Julius Lester’s excerpt “Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, gave a new view of the novel. Lester explains his point of view on reading the novel for the first time as an adult and his emotions and feelings about it. He starts off with explaining that he had not read the book as a child and then reading it as an adult is glad he did not. He says, “I am grateful that among the many indignities inflicted on me in childhood, I escaped Huckleberry Finn. As a black parent, however, I sympathize with those who want the book banned, or at least removed from the required reading lists in schools. While I am opposed to book banning, I know that my children’s education will be enhanced by not reading Huckleberry Finn.” Here, Lester is not only glad that he did not read Huckleberry Finn as a child, but he goes so far as to say that his children will actually gain knowledge by not reading it. These are strong opinions and later he goes on to explain why he thinks this way. He digs deep into the relationship between Huck and Jim and notices, “Twain makes an odious parallel between Huck’s being ‘enslaved’ by a drunken father who keeps him locked in a cabin and Jim’s legal enslavement.… A boy held captive by a drunken father is not in the same category of human experience as a man enslaved…. Twain did not take slavery, and therefore black people, seriously.” Lester shines a light on how Twain views Huck’s ‘slavery’ to his father and the legal slavery of Jim. Lester agrees that while Huck’s being locked in a cabin by his father was “awful and wrong”, however, that is different than being “legally owned by another human being and to have that legal ownership supported by the full power of local, state, and federal government enforcement”. I agree with Lester when he points out how it was wrong for Twain to parallel Huck’s ‘slavery’ with his father to Jim’s slavery backed by everyone around him, including government enforcement. It is not the same thing and should not be treated as the same thing because then it will degrade the reality of what slavery was when compared to what Huck went through even though it was immoral as well.
Overall, I agree with Lester on how Twain’s perception of slavery and African Americans was immoral, unfair, and degrading to what it was in reality. However, some things Lester read too far into the lines and was judgemental of the book from the beginning and didn't have the opportunity to read it with an open mind. An example is when he describes his thoughts on how Twain depicted a black hero. “‘I got to have help, somehow; and the minute I says it, out crawls this n----- from somewheres, and says he’ll help, and he done it, too, and done it very well. Of course I judged he must be a runaway n----- … I never see a n----- that was a better nuss or faithfuller, and yet he was resking his freedom to do it … He ain't no bad n----- gentlemen.’ This depiction of a black ‘hero’ is familiar by now since it has been repeated in countless novels and films. It is a picture of the only kind of black that whites have ever truly liked - faithful, tending sick whites, not speaking, not causing trouble, and totally passive.… A century of white readers have accepted this characterization because it permits their own ‘humanity’ to shine with more luster.” Here, Lester goes into to detail about the scene when a doctor is tending Tom Sawyer but can’t help him alone and Jim risked his freedom to help save Tom. This depicts Jim as a caring person who would risk his freedom to help save a White boy, even with everything he had to do for White people and how they all treated him. That’s what I depicted when I read this passage, that Jim had his chance to shine and become a hero to Tom which was against the norm. However, Lester digs way too deep and read it through an emotion of hatred of the book since the beginning. He read this heroic story and was infuriated about how the doctor viewed Jim. He went so far as to say that this heroic act was the only way that White people could stand African Americans; “faithful, tending sick whites, not speaking, not causing trouble, and totally passive”. Lester goes far beyond what Twain intended for this scene to mean. Twain wanted to show Jim as someone who stood up, past racism and the fear of what would happen to him, to help a boy who needed medical help. Yet, Lester could only see how Jim was being viewed by the doctor, looking past his act of heroism.
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