Race and America ....Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: 100th Anniversary Collection Paperback – May 4, 2018 by Mark Twain (Seawolf Press)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: how to write about race in the US

What does Mark Twain’s novel about a white boy’s friendship with a runaway slave tell us about race in American literature? Benjamin Markovits revisits The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the light of recent tensions

 

The kind of novel that could still launch a career … Eddie Hodges and Archie Moore in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960). Photograph: Allstar/MGM

One of the charges against Rachel Dolezal, the “biologically white” woman who recently resigned from the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is that she misrepresented herself in her application to Howard University, an elite and historically black university where she did a master of fine arts. Because of her interest in African American art, the admissions office assumed that she was black.

A number of people have made the connection between Dolezal and Coleman Silk, the hero of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain – a light-skinned black man who spends most of his academic life passing for Jewish, until a slip of the tongue gets him fired. He refers to two chronically absent students as “spooks” – the students are black, which he didn’t know, and they lodge a complaint against him for using a term that can be understood as racist abuse. As it happens, Silk also went to Howard – where, going off-campus in Washington DC, he heard the word “nigger” used against him for the first time – and reacted against the strong racial identification that he felt was forced on him there. Just one in a series of events and reactions to events that persuaded him eventually to pass himself off as white.

Of course, Roth himself is guilty (if that’s the right word) of writing intimately about what it feels like to be black. He brings his usual ravenous intellectual appetite to the task, but one of the curious things about his description of Silk is the similarity to another famous Roth hero, “Swede” Levov, from American Pastoral, another almost-all-American kid, star athlete and scholar, whose “almost” stems from the fact that Levov isn’t a Wasp – he’s Jewish. Silk is a high-school track champion and Golden Glove-level boxer. He first passes himself off as white at a tournament at West Point, where his Jewish coach (Silk is the only non-Jewish fighter) tells him to let everyone assume he’s just another one of the boys. Roth takes us through Silk’s conversion step by step, in exhaustive and persuasive detail. Nevertheless, you feel running through his account the knowledge that exclusion from the US mainstream was undercut in his experience and others’ by their love of American sports.

The questions this raises is whether the Jewish experience and the black experience are translatable into each other – Roth raises it himself – or whether there’s some essential difference between the two classes of American outsider, some human stain, that keeps showing through. One difference, of course, between being Jewish and black is that you can opt to become Jewish; there’s a process for that. And various commentators have referred to Dolezal as transracial, as though the softening of the boundaries between the genders might apply to race as well. Other experts are brought in to oppose this view. But the truth, for novelists at least, is that all these boundaries are supposed to be permeable. Otherwise, how are you going to write?

In 1984, on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Huckleberry Finn, Norman Mailer wrote in the New York Times: “Reading [the novel] one comes to realise all over again that the near-burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair, and woe to us if it ends in detestation and mutual misery. Riding the current of this novel, we are back in that happy time when the love affair was new and all seemed possible.”

My own experience of that love affair has necessarily been a very narrow one – we live only the one life. The neighbourhood I grew up in had a founding map that specified that no one of African descent could live there, except in the capacity of servant. Of course, by the time my family arrived in Austin, Texas, in 1975, that condition had become illegal and unenforceable – but it didn’t need to be enforced. No black family lived on our street, and I doubt I saw many black kids in the local park. My parents bought our house from an old Texas woman whose African American servant lived in the hut at the bottom of the garden. It was tiny; we later called it the playhouse, and used it as a base for the kind of cute Tom Sawyer-like escapades that spoil the ending of Huckleberry Finn.

Rachel Dolezal's deception: her 'black' identity doesn't make sense – or make her black
Gary Younge

The junior high I got bussed to was a specialist school in east Austin, one of those neighbourhoods urban planners had managed to separate by highway from the rest of the city because black people lived in it. A friend of mine once complained to me that he felt a bit like “salt in a pepper pot” in that school. This is not the kind of phrase a 12-year-old makes up. He must have heard it somewhere.The fact that this line has stuck with me for 30 years suggests that even then it left a taste in my mouth, but it’s also true that I had no black friends, except for one kid on the basketball team, who used to ride the bench with me. He did very good Bill Cosby impersonations. My mother says he visited our house once (a big clapboard colonial revival from the 1920s) for a playdate, but if he did I’ve blocked out the memory, and in any case I never got invited back.

And yet it was a love-affair, too, though unreciprocated. The ballplayers I liked were all black. Michael Jordan was something of an obsession, and shone at the tip of that constellation of celebrity reference points by which my family navigated the supper-table conversation (along with Philip Larkinand Cheers’s Sam Malone). But I read Langston Hughes, too, in the same way I read Heinrich Heine – because I was a nerd with a jones for intellectual folk-simplicity. Every day, the school bus drove through the run-down streets surrounding the school: cars in the grass, peeling paint, sagging roofs, people sitting on the porch. I didn’t know anyone who lived there.

Last week I reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I had loved in high school. Mailer, in his NYT piece, describes it playfully as a wonderfully precocious first novel, full of talent and energy. This isn’t quite a backhanded compliment but he also meant to put the book in its place. Part of what impressed Mailer is the fact that Huck Finn is the kind of novel that could still launch a career today – that would still seem fresh and promising. A semi-orphaned boy heads off down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. The central conceit of the book is that Huck feels guilty about not turning Jim in – basically, because by helping Jim he’s participating in a robbery. Jim “belongs” to the widow Miss Watson, who had always been kind to Huck. And yet he can’t help liking Jim too, admiring and sympathising with him, so that his refusal to shop Jim becomes just another part of Huck’s general depravity, his refusal to become “civilised”. The reader, feeling this tension in him between what he should do and what he thinks he should do, can’t help rooting for the kid to follow his instinct.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Reading Huckleberry Finn one comes to realise all over again that the near-burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair’

Five years before Mailer’s piece, James Baldwin gave a lecture at Berkeley in which he talked about his struggles as a writer to find literary models. “I did not agree at all with the moral predicament of Huckleberry Finn concerning nigger Jim.” (His audience – mostly white? – can be heard laughing.) “It was not after all a question about whether I should be sold back into slavery.” Baldwin, very elegantly, is laughing a little too. And of course he’s right. The appeal the novel makes depends on a very obvious assumption about his audience: the drama, for Twain, is about a white man fighting his conscience, not a black man fighting for his freedom.

But what’s curious about Baldwin’s remark is that a few minutes earlier he had been discussing his need, as a writer, to find an American vernacular – one of the legacies of Huck Finn. For Baldwin, the rhythms of the language he wanted couldn’t be heard or found while he was living in the States; he needed to go to Paris before they came to him, just as Saul Bellow, another cultural outsider to Wasp America, didn’t find the voice for Augie March until he saw Parisian cleaners sweeping the streets.

Baldwin is one of the few US writers of his generation as comfortable writing white characters as black characters (or the other way around). But if this is the standard (and it seems as good as any other) for a novelist who has come to terms with the “problem of America”, Bellow makes an interesting test case. One of the running subplots of Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet, which won the National book award in 1971, involves a black pickpocket whom Sammler watches from the windows of a bus. Eventually the thief notices that he’s been noticed and stalks the ageing Jewish hero back to the lobby of his apartment building. There he pushes Sammler into a corner and pulls down his own pants, exposing his large cock, forcing the old guy to admire it. Bellow comments: “[Sammler] was never to hear the black man’s voice. He no more spoke than a puma would.” There’s more along these lines, none of which looks great now; even at the time, it probably didn’t look great. To my race-sensitive ears, on reading it 45 years after the novel was published, it was almost enough to make me give up on the book.

But the truth, for novelists, is that all these boundaries are supposed to be permeable. Otherwise, how will you write?

In 2007, Penguin reissued the novel with a new introduction, by the black writer and essayist Stanley Crouch. “When it arrived, the deeper meanings of Mr Sammler’s Planet were missed by those afraid that Bellow had become a racist and a fuddy-duddy who didn’t recognise the importance of all the changes that were streaking – butt naked – across the American scene.” Crouch’s essay is a polemic in favour of high culture: “In this time of low democratic morale it is good to remember that some writers in this country aren’t afraid of the big bad wolves of popular culture and refuse to slink along with the cowards of our academies, those who are all too willing to add materials to the reading lists of their courses – if that means their most self-serving colleagues and orneriest students will pick some other people to harass.”

That phrase, “the cowards of our academies”, suggests exactly the sort of people who refused to stand up for Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. According to Crouch, the great failure of the American novel is that it has not adequately addressed the diversity of the American experience for fear of getting the other wrong. Television, he argues, has done a better job. Of course, there are white writers who have taken it on. Crouch praises Faulkner for Go Down, Moses, but more recently, Bill Cheng in Southern Cross the Dog,Jonathan Lethem in The Fortress of Solitude and Michael Chabon in Telegraph Avenue have not only written about black characters (from a white point of view) but adopted their voices as well. Chabon’s book was generally well received, but came under fire from black writers who disliked his appropriation of a black voice, and suffered from the hesitations of white reviewers who felt unqualified to judge it.

Crouch connects these hesitations to the rising influence of memoir or what the writer David Shields refers to as “reality hunger”: “If I don’t write about you, you won’t write about me. I’ll stick with my favourite subject – myself – and I suggest you do the same.” Crouch traces the history of this failure back to the publication of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, “which told the fictionalised story of the slave who led a bloody and squelched revolt in South Carolina in 1831”. Styron’s book won the Pulitzer prize, but it also received a “public flogging” from a number of black intellectuals who published a lengthy “response” to it.“Styron was no Faulkner,” Crouch writes. “His book was not good, which may have been one of the reasons that James Baldwin … loved it so and said that it expressed his own feelings with such accuracy.”

The trouble is writing is hard, and bad writing is congruent to bigotry – it imagines people to be less profound than they really are. If I write badly about expat American half-Jews living in London, then that’s just bad writing. But if I make the same mistakes about any other group it looks like and may well be a reflection of some deep prejudice. All of which means that taking on substantial characters whose experiences differ widely from your own can be an act of small courage for a writer.

But white writers can be criticised for not writing black characters, too. Lena Dunham responded to this complaint in the second series of Girls. Hannah Horvath briefly dates a black Republican, and the couple share an uncomfortable scene that leaves unclear whether the relationship fails because of political or racial differences. It’s a clever piece of self-critical self-consciousness, but in its way may be no less “symbolic” than Bellow’s pickpocket. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in a largely favourable response, “I have never met a black Republican in all my time in New York. And I’m black. So I have trouble believing that Hannah found that one black dude in Brooklyn who is anti-marriage equality, anti-abortion, pro-guns and anti-health care.” Whether or not this kind of Republican exists, Girls doesn’t give him much of a chance to explain his political position – possibly because the writers of the show can’t really imagine it. “We must tell our stories,” Coates concludes. “And other people must tell theirs.”

Fiction should offer the freedom to tackle these subjects; there should be a presumption of artistic innocence

As a kid, my main contact with African American life came from my experience on basketball teams. I heard the N-word often enough, though I would never have used it myself – and even now, after the C-word and the F-word have lost their power, I can barely bring myself to write it. Which is probably just as well, though it also seems a little suspicious to me – a kind of perpetuation of the wrong kind of magic. Even in high school, I had white teammates who could call the black players it, as they sometimes called each other, as a matter of friendly abuse. It was partly a class thing. I was a nerd; they weren’t. And there’s no question that these guys basically got along with our black teammates better than I got along with either.

One of the striking and uncomfortable things about the race conversation in the US is how much of it is framed by sports. In Black Planet, David Shields writes about the obsession with which “white people (including especially myself) think about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies”. He followed an NBA basketball team for a year and analysed the way the media covered the games. For Shields, black athletes embodied the sort of argument against “civilised” America that Huck Finn had intuitively felt in his sympathy for Jim. The book was widely praised for dealing honestly with an uncomfortable subject, but Crouch, in an excellent essay, “Blues for the Artificial White Man”, attacked it for admiring the antisocial, thuggish behaviour of athletes who look good only in the context of a white man’s need to delegate his transgressions to people he has no real desire or ability to emulate. He was standing up for Mr Sammler.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I did not agree with the moral predicament of Huckleberry Finn concerning nigger Jim’ … James Baldwin. Photograph: Sten Rosenlund/Rex Features

Part of the problem with the Dolezal story is that to exclude people from a whole category of experience imposes on the members of that category a certain amount of pressure to put up a unified front: if they can’t speak for us, then we have to agree with each other. But this leaves little room for the corrections and counter-corrections that should make up any conversation about something as complicated as race. And yet to ignore the boundaries doesn’t seem right either. When Chris Rock jokes, “I love black people, but I hate niggers …” even the biggest fans of permeable racial boundaries might feel that this is not a joke for a white comedian to make. And yet much of his audience is white, and you can’t help wondering, on either side of the divide: what are we laughing at? Is it what they are laughing at?

Fiction, I’d like to think, should offer the freedom to tackle these subjects; there should be a kind of presumption of artistic innocence. But it doesn’t always feel that way from the inside. It often feels like guilt. My first job after grad school was teaching English in New York, at a wealthy private school that also offered me my first intimate experience of a black middle class – the people I taught with, the people I taught. One of the new biology hires, a young Midwestern woman, skinny and white, in her first year out of college, who played Ultimate Frisbee on the weekends and sometimes after school, was telling me a story about the night before, when they had played at some field in Harlem. A real “sketchy” kind of place. And I said something stupid like, “So you came packing heat, right?”

One of my colleagues, a black woman in her 50s, overheard me. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me. What did you just say?” I stared at her for a minute, blushing; my heart sank. “You’re talking about somewhere people live,” she said. I didn’t mean anything by it; I just liked saying the phrase. “You watch too many movies,” she told me. “Don’t believe what you see on TV.”

Afterwards a friend of mine pulled me aside. Another English teacher who wanted to be a writer, a black guy from Princeton, who lived in Harlem as it happens, and was probably my best friend on the staff. “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “She’s always getting on her high horse.” For the rest of the week, I kept arguing with her in my head, but my self-defending didn’t make me feel any better – it rarely does. And now from this distance I can see they were probably both in the right.

Not long ago I gave a reading in Cambridge, Massachusetts – an excerpt from You Don’t Have to Live Like This, whose narrator is supposed to be a little off about race. Not racist, but not right in his mind about it, either. There were maybe 40 or 50 people at the event, all of them white, except for two people sitting towards the back – a father and his teenage son. In the passage, my narrator mocks a preppy friend of his for introducing himself to the black guy behind the counter in their college dining hall. The guy is embarrassed and carefully wipes his palm on his apron before shaking hands. “It doesn’t matter if you call him Willy, he’ll still call you sir,” I read out, suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the weird, hard-to-pin-down presumptions that lay behind this line – and not quite sure what I was communicating to that kid at the back. Afterwards his father raised a hand to ask a question.

“What do you feel about Alex Ferguson’s retirement?” he said.

“Totally gutted,” I told him in a mock-English accent, though what I actually felt was relief.