It is a curious thing when you are disappointed by folks with whom you share basic beliefs; it is more distressing in some ways than the vitriol of out and out White supremacists.
Recently, I've been listening to "Huckleberry Finn" as a book on disc, read by the incomparable Eric Dove, who can shift between Huck and Jim and other characters with fluidity and seamlessness. I first read Huck Finn at age 11, in the hammock on the shoreline of our rented cabin at Lake Winnipesaukee, and all I remember about that experience was the intense sense of loss when I read the last sentence and realized there was no more Huck Finn to read. I must have re-read it at some point, but so long ago I cannot remember. So this is, in a way, a new reading for me.
I had forgotten how early and how often Huck struggles with his conflict between loyalty to Jim and loyalty to the Southern "morality" which embraced slavery as a good and necessary institution.
Huck, of course, is an outcast, the son of a drunk who abuses and uses him, and Huck lives under the care of an aunt, who owns the slave Jim. But Huck perceives he is not really of the polite society around him, and he knows that fitting into that society will always come hard.
He tells the tale, first person, constantly trying to make sense of the righteous ways of Southern society, which he finds perplexing, because, of course, that society is fundamentally corrupted by the peculiar institution.
He is the boy viewing the Emperor without clothes, the peasant who looks at the world controlled by powers he cannot fully understand, trying to make sense of a world which makes no sense, and it's a wonderful device for exposing the hypocrisies and cruelties of the reigning society.
While there are plenty of themes running through the narrative, as Huck ponders the inanities of organized religion, and the workings of aristocracy and royalty, the major theme, the most basic conflict, is Huck's struggle with the morality of slavery and his growing love of the best, most sympathetic and moral person in the book, the slave Jim.
Huck's conflicts begin early in the book, and resurface frequently, as he knows he is aiding and abetting Jim's flight to freedom, and he has absorbed enough of Southern mores to know that he is doing wrong to Jim's owner, who could sell him for $800, and to the owner of Jim's children, who Jim hopes to free either by purchasing their freedom or enlisting abolitionists to help him. These intentions horrify Huck, as he has internalized the idea that Jim is valuable property and Jim belongs to his White owners.
But Jim clearly loves Huck and is rendered distraught and miserable the several times he thinks Huck has been drowned or killed.
Driving along in my car, listening to the scene where Huck returns to the raft after being swept overboard, to find Jim, asleep at the tiller, I saw Jim awaken, overjoyed to find Huck alive and on board, and I was shocked when Huck proceeds to play a Tom Sawerish trick on Jim, claiming he was never washed overboard and insisting Jim must have been dreaming and insinuating Jim was too stupid to even know what had really happened, but eventually, Jim sees the wreckage of the storm which washed Huck overboard and he asks Huck why he would be so cruel to try to convince Jim his mind was soft--Huck was "gaslighting" Jim--and I was totally with Jim.
Jim is hurt and confused by Huck's attempt to manipulate him, and he says so, and it's a stunning moment.
That was a stinking cruel thing to do and Huck, for the first time in his life feels genuinely ashamed and contrite. It's a powerful scene and it cements the idea that slave or not, Jim is not only a human being, but a very fine human being who knows right from wrong and who knows what dignity means.
And, in the 31st chapter, after some fits and starts in which Huck sets off to betray Jim, but then cannot go through with it, Huck tells us he knows he will go to Hell, and he knows he deserves to go to the everlasting fires because he has decided to help Jim to freedom, which Huck "knows" is the wrong thing to do. But, Huck, along with the reader, cannot do anything but love Jim.
Christopher Hitchens once remarked that only the religious can do something really despicable--like flying an airplane into a tower or blowing up children with a bomb--because if you did not have religion telling you to do it, you would know it's wrong. This is the lesson Huck learns.
No more powerful dismemberment of the rationale for slavery has ever been accomplished by any writer, not by Harriet Beecher Stowe, nor Thaddeus Stevens nor even Lincoln, because we have got to know Jim personally and we know Huck will ultimately have to choose Jim.
Against all that, parents in several school districts, in liberal California, have taken action to expunge Huckleberry Finn from school libraries and classrooms because they object to the use of the word "Nigger" which they call "the N word."
There is so much wrong with this, it is hard to know where to begin.
Do these parents really think their delicate children will be somehow permanently stained, traumatized and irreparably harmed by learning that Negroes, Blacks, African Americans were once (and still are) called "Niggers?"
One can only imagine how these parents would react to Randy Newman's song, "Rednecks," another satirical demolition of Southern bigotry and Northern racism, which uses the refrain, "We're keeping the Niggers down."
What sort of society, or subculture, do we have when there are words so heinous they cannot even be mentioned--like those Orthodox Jews who cannot say the word "Yahweh" the name for God because it is too holy for human lips? Who is foolish enough to not see that to expose the disease, you have to first look at it?
What bothers these parents, no doubt, is the fact that "Nigger" is used by a narrator who is not depicted as a loathsome person, and so it might be concluded that using that word does not fit their own world view that anyone who uses it is despicable and can have no attractive qualities.
But is that not exactly the point? Will children not encounter people who say "Nigger" or other racist things who appear to be otherwise normal or even attractive people and is it not important that children can learn to see that certain words or sentiments can alert you to the other side of people you thought were your friends?
And what do those parents think will happen to their delicate children when they hear the word "Nigger" in the locker rooms, the cafeterias or the hallways at school?
No comments:
Post a Comment