“Considable trouble en considable joy” is what Jim, the Negro slave, foresaw in Huckleleberry Finn’s future, and that’s what the book is causing today—”considable trouble” to our self-appointed censors and “considable joy” to me, for one, in watching their antics. The sudden banishment of Huckleberry Finn from New York’s junior high schools has brought the anti-prejudice boys into collision with the anti-book-burners, a conflict of ectoplasmic dimensions since the anti-PB’s and the anti-BB’s are, at most times, one and the same.
Why was it necessary to remove Huckleberry Finn from the approved textbook list? No one has come right out and said it—or, to be more exact, just about everyone has come out and not said it for the simple reason that today, no one dares use the word “nigger” even to deplore its use. It’s a cruel, a vicious, a bitter word which, whether employed in ignorance or by design, can inflict pain where none should be. But in Huck Finn’s day, and in Huck Finn’s world, a colored man was a “nigger” and for Huck to call him anything else would be not only anachronistic, but clairvoyant.
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