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As we find ourselves between Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month in February, I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about one publisher’s recently announced plans to publish a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s classics “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” for schools.

As you most certainly know by now, the edited versions of these two books will substitute the infamous N-word with the word slave. “N-word Jim” will become “Slave Jim.” And so on.

Absurdly so.

I do not like the N-word. It conjures up memories of inappropriate jokes, unfair treatment of our peers, and total disrespect for African Americans. In fact the only time the N-word has been tolerated in our home was in the reading of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

And then only after our son was old enough to understand the word and the hurt that it conveyed.

I admit that my husband and I initially did some censoring of our own. When Drew was 3 or 4 years old, my husband and I took turns reading “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to him each night. Frankly, we’d forgotten the book featured the N-word in its portrayal of an interracial friendship until we began reading it.

At that time, we decided that “N-word Jim” should become “Friend Jim” lest our child hear the term and repeat it in the wrong situation (as if there’s a right one).

A few years later, Drew read those books in school in their original format and learned the historical context in which the word was used.

Yes, the N-word is a controversial term at best. Completely removing it from books that represent a vital period of our history, however, practically condemns us to repeat the mistakes of those treacherous times.

I grew up in eastern North Carolina during the apex of the civil rights movement and it wasn’t pretty. Johnston County, an area famous for its Ku Klux Klan billboard along Highway 70 “welcoming” visitors to our region, was my home.

As a child I saw crosses burned on the front lawns of a white family whose daughter had supposedly dated a black man. The image of those charred timbers smoldering on a Sunday morning are forever etched in my mind.

Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and just as our public schools were becoming fully integrated, Klan rallies surged in my hometown. Across the pasture that was behind our house, we saw a frightening field full of white hooded characters igniting yet another set of timbers and, ironically, singing the hymn “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Driving home from our favorite barbecue restaurant one night, we saw another public gathering of that semi-secret society. It’s a shocking sight to see the sign of Christianity burned in the name of racism.

I heard the N-word used a lot during my childhood both at school and in the community, and it was meant to be degrading. It was meant to single out a specific group of people and humiliate them.
It was a word my husband and I consciously decided not to use in our home.

One day when my son was in kindergarten, he and I were listening to the news when a reporter told of a highway patrolman who was called the N-word by a driver who had been stopped for speeding. I can’t remember details of the report but I do remember trying to make this a “teachable” moment for my child.

I explained that the N-word was hateful and disrespectful and that under no circumstances should he ever use it. His reply became my teachable moment.

“Mom, I know that word. The black kids at school call each other that all the time,” he explained.

“That may be so,” I retorted. “But don’t you ever use it.”

I suspect that we’ve tiptoed around these bitter parts of our history so much that we’ve forgotten how hateful certain words and certain actions can be. How else can it be that the N-word is acceptable for anyone to use? How can so many musicians fill their lyrics with the N-word? How can it be that the N-word now fills the same airwaves that broadcast that “teachable” news report so many years ago?

I found it interesting that my son, now 24, selected “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as the first books to download into his new Kindle. He bought the books just a week before the sanitized editions were announced. In fact, we talked again about these classics and about the irony of Jim being a hero while bearing such an ugly title.

Please don’t take the N-word out of Mark Twain’s masterpieces. Leave it in — and leave it in as a lesson of the hate and indignity of that term. Leave the N-word in our literature and our history so we remember know how words can undermine the self-worth of a segment of our society, both in 1885 when “Tom Sawyer” was first published and in our world today.

When we ignore the N-word, we risk forgetting the lessons we learned from it.

Contact Cathy Weaver at CWeaverNR@gmail.com.