This week’s announcement by NewSouth Books that it’s publishing
a new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn in which a racial slur that begins with the
letter N is replaced with the word "slave" stirs up conflicting
reactions. On the one hand, the effrontery — "the vapid, smiley-
faced effrontery," as the great Twain biographer, Ron Powers,
put it — to replace a word that a genius pointedly used more
than 200 times when he wrote the book in 1885 seems a bit like
covering the large, gaping wounds shown in Picasso's Guernica
with Band-Aids. But there are already scores of editions in
print in which the N-word appears. And every year, it seems that
some school district somewhere refuses to read Huckleberry Finn
because of it. Dr. Allen Gribben, the Auburn University Twain
scholar who has edited this new version, says he just doesn't
want one word to keep students from reading a great book. Mark
Twain wrote conflicts into Huck Finn's soul. Huck was a river
kid of the 1830's who