And as a reader who loves the blues—but I’m getting ahead of my story. Trouble comes first: aspects of the novel to wonder about as we wander through the book, to resist.

The first problem is one I have mentioned already: the book’s constant use of the word “nigger.” Not as student now but as teacher, I find this offense to be glaring: What would I do about the use of the word in my classroom? What is there to tell eighth-grade readers and their parents and teachers—the first wave of those confronting the novel as a classroom exercise? I hate censorship, and would not remove the book from any library shelf or curriculum, even at the middle-school level; nor would I recommend deleting or translating the word in expurgated editions just for kids. To readers young and old, I would point out that “nigger” was used as part of casual everyday speech by whites and blacks in the South and also in the West and the East and the North. Sometimes it was willfully hurled as an assault weapon, sometimes as mere thoughtless prattle (and, of course, ignorant assaults at times can hurt as much as any others); sometimes it was tossed off by whites with well-intentioned affection-cum-condescension; sometimes by whites who lived at the borders of black communities and who felt their proximity granted them the insiders’ privilege (always a precarious presumption) to use a term usually not tolerated from outsiders. For blacks, then and now, the word has been used within the group, just as anti-Semitic terms are used by Jews themselves, in part as a strategy to disarm the enemy. Within the black circle, “nigger” could invoke bravado and/or camaraderie and/or even flirtation: to be called a “pretty nigger” in the black Washington, D.C., of my youth could be the sweetest of compliments. (Though in the jujitsu world of black language that term could be reversed into one of disdain: “pretty nigger” as weak, absurd peacock.)

But my point is that in Twain’s world of the 1870s and 1880s (when he was writing Huckleberry Finn), in the world of the novel itself—roughly the 1840s—and, crucial to note, in our own precarious world, the word “nigger” is and was, among these other things, a word of deepest racial hatred, a willful assault. In class discussions of the novel and in writing about it, let the students use the term warily, in quotation marks, in recognition that somebody in the class could take it as a deeply hurtful act of indifference, ignorance, or outright viciousness; and that at the next turn of the screw a nasty racial term may be hurled back at the hurler! For my part, as I teach the book this year at Columbia University, I will be ready with materials on the word’s history, in literary and cultural arenas beyond literature. Two important sources will be Jonathan Arac’s book, along with Randall Kennedy’s study Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Wordd—in which, among other things, Kennedy lists dozens of court cases in which a black defendant in an assault or murder case has claimed as a defense that the white victim of an attack had started the fight by spitting out this one nasty word.

In defense of Twain’s language, I would remind readers that we are getting Twain’s creation of Huck’s tale in Huck’s voice, and that, as many have argued, we should read Huck’s uses of “nigger” not only as evidence of authentic historical talk, however unpleasant, but as Twain’s relentless, well-turned irony. (With “irony” referring to an aside that is understood by reader and writer, and perhaps at times by a particularly knowing character like Huck, but not by most of a work’s characters.) One central irony here is that even a boy who strikes us as pure in heart and thoroughly genuine in his love for Jim uses the term in sentence after sentence—that’s how deeply ingrained the language of American racism was (and, sadly, is). In one of the novel’s most unforgettable scenes, Twain’s irony is most effectively pointed. In chapter 32, Huck, masquerading as Tom Sawyer, pretends to have just arrived on a riverboat that was delayed by an explosion on board. Aunt Sally asks, “Anybody hurt?” “No‘m,” is Huck’s quick reply. “Killed a nigger.” “Well, it’s lucky;” said Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt” (p. 201). Even motherly Aunt Sally, who seems well-meaning enough, is at home not only with this term “nigger” but also with the news of the death of an African American, who in her language is neither a human being nor worth a sigh of remorse. Further, Huck’s use of “nigger” in this instance adds detail to his cleverly turned lie, and asserts a sense of (white) community with Aunt Sally to hide his real intention of freeing Jim. As Huck suspected, Sally and family have bought Jim and kept him hidden as part of their own plan to sell him down the river. Behind what at first seems like her wonderful good manners lurks the monster of race hatred, unabashed.

Clearly, if in this scene we change the racial designation to “Negro” or “negro” (the more common nineteenth-century usage), we would lose the violence of the word “nigger”; but it is also true that with the emendation we would sacrifice the deepest, most slashing irony that Twain turns against the word and the world of prejudice underlying it.

The second problem I want to raise also involves race—the portrayal of Jim. Here a whole book-length essay could follow. But for this space my central complaint is that in this realistic novel, Jim is just not real enough, not true enough either to historical type or to human dimensions that transcend historical type. I’ll start by observing that the greatest critic of his era on this question of African-American portraiture, Sterling A. Brown, disagrees with me on this point, and in fact has strongly commended Twain’s portrait of Jim. Like Huck and Tom, writes Brown, Jim is “drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Running away from old Miss Watson who... ‘pecks on’ him all the time, treats him ’pooty rough’ and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi.”e Brown finds Jim’s humor rich, not the stuff of minstrel buffoonery alone: “His talk enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s ‘Yes—en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’ ” (p.