By Chip Minemyer
CNHI News Service

I have on my shelves a set of books by Mark Twain – a gift during my school years that remains among my most prized literary possessions.

While pages are worn and marked from use, not one word has been scratched out, not one syllable distorted.

That includes the words I found offensive or inappropriate – either then as a youth or now as a man.

Each time I confronted a reference that seemed wrong, I learned more about what was right.

I certainly understand the reasoning of some who would purge great works of literature of offensive content, the derogatory “N-word” at the top of the list.

Folks say removing such references from classics such as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn” make those books more palatable and more appropriate for use in our schools, especially for younger children.

A publishing company is set to release editions of those two books in which the N-words have been replaced with “slave” or “slaves.”

Already, elementary schools have access through various publishers to the works of Twain and others that have been abridged to remove such racial slurs, while striving to keep the story lines intact.

I sometimes see a double standard at work when we remove offensive materials from the books our kids read, knowing that many of them see and hear considerably more offensive material as soon as they exit the classroom and turn on their iPods.

There seem to be nearly as many N-words in popular hip-hop music as there are F-words, which is to say a lot of them.

My hope is that young people – of all races – will ultimately be so troubled by being inundated with racial slurs and overt vulgarity that they’ll prompt a shift in popular culture through their listening and spending habits.

That’s likely wishful thinking.

Such is the context of today’s pop culture.
The context of Twain’s novels was post-Civil War America – a time when racial harmony was considerably less than whatever levels we have managed to achieve since.

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was released in 1876, while Huck and his friend, the runaway slave Jim, took their raft down the Mississippi River in 1884.

Biographer Ron Powers said of the author in an interview with The Associated Press: “He was eager to please the public. But there were categories, like race, before which he was intrepid.”

Twain, Power said, stubbornly sought to portray the times as they were – or at least as he saw them.

And what of our times?

Are we taking steps to ignore history to protect our sensibilities?

Does doing so put us at risk of missing the lessons of our shared past?

I would hope that teachers, especially at the middle school and high school levels, will have their students read Twain – just as the books were written.

Indeed, those students should be forced to deal with the realities of the adventures of Huck Finn, Jim and the other characters.

By understanding the hurt that insensitive words and actions can cause, those kids will be less likely to feel intolerant or use such words in their own lives.

That’s certainly been my experience.

In arguing for the altering of “Huckleberry Finn,” Twain scholar Alan Gribben said:
“It’s such a shame that one word should be a barrier between a marvelous reading experience and a lot of readers.”

I would use the same argument for keeping such words in – and still making the books part of school curricula.

Powers calls the presence of the N-word in required reading “the ultimate teachable moment in American literature.”

So true.

Young people learn much more by confronting ugly truths than by being shielded from them.

Twain once said: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

But editors sometimes run the risk of removing exactly the “wrong” words that lead readers to better understand what it means to be right.

Chip Minemyer is the editor of The Tribune-Democrat in Johnstown, Pa. He can be reached at cminemyer@tribdem.com. CNHI News Service distributes his column.