Weighing In: The Death of Nigger Jim

You would think that a professor of English would have some understanding of the greater meaning behind a classic work of American fiction like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Alan Gribben, such a professor at Auburn University, seems to have missed the point.
Gribben has recently released an edition of Mark Twain’s masterpiece with the word “nigger,” which appears in the original text some 200 times, changed to “slave.”  Raul critiques the new edition adeptly, and I couldn’t agree with him more.
Gribben’s motives for releasing such an edition are pure enough: he worries that the presence of the racial slur in the novel has caused it to be dropped from school reading lists and kept out of the hands of America’s schoolchildren.  Surely this worry is well founded—regardless of the evolution of the word’s meaning and usage in modern times, “nigger” retains the indelible stench of racism, and has caused Huck and his pal Jim to be kept out of curriculums across the country (just a part of the book’s long battle with censorship).
That is no excuse.
The gut reaction of hardcore academics is that it is never OK to alter a text of such literary and historical importance.  There is a supposed sanctity to novels as important as Huck Finn; there is something special about the authenticity of the authorship.  That argument is all well and good, but it misses the larger import of this particular change.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, unquestionably, a book about slavery and the humanity of slaves.  Nigger Jim, despite his derogatory epithet, is the hero of the novel, even more so than the title character.  He is a vibrant testament to the compassion and courage of slaves and free blacks, a living rebuke to the oppression and dehumanization of blacks in the antebellum South.  The contradiction between the term—so much a part of the way the world views Jim that it is part of his very

name— and Jim’s character is Twain’s critical masterstroke.  The word “slave” holds considerably less stigmatizing baggage, but its substitution significantly dilutes the strength of Twain’s statement.
At the end of his post, Raul laments that Twain isn’t around to provide a pithy response to Professor Gribben and the school boards he tries to placate.
Twain, who must have been thinking ahead, doesn’t disappoint:
“God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.”
photo credit: http://www.wildwesthistory.org/research/bios/Kelly_Jim.asp