jim is a representative black figure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black, White, and Huckleberry Finnby Elaine Mensh Harry Mensh Copyright © 1999 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
