Word: slaves
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...attacks were and are silly--and miss the point. The novel is profoundly antislavery. Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction--a recognition that the slave had two personalities, "the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father...
...widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as coarse. Twain himself wrote that the book's banners considered the novel "trash and suitable only for the slums." More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave whose adventures twine with Huck's, and its frequent use of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often excoriated, never appears...
...fingerprints--stood as a challenge to the racial convictions of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intellect, Twain's tale revolved in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master's baby and, concerned lest the child be sold South, switched him in the crib for the master's baby by his wife. The slave's light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education...
...amid their sorrows. This was the subject matter of a sprightly little tale titled A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It, published in the 1870s. The narrator asks his 60-ish black servant, Aunt Rachel--who spent most of her life as a slave--why she is so happy all the time. The story is her answer, and I will not spoil it other than to suggest that Twain manages, in just a few pages, to lead us through the complexities of seeking happiness when your life is literally not your...
...words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, prosecuted and won a war to free him nevertheless. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a member of a Confederate militia, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to rile the nation over racial injustice and rouse its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century who has lifted...