‘Huck Finn’ a masterpiece — or an insult

Re:Huck Finn

read and discuss Randall Kennedy’s book “Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

Hope I can find a copy of that sometime. I have come to the tentative conclusion that the word nigger was used originally, in the 18th century, to denote civil status. You had: Mister, Master, Missus, Miss, Nigger; where nigger meant either slave or “property of” depending on whether you called him by his first name or last name. You can see this in action, somewhat, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When a slave changed hands he went from being Nigger Jones to Nigger Smith. Alas, I have no way of determining how much the use of the word had changed by the mid-19th century, and once Lincoln signed the emanicpation proclamation, the word became null and void as a measure of civil status. However, I surmise the word was still being used to differentiate between the slave Jim and Jim the free dude and blacksmith. If that surmise holds true, then after the uncivil war when the Klan started riding, the term would have been used solely as an expression of hatemongering, rather than from being a holdover from a rapidly dieing culture.

In answer to the question

‘Huck Finn’ a masterpiece — or an insult

The only honest answer is: both.

Most people have no ability to understand how something can be two things at once. Much art is pornographic. Much pornography is artistic. But there is no room in the minds of those who keep them small to encompass that idea. For two dimensional thinkers — those who don’t really think but merely rearrange their prejudices — everything is either black/white, on/off, yes/no, either/or. In such binary thinking there is no room for “maybe” or “yes, but”. Huck Finn cannot possibly be artistic to those people, only offensive. There is no denying the emotional impact of the word nigger. Along with fuck and shit it vies for top honour as the most vile and reviled word in the English language. But the word itself is not responsible for our reactions to it. Only we can be responsible for ourselves.

Toni Morrison* once wrote an anecdote about studying Huck Finn when she was in high school. It offended her to no end. She wrote that every time the word came up in the text while the class was reading aloud, her classmates would look at her to see how she took it and some would snicker. It was about three decades before the humiliation she felt from that time evolved into a towering rage at the injustice of a so called free society still holding onto such a backward sociological phenomenon as racism. Today, she attacks that injustice instead of attacking the word.

*Pulitzer prize winner and Nobel Laureate