Oops -- looks like August Wilson used the "n" word, and is being censored too !

Today's New York Times reports (C3, Weekend Arts Section)
that the school superintendent in Waterbury, Conn (who is black) "is seeking to shut down a production" of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" because the teenage actors would have to "utter the word 'nigger' as called for in the script."

The school "explored substituting another word" but "the rights holders of the play would not allow alterations."

Well -- good for them!
"Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is one of the best of Wilson's many great plays.

Personally, when it comes to such alterations -- I'm agin' 'em.

I think the question comes down to this: how much do we all have to stoop to accommodate the lowest common denominator ?
I mean, as that great American hero Forest Gump once said, "Stupid is as stupid does".

If a person can't take the heat, let them just get out of the kitchen and let the rest of us maybe learn something, maybe stretch our minds a bit, maybe accept the challenge a piece of art is putting in front of us ...

My daughters (half white, half Asian, if it matters) saw the characterization of Jim at the end of Huckleberry Finn as a very sad statement--completely missed by Huck and Tom, mind you--of Jim's continuing need to appear harmlessly buffoonish. Technically, Jim's not a slave, but when he returns to "sivilization" his freedom remains severely limited in ways that Huck and Tom can't comprehend; and their well-meaning lack of comprehension could easily get him into trouble, just as the white boy's ignorance very nearly gets the black friend and protector killed in Tony Earley's Jim the Boy (another of our family read-alouds). Twain's Jim simply doesn't have the luxury of abandoning his lifelong survival mechanism, in a society in which he might be lynched for a simple misunderstanding. Sadly, whatever vulnerabilities he shared with Huck on the river have to be left on the river. And Huck isn't sophisticated enough to recognize what's been lost.

Actually, my girls are far more troubled by the Gungan character Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars movies (Episodes I-III) and the Clone Wars cartoon television show. They condemn his portrayal as racist because Jar Jar is given a vaguely Haitian-like accent. If there is something that can be tripped over, Jar Jar will trip over it. Comic mayhem ensues wherever he goes. And yet, no matter how badly Jar Jar jeopardizes the health and safety of those around him (and occasionally the fate of a planet or two), not one of the other characters onscreen ever shows the slightest annoyance or impatience with him. This unwavering tolerance of Senator (yes, Senator) Binks suggests universal agreement to turn a blind eye to any blatant displays of ineptness and poor judgment on his part.

That would be stomach-turning enough, but it gets worse. No one ever suggests that Jar Jar's particular skill set (or lack thereof) is NOT a good match for the job at hand. Everyone continues to entrust him with important and delicate missions, as if they don't want to discriminate against incompetence. It's hard to miss the implication that he's only on the team because he's filling some sort of racial quota for universe saviors, since he obviously didn't win the job on merit alone. Given the faux-Caribbean accent, one suspects that under Jar Jar's greenish-tan skin, he's really black, at least in the eyes of the show's creators...which isn't far from suggesting that this doofus has so many shortcomings because he's really black.

But I digress. Thanks for an interesting and very "sivilized" discussion, everyone. Lots of food for thought.

I'm really shocked at August Wilson. Does he have absolutely no appreciation of black history or any sense of the power of words? Thank God we have school boards.

Odd. The children arrested and locked up for drug possession for instance, are disproportionately black; the chances of a white adult male being locked up in DC is 626 to 1, while the chances of a black adult male being locked up in DC is 13 to 1; and yet we as a country are in a tizzy about the 'N' word in Huckleberry Finn.

Ed

Where on earth would you be with Ronald Firbank's novel, still freely available here at least, called 'Prancing Nigger'? It isn't very good, in my opinion. And there's Joseph Conrad's 'The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'' which IS a good book.

Ed,

Thanks for this. It's far more eloquent than anything I've said on the subject. If we lived in a world where educated white people got as worked up over this as they do about some 150 year old text, I have a feeling we'd all be better off.

Who are we, anyway?

Thanks,

Bill

The Daily Show summarizes my position:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tu...in-controversy

Hmm . . . I wonder. Does Huck know "for sure" that he's going to go to hell? Just what does "going to hell" mean to him, anyway? How much real textual support is there for viewing his declaration as the conscious--and momentous--moral decision that the book's defenders make it out to be?

For example, what evidence is there that Huck believes (and takes seriously) the doctrine of eternal perdition of souls? Remember, in Chapter 1, when Miss Watson tells him "all about the bad place" and "all about the good place" he glibly chooses the former. (Miss Watson won't be there, and Tom Sawyer will.) Granted that there may be a certain amount of adolescent flippancy at work in that reaction, what evidence is there in the rest of the book up to Chapter 31 (where the "I'll GO to Hell" declaration appears) that his understanding of the matter has become any deeper?

And what evidence is there that Huck is any way troubled by his decision--to "go to hell," that is--once he has made it? After all, it's a fine and noble thing to say you'd go to hell to help a friend . . . but hell is hell, right? Everlasting fire. Does Huck show any consciousness that he has turned his back on God and committed himself to an eternity of torture and punishment?

For that matter, does Huck even believe in God? True enough, in the very next chapter (32), we find him "trusting to Providence to put the right words in [his] mouth" as he approaches the Phelps's farm. Indeed he uses the word--"Providence"--three times in close succession in the scene. But then, of course, he's just committed himself to going to hell . . . what is he doing trusting to Providence? (Or is "Providence" indeed not synonymous with "God" here? The latter word, incidentally, appears only twice in the book, once from Jim and once from Aunt Sally; the words "Jesus" and "Christ" do not appear at all. Here, check for yourself: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76/pg76.txt.)

We do know from Chapter 3 that Huck has tried prayer--though it turns out he doesn't think much of its usefulness (no fishhooks!), nor for the altruistic "spiritual gifts" that are its supposed true reward. And there's some fun about "King Sollermun" in Chapter 15; and in Chapter 19, Jim and Huck lie on the raft looking up at the stars "discuss[ing] about whether they was made or only just happened." Oh, and yes, there's a bit in Chapter 18 about going to church with the Grangerfords one Sunday, and how "It was pretty ornery preaching--all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness . . . and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't know what all[.]" But what evidence is there that Huck has genuinely internalized the doctrines and values of literalist Christianity to the extent that the concept of Hell-as-eternal-punishment is meaningful to him, and present to his conscience/consciousness as a live possibility? To what extent, if any, is this understanding (assuming that it exists) manifest in his actions prior to Chapter 31? How about after?

Yes, of course, one could argue that Huck functions at a different level of belief: he is a naïve son of the soil, a mixture of superstition and preliterate folkways and shrewd common sense, with just a sprinkling of Biblical (that is, Bookical) culture tossed in here and there, not always well digested. So his beliefs are not articulate, perhaps, but that does not of itself mean they're not sincerely felt.

But so what? The question is not whether he might see "Hell" as some kind of unpleasant possibility; it is whether he understands that in committing himself to it, he is committing himself to an eternity of conscious agony. On the same night that Miss Watson tells him "all about the bad place" in Chapter 1, he accidentally kills a spider by knocking it into the candle . . . and of the two, he's clearly more worried about the latter (bad luck) than the former (eternal perdition). Has anything happened in the interim to show that his understanding of the matter has changed significantly?

Frankly--I'll anticipate the inevitable non-answers to my questions above--all this heroic "I'll GO to Hell" stuff is a crock. As a defense of Huck, and as a defense of the book, it simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Sure, it sounds good--it has a wonderful dramatic ring to it. But it rings hollow since there's no reason to believe that there's any genuine emotional truth to it--not, at least, of the kind that its proponents clearly want to invest in it. There is no crisis of beliefs; Huck does not lay his immortal soul on the line to save Jim; the great triumph of conscience over customary belief simply ain't what it's cracked up to be. Do not go to Hell; do not pass GO; do not collect $200.

Does that mean that there's nothing to Huck's decision at all? Of course not. But let's be clear about what's really at stake for him:That, I submit, is Huck Finn speaking. The stuff that follows--the stuff about Providence slapping him in the face, and how if only he'd gone to Sunday-school they'd've learnt'm that "people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire," and so on--all that is just so much Mark Twain laying it on with a trowel. It makes for good satire, perhaps, but as responsible, credible character development, it's a complete non starter.

Yes, Huck makes the right decision--a difficult decision, a brave decision. But to take Twain's satire of "Christian conscience" at face value here--to insist that Huck "knows for sure he's going to go to hell, but just won't turn in Jim anyway," or whatever--is to invest that decision with an exaggerated moral significance that it simply cannot bear. It is justified by neither the development of Huck Finn as character, nor that of Huck Finn as book. For the truth of the matter is that Huck was not willing to go to Hell for Jim--the ending of the book shows that clearly enough--and clearly, neither was Mark Twain (he's responsible for the whole dismal mess, after all). Not even close.

But then, clearly enough again, neither have we--collectively, all of us--been willing to do so. And that's fair enough: who wants to go to hell, even if it is for a good cause? My point is simply this: let's not pretend otherwise. Huck's declaration in Chapter 31 cannot save the book, and it cannot save us either.

.

I think he understands Hell as well as you do, Steve. How well do you understand it?

Even in the passages I quote in this thread, it is clear that Huck is thoroughly indoctrinated in the moral/legal notion that what he is doing is wrong. And when he writes the letter to rat out Jim, he feels a weight lift from his shoulders and a feeling of peace, virtue and goodness, before he decides to help Jim after all, at what was surely great personal risk and contrary to scruples and values that he felt very strongly about and which were difficult for him to overcome, but which he overcame only because of an essential goodness and loyalty in his character. We, the reader, know that he actually chose to act morally, and we chuckle at and are moved by the irony of his thinking otherwise. I think you can take Twain at his word when he tells us what Huck was thinking and the forces that were shaping his decisions.

It's hard to know what else you'd want or expect. To interrogate him about precisely what he understood by "Hell" under the circumstances seems to be both unfair and superfluous. Most of us feel we already understand enough to judge his courage and principles.