With a little help from my pet jay, Huckleberry, I’m working up a guide to help understand and appreciate Mark Twain’s challenging classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This little handbook will be illustrated by non-other than celebrated Nevada artist, Steven Saylor, so if the words don’t make sense, the pictures will…

Twain’s novel was banned in the Concord, Massachusetts Public Library in its year of publication, 1885. The charge: “The veriest trash -too coarse for our youth.” This allegation assured twenty-five thousand additional sales.

I only wish that were the charge today. Today the charge is “Racist.” But racism, by its very definition, assumes an attitude of superiority, and Mark Twain tells us, “I have no prejudices as to cast, no prejudices as to creed and no prejudices as to color. All I need to know about a man is that he is a human being…he can be no worse than that.” Yes, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a problematical text that carries dynamics for trouble into today’s classroom with its emotionally loaded nomenclature. When you first encounter the offensive epithet that appears more than two hundred times in the novel, it sears the eyeball; makes you want to set the work aside and be done with it. But in 1885 this word, which comes from the Dutch word for black, was a kinder word than the word “slave.” Over time the word has become the most powerful secular blasphemy in our language and has several times the preemptive force than it had in the 1880’s, particularly when it falls from white lips like mine. But if you can get through that word, not around it, but through it, I believe you will find the novel to be a strong indictment against prejudice, racism, and narrow-mindedness.

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For the adolescent of the 19th century, as well as the adolescent of the 21st century, moral development and self-identity emerge through the examination of accepted norms. Young people today continue to question custom and convention. Is it cool to join a gang? Or can I transcend conventional wisdom and establish my own identity, my own freedom?

Tom Sawyer arrives to the Phelp’s farm and intends to romanticize stealing Jim out of slavery, a turn of events that some Twain scholars call, “a chilling descent.” But let’s take a closer look…

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Tom was in high spirits. He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most intellectural; and said if he only could see his way to it we would keep it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out…which is exactly what happened.

Aboard the Tahoe Queen one afternoon, a lady told me very privately, “My father taught American History all his life, and was buried, as requested, with his copy of Huckleberry Finn on his breast.”

Reading history alone is never enough. We must read the literature. Hopefully, our little handbook, due out next year, might help…