by Maureen Thomas

Created on: June 21, 2009   Last Updated: June 23, 2009

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the most banned books in America. Mark Twain would be the first to appreciate the irony. The book has been banned by the element of society that he was satirizing: those who wish to sanitize and protect us from real truth, practicality, and individualism. Twain would certainly have had a laugh at the inanity of banning a book because it uses racial epithets to illuminate the injustice of slavery.

Admittedly, the novel is a difficult one. I experienced a certain level of resistance before I really understood it. However, being forced to teach it to tenth graders required my own analysis and understanding of the book. I had never read it as a student. Now I not only had to read it, I had to really help others understand its brilliance.

And brilliant it is. The protagonist, Huck, is ignorant, dirty, son of the town drunk. Yet he is a clever everyman who, through his odyssey down the Mississippi, encounters pilgrims from all walks of life, and discovers the true meaning of injustice and hypocrisy. His companion Jim, a black man and runaway slave, while unschooled and superstitious, proves to be innately wise to the foibles of mankind and, more importantly, becomes Huck's one true friend.

The watershed moment in the novel is when Huck, faced with the choice of giving Jim up to the slave hunters, decides to "be damned" and do the "wrong" thing, according to society, which is aid Jim in obtaining his freedom permanently. Huck's personal growth, from perceiving Jim as chattel, to esteeming him as a brother, is a leap that many of the "good" people of the novel never can make. And while admittedly, seeing the "N" word over and over is disturbing, it is the unfortunate vernacular of the times. Sanitizing it would lessen the authenticity of Twain's voice. I do not believe that Twain wants the reader to ride the river of political correctness, but to experience the harsh reality of the time and the dehumanization of people due to their race. This give's Huck's epiphany more impact. If an ignorant, barely literate product of the Antebellum South could wake up to the inhumanity around him, doesn't that speak to Twain's message to the rest of us? This message is more important than the shock of seeing the "N" word in print. It is my belief that the "Aunt Polly's" of the world, those morally superior beings who seek to protect us from ourselves, have attempted to ban the book without fully understanding it. They are the very ones that we, like Huck and Jim, need to paddle away from as fast as possible.

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