Twain—Huck and Education

In the early 2000s, as if through some sort of telegraphic, telepathic consensus, English teachers around the United States—myself included—suddenly stopped teaching Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This had nothing to do with the quality of the novel—every single one of us knew that Ernest Hemingway, for example, once declared that “all American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” All of us—probably almost every single one—had read it when we were high school students. And still, we silently agreed to put down our cards and back away from the table. I taught Huck Finn until about the mid-2000s; then I stopped.

There were a lot of reasons for this; most of them were good. Huck Finn ranks fourteenth on PEN America’s list of banned books—sort of a perfect emblem of a text that outrages contenders from all quarters. It tells the story of a young kid, Huck, who tries to escape from the shackles of “sivilized” society by going out into the wilderness. He flees his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, by way of the Mississippi River; on his journey he reunites with, Jim, an escaped slave from the local plantation. Eventually, the two become friends, which spikes a crisis of conscience in poor Huck. Should he protect his friend and break the law and go to hell, or should he rat Jim out and return him to slavery, collect the social and monetary antebellum reward that is reserved for people who do the so-called right thing? The novel is at times deeply realistic and also sometimes cartoonish and satirical. It openly mocks the grand traditions of the south—slavery, states’ rights, and the hypocrisies that underwrite them—but it is also wide-open in its portrayals of racism. Huck uses the word “n****r” 219 in the novel, probably a record. The KKK-adjacent types on any school board are probably going to hate Huckleberry Finn, but so are a lot of the African American parents, as well as a lot of the openly progressive folks who feel uncomfortable with their children listening to racial slurs over and over again in class. Finally, there’s the technical matter of standing at the front of the room and trying to stage-manage a conversation in which the majority of kids either butcher or avoid discussions of the racially charged language and themes. The smartest ones look alternately uncomfortable and pissed.

By 2008, Barack Obama was the president and Huck Finn had always been a hand grenade. I think it stopped being worth the risk.

Times change. Welcome to The Show, I guess. I suspect Mark Twain must have grappled with many of the same concerns when writing the novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884, twenty years after the conclusion of the Civil War and the end of slavery. It is very clearly an anti-slavery text—but what was the point after the fact, after slavery was dead and gone? (This has always been part of the problem with teaching it: the moral of the novel is pretty simply, “Don’t participate in the slave society”—but for the text to have any sort of serious critical impact, you’d need to suggest that the people in the room still sort of live in such an environment, that the slave-society is somehow alive and well right now. Do we live in a world like that? Did we live in it all along? Intelligent and very angry people disagree.) Huck Finn feels as though it should have been published in the 1840s or 1850s, in advance of the Civil War. That’s when the novel takes place.

But: Twain’s decision to tell this story twenty years later, twenty years after the fact, suggests that he thought that the war somehow wasn’t over. After the military defeat in the Civil War, the Old South reconstituted itself through a series of legal, extralegal, and paramilitary maneuvers. These are well-documented. They would have been easy to recognize, and they would have looked very much like the judicial, extrajudicial, and policing trickery at work in the U.S. today. The collapse of Reconstruction would have forced Twain to reconsider his original assessment, made shortly after Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. At that time, Twain suggested that the president’s decision to ban slavery “not only set the black man free, but set the white man free also.”

And anyway, a text is not a static thing; readings adjust with time: we are the first generation ever to read a post-January 6 version of Huckleberry Finn. There was a moment when it seemed as though we had outgrown the novel; now it appears we never really understood it. When Stephen Miller announces that the president is “looking at” suspending habeas corpus on Constitutional grounds; when Kristi Noem—shortly after posing for a fashion shoot in front of a wall of men detained only for moving from one place to another—casually suggests a Survivor­-style reality television show where immigrants compete for legal status; when Donald Trump advises Salvadoran, Sudanese, and Libyan dictators to “build more prisons” to house “illegal” refugees and “homegrown” criminals alike, so that we can watch immigrants, friends, and neighbors ripped off the street and whisked away in darkened white vans; well, these horrors signal that segregation is very much alive and well, that maybe the South never really lost, and that maybe the “white man” was never really free. The law is not what we thought it was. Footage of masked ICE agents zip-tying children outside their legal hearings and elementary schools completes the picture. Not so long ago, agents—armed with however much legal authority you can muster behind a balaclava—smoke-bombed a restaurant to clear out customers, raided the kitchen, and dragged out the refugees in front of everybody. These days, there are Marines “keeping the peace” in L.A., Chicago, D.C., and elsewhere. Every time I write an example, a worse one overwhelms it. I can’t keep up, but Mark Twain’s Huck Finn experienced and predicted all of this.

When was the last time in these United States that a paramilitary group slapped on masks and rode around heavily armed, rounding colored people up? Twain’s birthplace of Hannibal, Missouri was a happy enough little town, full presumably of people who wanted to be good and decent, situated right next to a bunch of plantations, a bunch of killing fields. Huck’s struggle is the same one that so many of us are facing down right now—the question of how to be a moral person in a society that has already decayed. What does morality look like when the police, the courts, the churches, and the schools all concertedly recommend brutality? And how can schools and people discuss it openly?

This is Huck’s principal problem, and from the beginning, it troubles him right to the brink of the worst sort of depression:

Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By-and-by they fetched the n****rs in and had prayers, and then everybody was off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of candle, and put it on the table. Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company.

Well, this is a mighty grim scene for Chapter 1, but on face there’s not much wrong. Huck is reading an everyday scene in the worst possible way. The stars are shining, the leaves are rustling, an owl is who-whooing—how could he even know that this old owl is concerned about “somebody that was dead”? In Huck’s mind, an ordinary and even relatively peaceful evening takes on such a depressing cast that he “most wished he was dead,” too. I suppose to understand Huckleberry Finn, it’s worth getting to the root of the kid’s problem with “sivilization”: this is a kind of suicidal loneliness. But the rest of the chapter has not been preoccupied with Reconstruction, or with slavery; Jim has not even arrived on the scene yet. No: Huck’s problem is with his education, with the widow pecking at him. But what’s so bad about an education?

A question like this is probably why schools have been the main battleground where warfare over Huckleberry Finn breaks out—not only because the novel is open, critical, and contradictory about racial issues, but because it questions the nature of school systems themselves. Huck’s problem is all of the baggage that comes along with a basic education, all of the instructions about how to be a moral and functional person, somebody like the widow, who he regards as “dismal regular and decent.” Sometimes, too, morality and functionality clash. It’s subtle, but if you look at Huck’s description of loneliness to the point of suicide, I don’t think it’s the widow’s pecking that sets him off, I think it’s that after she hassles him for his lack of education and his unseriousness, they

“bring the n****rs in for prayers.”

Huck never describes that process, he throws it away in one half of one line, but when I think about the mechanics of gathering the overseers, with their whips and guns, and telling them to haul in the slaves from the fields, no doubt bloody and sweaty and hungry and scarred, and who have witnessed one atrocity after another, all through the day—well, I feel a little disoriented here, thinking about it, a little sick, thinking about the gall of those prayer-time motherfuckers in the big house. My stomach begins to hurt; if I’m honest, it hurts even now. But I suppose Huck sat there with the slaves and the slave-catchers and he probably bowed his head and he probably prayed, too, or at least pretended.

The widow’s hypocrisies are educational hypocrisies—the hypocrisies of schools and of churches, too—and Huck latches onto them faster than any contradiction in the novel. They occupy most of his thinking up to the mention of suicide a few pages in. The school is a slave-state school, just as the prayers are slave-state prayers. That means a focus on the minutiae, never on the big picture. Huck wants to smoke, but the widow won’t let him—even though she takes “snuff too, of course that was all right, because she done it herself.” The widow is mighty particular about manners, and totally oblivious about the larger violence they mask—everyone inside the plantation economy needs to “set up straight” and “don’t put your feet there” and “don’t gap and stretch like that,” while meanwhile out in the fields a different set of rules presides. Huck never says that this contradiction is what makes him so angry and so sad, just as he never specifically notes the relationship between Miss Watson’s pecking and forcing a bunch of slaves to say prayers in the master’s living room. Is it conscious or subconscious? Hard to say, but by the end of the first chapter, when the widow warns Huck about Hell, he retorts that he “most wished [he] was there,” and the widow responds naturally enough that she is all about Heaven—“she was going to live so as to go to the good place.” No doubt, when she forces the slaves to come in for prayers, she offers them roughly the same line.

To be fair, educating in a slave-state might not be so different from educating in a world where ICE teams swoop up migrants from Home Depots, National Guardsmen smoke bomb women and children, tech geeks vanish whole populations from food and grocery programs, glaciers crash into the oceans, pandemics rage, and artificial intelligence rewrites every human institution—all while billionaires and politicians cat-fight about online decorum and parliamentary procedure. The hard reality is that the majority of us, especially the teachers, have a hell of a lot more in common with the Widow Douglas than we do with Huck—except maybe, potentially, for a sort of shared and quiet loneliness and sorrow. Maybe, in the very best case, what unites us most with the Widow Douglas is simply a joint fear and recognition of the danger of telling the truth. It would seem that she has bought into the society, but maybe the widow is just going through the motions, just like everybody else, because there are so many guns around.