Mark Twain Comes to Compton

Mark Twain Comes to Compton

by Hubert O'Hearn

Anyone who is surprised that I'm moved to write about this clearly hasn't been paying much attention to my fourteen year career in journalism, criticism and live theatre. The announcement that the Alabama-based New South Books is publishing a version of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'* with the word “nigger” replaced in all its 219 occurrences by the word “slave”, and that “injun” is replaced with “Indian” was reason enough for me to rise in indignity, but a CBC News report on January 6^th has absolutely set me to boil.

This is more than silly people doing stupid things. This is absolutely the prime Exhibit of why liberalism is in decay and retreat. Please read on. We are talking about much deeper issues than the sanctity of classic works.

The CBC News report, as gravely voiced by Peter Mansbridge, mentioned that the three books most under attack in terms of exiling them from school curriculum were the aforementioned 'Huckleberry Finn' along with F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' and Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. These three books are cited as being full of sex, violence and racism.

Well, I certainly missed the paragraph or two in 'Gatsby' where Jay removes Daisy's panties with his teeth before gratefully devouring  the soft flowers of her Southern beauty …

And so did you.

Because it's not there.

But let us look at the what these three books just happen to have in common. If I was any good at drawing, I'd construct a Venn diagram. (Call that your homework, or après reading craft activity.) But at bottom line, the overlaps create a fairly grim picture.

Both 'Huckleberry Finn' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' have central characters who are black men treated unjustly by a white justice system. In the case of Jim, he is both an heroic figure in the story, but is also recaptured into slavery. To slave owners, he is just a nigger. 'Mockingbird's' Tom Robinson equally tries to escape injustice and is killed. He too was just a nigger.

'Gatsby' shows the shallowness of elite society by having Jay Gatsby instantly accepted by them so long as he was wealthycand played his part well. It didn't matter how he made his money, the point was that he had made it at all. But once Gatsby is dead, he too metaphorically is just a nigger. Or possibly a Jew or possibly a German, but in the U.S. of 1925 when the book was published, one might as well say 'same thing'.

1 out of every 8 American black men between the ages of 18 and 30 are currently incarcerated. I think they used to call those pogroms when other countries locked up similar percentages of racial or cultural groups.

And let us not assume this to be an American problem and shake our heads and go 'tut tut poor Yanks' from where I am in Canada or you are wherever you are in the world. How's the weather, by the way? (Canadians have to begin conversations with strangers in an urgent discussion of weather.)

No, in the city where I live I see every day the result of a permanent underclass of Native peoples. Don't talk to me about opportunities, or government support or any of it. I see generation after generation of babies born to young and unwed mothers who will be raised in an atmosphere of corruption, alcoholism and living off what the government of the day chooses or doesn't choose to dispense.

I spoke to a Native man the other day. He would have been 54 or so, not much older than me, and he was sat at the bottom of a stairwell because a combination of drink and a prosthetic leg had rendered him unable to stand up, let alone walk up the stairs. He had been abandoned there by his nephew in the hotel where this happened. I spoke with him at length while waiting for an ambulance to come to his aid.

He had been a graduate of a government program, a B.Sc. granted in 1978 by a completely reputable university. That would have been early days for those sort of post-secondary support programs and at that time, Canada was only supporting the truly intellectually qualified Natives. The Trudeau government wanted success stories. So this man must have been quite right.

And this is where he had come to. Abandoned at the bottom of a stairwell: poor, drunk, unemployed and alone.

Or not alone. No, he is one thousands. Whatever is being done has not worked. And changing the word 'Injun' to 'Indian' isn't going to particularly help. Not when people are being treated like niggers.

But that's the nut of it. This is what liberalism has turned into. Never get to the nut of the problem. Never truly attack – not 'discuss in reasoned terms' – but attack the elite levels that are the proof of Edmund Burke's great and oft-quoted phrase: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

When the men aren't particularly good and don't intend on doing much of anything, the situation is even worse.

For this where 'Gatsby' comes in. Not only must the elite snuff out things that might get black folks riled, but any work that might display the shallow ethics of an Eastern wealthy class that sucked billions of dollars from the wallets of American taxpayers. Very few have served prison time. There are no meaningful new regulations to stop another 2008 type man-made financial collapse. And those self-same elite executives still go off to their summer homes on Long Island...where Jay Gatsby's house used to be.

Really though, this is a skirmish in a larger war, that of the bottom of society against the top. I doubt (I hope) that this new version of 'Huckleberry Finn' will go crashing up the best-seller lists. The irony may well be that school boards, pressured by yahoos to buy the 'clean version' will come to a non-resolution and just won't teach the book at all. “There, we'll show resistance to pressure by dropping Mark Twain. So there. Now who's on Charlie Rose tonight?”

The final exhibit is in the newscasts of the Mark Twain story. I didn't watch every networks' coverage but I saw enough to remark on the strange absence of the word “nigger”. Instead we had the fug-alicious construct of “the N-word”. On these self-same newscasts I know I have heard every one of George Carlin's ancient 7 Words list used with un-bleeped relish.

I had to wonder: if one was reporting a crime story wherein a black man was accused of beating up a white man because the latter had called the former a nigger, would the network use the word then?

And I guess that all the recorded comedy routines of the late Richard Pryor – who was scorchingly brilliant as a social commentator at his peak from the mid-60s through the mid-70s – must not be broadcast again. Pryor used the word nigger as frequently as the modern comic says fuck. The difference being that Pryor's word actually shocked, jolted, and made an audience take notice.

And I guess it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to say that the primal rap group N.W.A. Had initials that stood for Niggers With Attitude. N.W.A. Itself stood for much more than that; again anger that threatened to cause urban revolt.

Which is why I titled this essay as I did. Because Mark Twain, you're just another nigger living in Compton. But you'll probably get along fine with the people there.

And that's the point.

As Number 6 used to say in 'The Prisoner': Be seeing you.

*I generally link book titles to my Amazon on-line store. Your buying things makes me money. But if you think I'm going to profit off that book; well, I may not have much but I do have ethics.