Tweaking Twain: Publisher introduces new and improved "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"

Read this on the news a couple of days ago. I had to double check the website to make sure it wasn’t a satirical news website. It wasn’t: it’s true. They’re coming out with new and improved Mark Twain, rest his soul.

To make Twain’s classics “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” more palatable for readers, publisher NewSouth Books in Alabama is working with Twain scholar Alan Gribben to publish the classics with some revisions, such as replacing each occurrence of the word “nigger” with the word “slave.” Gribben claims this word is less offensive to readers and so people will be more likely to embrace the classic novels.

You know, kind of like deep-fat batter frying okra. It’s a southern thing.

Which issue do we tackle first? Well, for starters, I’m offended by the idea that the word “slave” is somehow less offensive. A human who owns another human like any other property- cattle, clothing, a house- is absurd, inhumane, and evil. That this word is somehow more acceptable might be a clue as to why we have more slaves in the United States now than we did before the civil war. It’s just not offensive enough to us.

But let’s get back to that dirty n-word. Is it an offensive word? Absolutely. Is it demeaning to an entire race of people? No doubt. Does it need to be completely purged from our current vocabulary? Certainly. Should we pretend like it never happened? No.

Twain didn’t write fairy tales. And though the protagonists in these books are children, they are not children’s books. He wrote about and for the times, often using humor as the medium for his cutting criticisms of society, a society deeply entrenched is racism, who used words like “nigger” because a majority of them believed that black people were inferior human beings. To turn our eyes from this reality, to pretend it didn’t happen, that it is not a prominent part of our country’s history, is to doom us to ignorance, stagnation, and repetition.

You may disagree with me. You may think that works like Twain’s have no place in a cultured, educated person’s library. Fine. Keep it off your shelves. But for god’s sake, don’t bastardize the man’s writing. If, 100 years from now, someone were to republish my writing removing or changing all the little parts they found offensive, I would rise up out of my grave and knock them over the head. Assuming that Mark Twain was no less spirited than I, let’s not risk it.