Three Ways Removing the N-Word Will Screw Up 'Huck Finn'

A new edition of Mark Twain’s seminal Huckleberry Finn is going to be scrubbed clean of all 215 uses of "nigger." According to Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar who is leading the creation of the politically correct edition, "Race matters in these books. It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

This censorship is silly for a number of reasons, of course, but especially because the word that’s going to replace "nigger"—slave—simply won’t make sense a lot of the time. Here, a few instances:

1. Free blacks shouldn’t be called "free slaves," as it’s possible they were never slaves:

Pretty soon I went out on the road, trying to think what I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and asked him if he’d seen a strange slave dressed so and so… (page 292)

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2. When racists are trying to deride blacks, "slave" doesn’t mean the same thing as "nigger." Take for instance, this rant from Huck’s father:

They call that a govment that can’t sell a free slave till he’s been in the state six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and let’s on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to a set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a-hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free slave. (page 38)

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3. When Twain has black characters use "nigger" amidst the rest of their phonetic patois, it’s a literary device showing how they’ve internalized and adopted their own denigration. When black characters call themselves "slaves," it’s merely a statement of fact. This is Jim talking about starting a bank with an acquaintance:

You know that one-laigged slave dat b’longs to old Misto Bradish? Well, he sot up a bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar would git fo’ dollars mo’ at de en’ er de year. Well, all de slaves went in, but dey didn’t have much. I wuz de on’y one dat had much. (page 64)

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You would think a literary academic like Alan Gribben would have more respect for the complexity of words and not try to use "slave" as a one-size-fits-all remedy for fictional racism. To quote Twain himself, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."