When I was in the fifth grade I read Huckleberry Finn. I was deeply influenced by the scene in the book where Huck considers the morality of helping a runaway slave. In pre-Civil War Missouri aiding and abetting a fugitive slave was considered a major crime.
Huck, however, was not all that worried about breaking the law. He was largely truant from school and lived a rather carefree life on the edge of civilization. His problem was that he had internalized his society’s views on slavery. If he helped his friend Jim, he would burn in Hell.
I can’t quote from the text exactly after all of these years, but Huck’s decision still resonates. He thinks about the consequences of aiding JIm and concludes, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
After all this time that still gives me goosebumps. You don’t follow the rules when the rules are wrong. I later learned about Gandhi’s struggle in India and read Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” and assigned Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” as class reading, but I had already internalized Huck’s message.
A professor of English at Auburn University recently produced a new edition of Huckleberry Finn that removes the term “nigger,” used in the book something like 200 times. He calls Jim “Slave Jim.” He’s changed “Injun” to Indian. He says teachers will more likely to assign his version of the book. I think he’s missing the point.
Tomorrow: The Republican House, evidently taking a lesson from the Auburn professor, censors the Constitution.
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