'Huck' hubbub shortchanges Twain

Janus Adams is publisher of BackPax children's media and author of “Traveling Mark Twain’s America.”

Can you believe it? One hundred years after dying, not only has Mark Twain managed to publish a new bestseller, his autobiography, but - in a feat of "all publicity is good publicity" - his seminal work, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," is stirring up its 126th year of controversy.

Too bad Twain has no direct descendants to profit from the windfall. His indirect descendants, however, include every American novelist since 1886. This, according to none other than Ernest Hemingway, who decreed, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' "

Hence the commotion.

This latest controversy is propelled by the stuff that's kept folks arguing and the presses rolling for a century: his use of derogatory racial slurs. But focusing on the language - as most folks have done so far - misses the bigger picture about what Twain had to teach us.

Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University in Montgomery, has issued what Twain might have written had he lived in the 21st century America his imagination helped forge - and realized the damage his book (and others) had done to readers of every hue since 1885.

It's easy to turn a mole hill of a decision like Gribben's, to replace the offending words with "slave" and "Indian," into a mountain of indignation. We're talking Huck and Jim! We're talking classic! As one Arizona teacher defiantly put it, "I'm not offended by anything in 'Huck Finn.' "

Pity. Even Twain had mixed feelings about his book.

Writing in a progressive post-Civil War-era 1876, Twain felt free to explore the parallel plight of his two outcasts: a virtuous, albeit stereotypical, black runaway from slavery and a crafty white runaway from child abuse. Twain artfully placed blacks and whites in the same boat.

Hitting a bend in his own life stream, he soon set the book aside. Then, in 1885 - met with bankruptcy and the neo-racist tides overtaking the country - he resurrected his nostalgic Mississippi River heroes and neutered his originally more edgy tome into a crowd-pleaser.

Twain's controversial ending has Huck and Jim jumping ship, leaving the raft. Huck has grown immensely but Jim's plight has changed little. In an odd twist, Tom Sawyer shows up and the now-seasoned Huck defers to the immature prankster. Playing the kind of cruel trick on Jim that Huck has outgrown, Tom - knowing that Jim is now free by his slave owner's will - yet again endangers Jim, prolonging his agony. Hence the longstanding controversy.

By lionizing "Adventures of Huck," schools are teaching - too often without comment or context - one of Twain's most conflicted works.

While "Huckleberry Finn'' and "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" are his most popular novels today, he had dozens of works to his credit. But most are far less read, and he would wonder why our knowledge of him is cut short 25 years before his time.

Knowing what was funny and what wasn't, he went on to skewer America's fondness for slavery and segregation in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," champion women's rights in "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc," and condemn Belgian brutality in the Congo with his nonfiction work, "King Leopold's Soliloquy."

As a progressive thinker, Twain might wonder, too, why in some classrooms, his is the only portrait of 19th century black life offered, when such African-American contemporaries as William Wells Brown and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper lived in Huck's time and wrote from Jim's view.

But then, as Huck himself might say: "You don't know about America, without you have read a book by the name of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly."