By McAvoy Layne…With thanks to the Banned Book Club at St. Patrick’s, I was invited to speak on Huckleberry’s behalf, so I thought I’d like to pass my thoughts along to you, the gentle reader, while they’re fresh on my mind…
Olivia Clemens wanted her husband to become an American author, more than the sagebrush humorist he was when he was out here in the west. So she encouraged Samuel to use his humor like the wheel on an opera glass, to focus our attentions on more serious matters at hand. Thus, Olivia lifted Mark Twain from the grab-bag humor of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to the Socratic irony of Huckleberry Finn.
Nobody says anything bad about slavery in the book; it’s all done with glorious lies. So the reader must be aware of the social discourse to which the book is responding, the Jim Crow laws, the convict-lease system, sharecropping, and the terrible lynchings that invalidated Reconstruction of the South.
Of course, there is that word that sears the eye and makes today’s reader want to lay the book aside. That word appears more than 200 times, and has ten times the preemptive force today than it had in the 1880’s, especially when it falls from white lips like mine, so I never used it in the classroom. If you’re being hurt, you can’t learn. But, if you can get through that word, and understand it was a kinder word than the word slave back then, well, you will find Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be a strong indictment against prejudice, racism, and narrow-mindedness.
Olivia edited out some objectionable characterizations of Sam’s, including Huck’s description of Miss Watson: “You could not tell her front from her back if she had her head up a stove pipe.” Then, too, Olivia called Sam, “Youth,” which inspired him to write perhaps the most powerful sentence in American literature, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
Mark Twain speaks to us with an immediacy that transcends the ages, and his book about human relations remains a central document to nineteenth-century America. As Toni Morrison reminds us, “The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from the classroom extend Jim’s captivity into each generation of readers.”
In the end, we have Olivia to thank for pointing Sam in the direction of the solidarity of the human race. Olivia was the best thing that ever happened to Sam…
I can’t speak for the girls, but I think I know boys well enough to state unequivocally that banning Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only serves to make the boys want to go out and get it. Sam tells us about Huck, “As his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boy’s.”
So, just here, let us leave the last word to Mark Twain: “This is a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision, and conscience suffers defeat.”
Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO
— For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”