Roger Ebert, Huck Finn, and me.

It seems there’s a new edition of Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn being published, with all instances of “the N-word” replaced with “slave”, and it’s stirred quite the controversy.  In particular, there was a mini-commotion over a post that Roger Ebert wrote on Twitter regarding the topic.  The hubbub didn’t last long, and Ebert quickly clarified his initial comment… But the whole thing struck me, because I first read Huckleberry Finn when I was given a copy by Roger Ebert, quite a few years ago.

When I was a teenager, I was attending and volunteering at the Virginia Festival Of American Film.  At the time, one  of the highlights of each year’s festival was the “film masterclass” led by Roger Ebert.  This involved twenty-odd people in a room, dissecting a film, stopping the laserdisc for commentary, discussions and questions.  The film in question that year was Pulp Fiction, by a fresh young director named Quentin Tarantino.

Some time in the middle of the first session, the topic of race relations arose.  Lively discussion ensued regarding the script’s liberal use of “the N-word”: whether the language was  acceptable for Samuel L. Jackson’s character in a film written by two white guys, if  context and homage to classic genre film excused the offensiveness of the terminology, if the friendship of Vincent and Jules (John Travolta and Jackson) was a filter through which to determine the filmmakers’ ideas on race, and so on and so on.  And when the conversation focused on whether using “the N-word” could ever be justified, a parallel was drawn to Mark Twain’s use of the term in Huckleberry Finn.  We discussed the historical censorship efforts of that book, how use of language shifts with context, and the importance of the artist’s intent and audience’s perception…  The discussion eventually moved on, the session ended, and the next day Ebert showed up to class with a beat-up paperback of Huck Finn.

He explained that he’d gone to a local used bookstore to pick up a copy and revisit it after the previous day’s discussion, and how he was struck by not just the parallel uses of the term in Twain’s book and Tarantino’s film, but also by the camaraderie, friendship, and common quest for freedom between the central black and white characters in both works.  It was a pretty fascinating swerve from the expected course of the session, and became a thread that cropped up throughout the rest of the class.

At the end of the class, I stopped to thank Ebert for the experience.  We talked for a bit, and he asked if I was familiar with Huckleberry Finn.  When replied that I wasn’t, he handed me the copy that he’d purchased for the class, and said that he thought I’d enjoy it.

(And I did.)