Twain-based truth

One of my first college literature courses surrounded me mostly with folks of Hoosier background, with sprinklings of Illini. They filled the cramped Ballantine Hall room with a din of unmistakable dialects and raucous humor that irked my professor. Having met someone who would later become a lasting friend in the class, this atmosphere did not start out bothering me.

Until, one day, someone decided to deride Mark Twain (an American literary hero if there ever was one) for the relatively free pass our current era of political correctness has given him.

“I mean, nobody ever calls him racist!” the student said, tossing up his hands exasperatedly in the middle of his directionless diatribe.

Upon spouting his hastily surmised thought, he took for granted how serious a reaction it would’ve elicited outside the classroom. By “outside the classroom,” I mean any recognizably public spot, including the hallway.

In these places, where others were not so accustomed to the strident, unyielding flow of this student’s rants, where people wouldn’t have been so tired of them that they stopped listening after five seconds, this student wouldn’t have gotten off as freely as the dead man he thoughtlessly criticized.

Outside the classroom, he might have been approached by someone of the same opinion as Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter, who recently wrote an essay for Time Magazine called “Getting Past Black and White.”

“Was Twain racist?” Carter, who is himself black, asks. “Asking the question in the 21st century is as sensible as asking the same of Lincoln.”

Although Lincoln really did think of African-Americans in terms that would be considered racist today, Carter concedes, he deplored slavery throughout his life and waged one of the most gruesome wars in our nation’s history to uproot, outlaw and formally end the despicable practice.

Now, even a young American like me (supposedly brainwashed by the public school system, if I have any brains left) can pride himself on knowing this part of my country’s history. I guess that’s because American history isn’t much without Honest Abe.
The same could be said for his fellow Midwesterner, Twain, whose storytelling and prowess for blunt criticism brought out from the American mind its humane and sensible elements while lampooning its darker side as no one else could. He villainized his era’s bigotry, hypocrisy, fanaticism, zealous religiosity and moral disfigurement, among other things.

Academia and literati may be the most willing to defend “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from censorship and attack by those who cry foul at the characterization of Jim, Huck’s runaway slave companion, who speaks (like the rest of the characters) in dialect and whose appearances in the narrative are often accompanied by the n-word.

Still, there’s no level of erudition necessary to see Jim’s deep fraternal bond with the narrator, the heroic instances in which he ensures his safety or the transcendent pathos of his development throughout the book – a book that generated more momentum against the cause of slavery than any work of American literature, before or since.

There’s a reason Twain isn’t branded as racist more often. It’s because he wasn’t.