Huck and Jim.

As a fan and student of literature, and as a person who liberally curses, I am appalled and truly disheartened by a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, headed by Twain scholar and Auburn U professor Alan Gribben, that removes all uses of the words "nigger" and "Injun" and replaces them with "slave" and "Indian," respectively. Someone said it's offensive, to which I point the episode of The Simpsons in which they considered putting a pair of pants on Michelangelo's David.

I'll leave the actual reporting to the BBC article on the subject dated 01/06/11 and save all my space here for editorializing. It makes me groan enough to begin with that I should have to preface this discussion by proclaiming No, I'm not a racist, nor do I want those words remaining in Huck Finn to offend the peoples to whom they refer, which I think should be taken for granted. Now, I don't use "The N-Word," and I don't like when people make up cheap excuses to do so. I thoroughly enjoyed Saul Williams' attitude that it's a word that needs to be fully explored for its historical, cultural and sociological significances (and even purposes) in order to be understood. But even that isn't the issue with Mark Twain's novel. The problem with the Huck Finn edit is threefold: allowing censorship, altering history and affecting impact.

Since my wife and I had our daughter, I've been quietly tiptoeing from my extremist "free speech uber alles" stance on what is commonly referred to as "bad language" ("sure, let the kids hear it; what harm could it do?") to a quietly indecisive procrastination ("eh, we'll figure that out when the kids start talking"). I still believe wholeheartedly that as much as one can teach a child right from wrong and how to behave, offensive language is a part of that package as much as chewing with your mouth closed, not saying anything if you have nothing nice to say, keeping your pants up and boogers in tissues and not running amok in the grocery store. There's no reason on Earth to suddenly change 219 "niggers" to "slaves" just because it reddens a cheek or two. The word has been "nigger" for 140 years for a reason.

Slavery in any part of the world is one of the great atrocities. In my opinion there should be no pissing contest between "what's worse" - slavery, genocide, AIDS, child or animal abuse, whatever. They're all, in my eyes, pandemic horrors that truly need champions fighting to eradicate them from civilization, as do a dozen others. Nobody wants to celebrate subjugation of a race and the abominations that come with it, but that's no reason to ignore that it happened or what the attitudes of a people towards it were like at the time. As near as I can remember, part of the irony that Twain carries brilliantly throughout the book is that Jim, who ends up more of a father and friend figure to Huck than anybody else would care to, is constantly greeted with offensive slurs, derision and slave duty for his troubles. It may not make us happy to know he's been treated that way, but the fact is that he has been - until he's only referred to as "slave," which is not the word I've been told was snarled at hatefully in the 1800s at Africans/blacks worldwide. Reminding ourselves of the prejudice and injustice suffered by a people is good practice to avoid its recurrence.

And why not call them "African-Americans?" I'm glad you asked. Socially, that's an American-centric name that has evolved to referring to all people of African descent, but the United States hasn't tried to annex the rest of the planet yet so until we do, there's no logical reason to call fine African descendants in other countries "American."

Hearing Africans and American Indians called "niggers" and "Injuns" so frequently still makes me fidget a bit. I feel a little poorly reading, in the voice in my head, the parts of men and women who have the disdain to disregard Jim as one of those. But the reason I don't skip it is because of their very purpose. Removing such epithets would wear down Huck Finn's sociological impact to a nub. It's a fun adventure story, no doubt, but underneath it all beats the seething heart of satire and morality. To remove its anti-racist narrative (by removing its very racist dialogue) is to finally and utterly condemn it to be a children's book. And while there are some great lessons to be learned from children's books, I don't want one of those lessons to be that being a minority during the Civil War was really not that bad.

The pen is only mightier than the sword until you cork the tip. Leave the fucking book alone.