“Oh, I don’t want you to use the word ‘nigger’ less,” said the teacher. “I want you to use it more!”
“At this point—and you said it quite nicely yourself, in fact—there is a quote ‘well-earned cultural expectation’ surrounding Huckleberry Finn,” said the teacher, now beginning to pace the room himself.
“And because of this, leaving the present number of the word’s appearances alone risks dooming the book to permanent irrelevance! Let me tell you why. In the case of Huckleberry Finn, the controversy so precedes the material itself that students are now delivered a book that is preloaded with two notions: on the one hand, it’s the most controversial book they’ll ever read in school—but on the other hand, it may well be our nation’s greatest masterpiece. These dual preconceptions have become so inextricably linked in the public’s mind that at this point to diminish one is to diminish the other. And the controversy over this word has escalated each year for as long as we’ve been alive—yet the number of times this word appears has not kept pace with the controversy! Therefore—to use a nautical metaphor we might both agree Sam Clemens would have smiled upon—the wake of expectations left by those who have rocked the boat has left us no choice but to add the word ‘nigger’ at least once or twice to every page.
“And imagine how that will improve the book! White students, African American students, foreign students new to this country—when they’re handed this book, they’re all expecting something explosive, something controversial, something they’ll want to talk about long into the night afterward, not because they are told to do so by a teacher, but because they need to, because their heart beats quicker or slower depending on whether or not their friends agree with what they think. That’s the impact of the book that stays with you, isn’t it? It was Twain, after all, who said something to the effect of ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education.’ Yes?”
Yes, the editor indicated, nodding without moving his head.
“Well! I would contend that nothing would make the reading of this great book feel less like schooling and more like a damn education than for students to discover the most charged word of our lifetime plastered all over the pages of the book they are handed in a classroom, to a degree that shocks even—no, especially!—the teachers who have handed the book out! Take a moment and imagine that! And in plenty of cases, there may be honest and enlightened teachers who have already confessed to having been not particularly offended the first time they read the book. Can you imagine their shock and shame at then finding a book absolutely packed to the margins with our most explosive and controversial epithet—page after page after page? Can you imagine the looks on those teachers’ faces—these teachers who had just moments earlier confessed to them that as they remembered it, the use of this word in this book wasn’t that big a deal? And, of course, the students will sense their teachers are off-balance—as students always have the uncanny ability to do—and will instinctively take that as their cue to lead the conversation—a conversation which rightfully belongs to them, wouldn’t you say?”
Each man stared at the other, trying to figure out to whom he was talking.
“I’m simply trying to protect the legacy of Mark Twain,” said the editor, scratching his face where a mustache would be.
“So am I,” said the visitor, tapping his lips where a pipe would be.
The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore
She loved the kind of books you could buy in stores that also sold things.
Her favorite store, which was only two or three blocks away from where she and Sophie lived that year, depending on how you walked, was full of books, and it was also full of things.
Sometimes in the afternoon, when she and her boyfriend ran out of things to talk about, which was often enough, they went to the bookstore.
He looked at the books. She looked at everything.
Some of the things that the store had: oversize fashion magazines from the 1940s and ’50s; vintage maps from back when states were just scraggly lines, just guesses; railroad spikes that had been made into bottle openers. There was a magnifying glass built out of a knotted clunk of iron with a foggy lens that magically made even the most serious face, her boyfriend’s face, for example, evaporate into a vague and bloated and goofy smile that never failed to make her laugh.
Things like that.
“How good does this book smell,” she said, pulling a paperback from a shelf. “Like dust on a bottle of vanilla.” She turned it to read the front. “Salinger! I love him. Four dollars. Perfect!”