Bringing Twain and Huck to class

Sliding "Teaching Huckleberry Finn" in under the wire

EDITOR’S NOTE: It was almost seven years ago that — quietly — I took the step of publishing a book about my experiences teaching Mark Twain’s “Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” in a high school setting that was almost exclusively African-American. Because of that one explosive word being used over 230 times in the novel, we spent a couple of days before we even opened the book discussing that ugly word, why I thought Twain’s work was worth sharing and why, ultimately, I thought they’d come to love its humor, its humanity and as Huck came to love Jim and vice versa, the racial harmony. That it can happen.

When I had one student skip his lunch hour to come to find out “if Jim was going to get to Cairo” that day, and another write that “Huck was the brother I never had” I thought Mr. Twain, wherever he is, would smile, maybe blow a puff of cigar smoke our way and start rocking in his rocking chair in a satisfied way. He’d earned it.

Since one section deep in the book was critical of a short-sighted, some might say “wrong-headed” administrator while I was still gainfully employed at the school, I had to release the book with no promotion, fearful of retaliation. Since this individual had never actually read Huck - but hated the book, she said — I would have doubted they’d have read anything I had to say anyway.

But I’m proud that I had the determination to write it, regardless of what might happen and also that so many of my former students had a chance to spend some time with one of the great minds and deepest souls who ever put a word down on a page. By the end, they counted Mark Twain as a friend. I think he would have loved that.

TEACHING HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Why and how to present the controversial classic in the high school classroom

MY INTRODUCTION

I thought of one word. Help. What if the books could talk back? Could they tell me? It was an early August morning and I stood there all alone in the school’s book room, a steamy, out-of-the-way little hole in the gray cement wall next door to the cafeteria, a generally neglected storage location cluttered with books and workbooks from all corners of the academic spectrum.

As a new teacher, at least new to these environs, I wondered if there were words in these books that could help me. Ostensibly, I was there to select my textbooks for the upcoming academic year, which would start in a couple weeks. Being ambitious, idealistic and, yes, unbelievably naïve, I hoped for more. I knew what I was up against. In this sweaty gulag, a perennial “F” school in northern Florida, the challenges are many. A school annually stocked with the exotically named offspring of financially strapped, overworked minority moms, yeah, one of those disappearing dads kinds of places, most of these kids viewed school as a kind of virus to be resisted at all costs. This was a school where getting a kid’s correct working home number from guidance was like hitting the lottery. It was not unusual to have students miss 20 or 30 or even 40 days out of a 180-day school year and not think it was anything unusual. In other words, they might come to school 2 or 3 days out of 5.

My introduction to "Teaching Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"

Parents even stick up for those absences. “Well, you don’t know what it takes for her to get to school,” one told me indignantly. “I guess we can decide when she is up to going…” Oh.
Dealing with difficult students, teachers are encouraged to make a connection with the parents to try to hold them accountable. Getting a working phone number is only one of the problems. One school employee complained she got cursed out every single day by parents upset about their children’s punishment or grades. “Then, when they come in, you can smell the marijuana coming off them,” she said, waving a hand in front of her face. “No wonder we’re seeing what we see.”

You see, the Florida Department of Education’s recommended techniques don’t work here. This wasn’t a place where I could just pick a textbook and bop out a lesson plan like at any other school. I wanted something that would shake up their world. A bomb.

I wanted an assortment of words and themes and ideas that would find a way into their heads and toss things around. I needed something radical, something earth-shaking. So…when I looked over in a corner and saw pristine copies of a famous, if controversial book that, the more I looked at it, seemed to be seething.
Why, Huck Finn looked like it was being quarantined. I had to stand there for a moment. It is quite a sight to stand there in the bookroom after a school year. These text books had been in the daily line of battle, now they were trying to get over the battle scars of a year in the open classroom.

You know those scars, maybe you added to them back in your day. Kids who just couldn’t just leave the book alone. Even a routine inspection would turn up stupid pen marks slashed across the edges of the pages of the book when it was closed. You know, clever additions like “Suck” “Rule” or the letters of some gang graffiti. It was as these kids just had to make a mark, like there had to be a way to-deface-this-damned-book-that-this-idiot-is-makingme-read, corners bent down, pages torn, some even torn out altogether.

As I looked around at these battered books, they might have one day been classics, but they were a long way from a time when they were celebrated by one and all.

The author with “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” at the Mark Twain House in Hartford

The magical days where the beauty and wisdom and eloquence strewn across these glittering pages made the experience of just holding it in your hands lift one up…well, they were long gone. These books were not treated reverently now.

But Huck? Here, in pristine shape, neatly stacked in a corner, are 30 copies of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn.” And they looked pissed. I could just imagine how those 30 copies felt, watching all these other books trotted off to classrooms all over campus. I half-expected the book to start talking to me once I opened it. Huck was neglected as a child and well, it was happening again.

Sure, Twain’s book was still taught around the country in lots of schools, still stirring up trouble. Here, in north Florida, sequestered away in a book room of a traditionally failing school that’s 99 percent African-American, Twain’s controversial novel evidently scared most teachers off. And had for years.

I could see their concerns, I guess. It is not an easy book to teach. Not only is “Huck” a book that was written over a hundred years ago, there were just too many issues; dialect, hearing that poisonous “N” word in class every day, it’s just too long. What about having to explain - and revisit - slavery?

The humor, would that still work? And in my case, what about having an older white teacher read the “N” word in class every day? How would my black students handle that? It was something to think about. I didn’t make my choice just then. I walked back to my classroom and on the way, got a pretty good idea why the book was ignored.

Next door to me, a tall, slender African-American woman was writing on the board. We chatted for a bit. She asked what novel I was going to teach and I mentioned Huck Finn. She looked stunned that anybody would even consider it. “THAT book?” she asked, turning to glare at me. “N-word….3 times” I smiled, embarrassed. “I know,” I nodded. “That’s a hurdle. I don’t know… I think it’ll be worth it.”

When I walked back to the book room a little while later, I knew what I had to do. Walking in, it was as if the old guy himself was blowing a smoke ring in my direction. I kept staring at these books, envisioning these kids, these neglected kids, so hungry for a sign that someone acknowledges them and their existence. I could just see them nodding once were done reading it. “Yeah, this Twain dude,” they’d say. “He be straight.”

Somebody had to put those books into action and loose Twain’s enchanting words on these kids. Why, it would be like freeing butterflies out of a cigar box. As I carried the books back to my classroom, the more I thought about it, the more I was sure I was right.

Wouldn’t Huck’s hard-scrabble life fit perfectly at my school? If Huck was alive, hell, wouldn’t he GO to my school? Wouldn’t he fit in? Here he was, a victim of child abuse, the son of a horribly racist town drunk, a kid who definitely felt unwanted. Wouldn’t Huck strike a sadly familiar chord with so many of these young people raised by a single mom or a grandma, a Dad unknown or incarcerated, a long, sad trail of trouble stretching in every direction?

More than that, wouldn’t they find – didn’t they need – a moral compass in their own lives to mirror the one in this extraordinary tale of two absolute misfits who cared about each other, one willing to go, as he so movingly says, “to Hell” to help the other?

For young people who grew up definitely outside and in most cases, uncared for by the system, wouldn’t Huck’s ability to survive, to live by his wits, give them something no other novel I could think of would? Hope? I was convinced that I was right.

Sure, there would be hurdles – there always are, attempting to connect with this overconnected generation– but couldn’t they be overcome? We would find out. We’d go at this strategically, carefully but also with a bit of the “we’re getting away with something” enthusiasm that fired some of Twain’s finest work.

The more I thought about it, the more that seemed the right way to go. Let them feel like we’re sliding this in under the wire, smuggling it into the classroom, this controversial book that some people didn’t think they should read it, but hey, YOU GUYS DECIDE.

That seemed like a good plan. I began to strategize. Before we actually began reading “Huck,” I’d explain to them how Twain wrote it. He’d work all day, undisturbed, no cell phones, no TV, then, in the evenings, he’d bring those pages back to the house, gather the family and read that day’s work, his wife, Livy serving as first set of ears and editor. So he got immediate feedback.

What feedback do these kids get? Why not let them imagine a real, connected family – something most of them didn’t know. That would sort of model how we would do it in class. We’d read it TOGETHER.

As I thought about the year ahead, I remembered reading Twain’s daughter Susy on this: “Papa read "Huckleberry Finn" to us in manuscript just before it came out, and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, while he went off up to the study to work, and sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out. And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that Clara and I used to delight in, and oh with what dispair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. But we gradually came to feel as mamma did.”

Hearing a kid have INPUT on her dad’s work, yeah, that is something. Now whether or not Twain actually put some things in just so his wife would have something to take out (he has hinted that was the case) that doesn’t matter. It was clear that to Twain, the kids’ reaction mattered. As it would in my classroom.

Had these kids ever talked about slavery? Or friendship? Or doing the right thing? This novel will get them talking about that. At the very least. The great goal of any teacher would be to get them engaged, to really know the man and his characters, especially Huck and Jim, their great ancestor. If I could do that…why, that class could flow like the Mississippi herself… We’ll get to that…

“Teaching Twain” is intended as an encouragement, a spark to help English teachers everywhere – and maybe just plain readers – to enjoy, devour, savor the work of one of America’s most significant writers. While the main focus is on “Huck Finn,” Twain’s greatest work, there are so many things in his writing that can be useful, informative, exciting, even.

I have found that “Huck Finn” is a book that can get your students to connect in a way that few books can. Using a few of his other works spread out through the year - just a smidgen of them included here - can help you take your classes somewhere unusual, some place you might not be able to get with the standard English class fare.

Now, of course, most of America will continue to slam the standards: “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice” and “Night” and “The Scarlet Letter” down these kids’ throats. There are many ways to teach and for some, maybe even most schools, these works will be fine. That was not an option for me. I wanted to take my kids somewhere else. I wanted them to see if they could really appreciate a writer who thought and wrote differently; someone who didn’t mind putting America on notice when it took incredible courage to do so.

While we will never exactly know what Twain had in mind with Huck Finn, it seems abundantly clear that the character of Jim is drawn with great affection and pride and, considering he made him a hero in 1885, courage.

Unlike like a lot of classroom offerings, Twain is a writer who is still funny. Teaching these seven pieces (“Curing A Cold,” “How I Edited An Agricultural Paper,” “An Entertaining Article,” “The Private Habits Of Horace Greeley,” “Cooper’s Literary Offenses”) and the two supplemental pieces by Norman Mailer and George Saunders surrounding “Huck Finn,” teachers have a way to not only share this remarkable novel with future generations wrestling with the same kinds of moral boundaries Twain tackled over a hundred years earlier, they can also reveal a writer who was fearless, willing to explore almost any idea.

For students often hesitant to expand their ideas or even have one, Twain’s work says one simple thing: go for it. In the process of helping them discover Twain and this Whitman’s Sampler of his work, many of my students came to look at him as a long distant friend, loved his humor, his irreverence, his honesty, his courage.

And there’s this. In a time of great racial strife, whether it’s Ferguson or Dallas or Minnesota, is it so wrong to offer up Huck Finn’s enduring message of friendship and loyalty? Over the years in my classes, certainly not a place you’d think Huck Finn would go over, I came to see the book have an impact I couldn’t have imagined. When a writer gets you to plug in, to connect with him or her in that oh so intimate reader-writer way, the experience can enrich you and all of those around you. It changes your life. Or can.

John Nogowski’s “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” is still available on Amazon if you’re interested. It also includes — gratis — George Saunders’ wonderful “The United States of Huck”