I thought one of the funniest moments in the book so far is when Foy Cheshire presents his reworked version of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”. In addition to altering the plot line, Foy changes the novel’s title to “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit”. I feel as though there is so much to unpack both in this title and in the fact that Foy felt the need to make these changes. For example, the emphasis on race and Foy’s need to comment on the race of each character, even within the title, is quite unusual and I think tells a lot about Foy’s character. What did you all think of this?
2 thoughts on “Huckleberry Finn”
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To me, this called back to the debate that took place during the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals meeting. On one level, as Foy argued, the n-word recalls generations of racism that the black community has been subjected to, and thus should be avoided. On another level however, as the protagonist argued, one should not hide the word from children, but acknowledge its presence. This would take both immense courage and articulation as the history of the word is charged with centuries of troubling, almost incomprehensibly cruel history. Another potential argument regarding the word that was brought up in class is that steering away from the word gives the word power, and thus by “protecting” children from it, one is essentially arming the word the racism one is trying to protect from. One final layer to the conversation about the n-word is that the narrator says that the worse case scenario of the use of the word is not when someone is called the n-word, but rather when one “call[s] somebody else a nigger”(97). Ultimately, it seems that Beatty, in that he freely writes yet does not say the n-word conversationally, seems equally conflicted about the use of the word as the different points of view his character’s have regarding the word.
I think that to completely disregard the fact that in history slave owners used the n-word in a derogatory term towards blacks is a bit outrageous. Perhaps Foy and his friends have become so out of touch with the mindsets of those who are not intellectuals and still live in lower middle class neighborhoods. Clearly, the narrator and King Cuz are believe that Foy’s group is a danger to Dickens (or what used to be Dickens).