The N-word at the time of Huck Finn

[Barbara Need]

Wilson,

I agree. I did not notice any occasions when Jim is addressed as
"nigger" (which is a good point)--but I wasn't looking for that.
Mostly it is Huck who calls him "nigger" (or refers to other blacks
that way). But people who object to the book often do so because Huck
uses the word and find it (in the 20th and 21st centuries) offensive.
I just don't know if was when Huck and Jim "lived" or Twain wrote.

As for banning the book, so far, my students who have expressed an
opinion on that subject (addressed by the first critical essay in the
section, though I gave them an option of reading any one of them!)
completely agree with you.

Barbara

On 11 Mar 2009, at 9:23 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> FWIW, since I haven't read HF in dekkids, I don't recall that, in the
> book, Jim, though referred to as "nigger" or "Nigger Jim," is ever
> addressed that way. But, even if my memory is correct, I don't know
> that any conclusion can be drawn from that, since Twain couldn't have
> been particularly concerned with offending his black readership.
>
> IMO, Twain sorta dug ol' Jim. In another book or, perhaps, only a
> novella, whose name I can recall only as Tom Sawyer [?Traveler?
> ?Aeronaut? ? ... ?] (my maternal grandfather owned Twain's collected
> works), Twain allows Jim to demonstrate to Tom the illogic of the
> saying, "Birds of a feather flock together."
>
> And I think that attempts to ban HF from schools, from public
> libraries, or from anywhere else, are totally asinine.
>
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 9:40 PM, Barbara Need <bhneed at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Barbara Need <bhneed at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â The N-word at the time of Huck Finn
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I am grading papers about racism in _Huck FInn_ and several students
>> have said something implying that _nigger_ was offensive at either
>> the
>> time the book is set or the time Twain was writing (or both). I have
>> not found anything very useful in the archives. Do we know how
>> offensive the word was in the 19th century?
>>
>> Barbara
>>
>> Barbara Need
>>
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>
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