An Apology 

I've been a high school English teacher for the last 35 years, and over that time, I hope I've grown and improved as an educator. Although I started out teaching in a public high school, I have often said that those students I taught in the first few years of my career deserve their money back. I had so much to learn, and there I was in front of real classes of real students, feeling like I was making things up as I went, mostly doing the wrong things. I felt inadequate to the task. But over time, I hope I've grown into the job. I cringe to think of my rookie years now, but they're not really anything to apologize for. I was doing the best I could.

Almost ten years ago, I came to Sturgis and took over a group of senior students who had had their first year of IB English from other teachers. I was given a curriculum to teach to complete their two-year course, and I taught that curriculum. One of the books in the list was the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. Certainly a classic of the American literary canon. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” There are lots of reasons so many schools teach the novel, not the least for our purposes its embrace of a vernacular literary style that makes it well-suited to writing about on an IB Paper 2 exam.

And so I plowed through the novel, which, although I'd read it when I was young, I'd never taught before. It's a substantial work, which takes weeks to teach. But it was one of many books covered in the IB English course, read, studied, reviewed, and eventually moved on from. I taught the book that year, and again with my next group of IB seniors, two years later.

Now, it's not as if anyone reading this, or anyone reading Huck Finn, can ignore the reasons it's been such a controversial choice for schools. Not just that the n-word is so frequently used in the book, although that's certainly a giant part of it. The book is definitely an artifact of its time—it is, in fact, a racist book. Its depiction of the slave Jim can't honestly be viewed as anything other than the author's own racism on the page. It can be taught that way—as a racist artifact of its time—and that's what I tried to do. After all, the n-word is coming from the mouth of a fictional character, created a long time ago, by a man who's been dead for more than a century. It's ink on paper. It's not shouting the n-word at anyone in real life. The book's racism is part of an earlier era.

And yet.

When English teachers teach a book, there is always an unspoken assumption about that book. It's the English teacher saying, The Book Is Worthwhile. It's the English teacher saying, Sure, you may enjoy re-runs of The Office on Netflix, you may listen to the latest single by Cardi B, but this, this work you have before you now: This. Is. Literature. There is an invisible army supporting the book that someone spent so much money buying in such numbers to spend so much time studying in school. And for so much of the history of English classes in America, it has been a very white army. For students at Sturgis at the time, less than a decade ago, it was possible to spend your ninth and tenth and eleventh and twelfth grade years being told in a dozen unconscious ways that Literature consisted of a line of dead white men, a line that started with William Shakespeare and ended with names like F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and John Knowles, and yes, Mark Twain. Perhaps, over in Africa, Chinua Achebe sat patiently waiting for a brief visit, but the Literature train was mainly making stops only at the familiar, white stations.

If you were a Black student in any of the classes when I was teaching Huck Finn, not only were you probably dying a death of a thousand cuts as the n-word crowded all over the page every time you picked up the book and it was discussed in class, but surrounded by white classmates, with your white teacher from the whitest part of the American Midwest, on predominantly white Cape Cod, surely you must have wanted to sink into the floor every day of that unit in your English class. The forces of white supremacy, in the form of Literature, were silently, invisibly, pushing you to the corner of the room and out the door.

If you were a white student with any sense of what is humane, surely you felt similarly about this book, and the way the language almost brought a foul smell into the room.

If you were the teacher, and I can only speak for myself, it was as if my conscience were being dragged around in the dirt and beaten up by force I didn't want to name. Maybe there are white teachers who can teach Huck Finn without having those feelings. I am not one of them. Toni Morrison, in an essay about the book, describes reading it in her own high school English class in the 1940s. She says the book had its merits and pleasures, but “curling through the pleasure, clouding the narrative reward, was my initial alarm, coupled now with a profoundly distasteful complicity.” That's the word: complicity. Teaching Huck Finn made me feel a profoundly distasteful complicity. I could hide that complicity from my students and myself through two teachings of the novel. After that, no more. And I will never teach that book again. Other English teachers may make a different decision, but that is mine.

Don't get me wrong, I still teach dead white male authors. Including some who were probably not the nicest people in real life. I still enjoy teaching The Great Gatsby, a novel in which every main character is a racist and antisemite. That's part of the point of Gatsby, the characters' shallow, insular, monied, careless self-centeredness and cruelty. Pointing out and criticizing their racism isn't just easy, it's the one of the main points of the book. It says something true about American society that I don't mind teaching. And any of my former ninth grade students will remember (I hope) that Of Mice and Men, that old cliched chestnut of a classic novel, a staple of middle school and high school classrooms for so many decades, another book by a dead white man featuring a central cast of casual racists, is a very special book for me.

No, I'm not going to dump all the dead white male “classics” into a bonfire. I have no interest in burning any books, or even censoring any books. There's value to be had in studying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I recommend picking it up at your local library. But a high school English class is a group enterprise, a collaboration with others, a conversation. Not just with the author, but with each other, in the classroom. And there are so many other books, not written by dead white men, waiting to join and enhance the conversation. It's 2020, and already way late be asking, Why not let them in? Why not change the complexion of that invisible army of Literary Respectability soldiers that marches into the classroom supporting every book English teachers choose to teach? Why not tell every student in an unspoken way that Toni Morrison can be every bit the equal in importance to Shakespeare or Fitzgerald? Because she can, and she is.

And so while I'm not in favor of banning, or burning, Huck Finn, I'm definitely in favor of boxing the copies up for a while, and making space on the English book room shelves in the basement of 427 Main Street some new voices. And now it's possible. Thanks to the efforts of so many of my fellow English teachers over the last decade at Sturgis, looking around those shelves now I can see books not just by Morrison and Achebe, but now also Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie, Arundhati Roy, Jesmyn Ward, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, and so many others—authors who present more than one view of history, and more than one way of telling so many kinds of stories. We're still a very white department (something I suspect and hope will change over time), but speaking for myself, we're not putting in purchase orders for these authors of color merely to pat ourselves on the back for being so woke. It's about elevating other voices into that unspoken, but necessary, conversation taking place in our classrooms, the conversation Fitzgerald and Shakespeare were having—not by drowning out their voices, but listening to other voices, too, for a while. Inviting some new, equally interesting and valuable, people to the party. It's certainly about trying to ensure that students are not made to feel less than, made to feel marginalized, made to feel they want to disappear, or that they don't exist.

To Mark Twain and Huck Finn, I promise you'll still be there, whenever anyone is ready to read and appreciate you for all the things—the horrible and the valuable—you have to teach us. To the former students who suffered through their racism disguised as Extremely Essential Literature, this is my apology. I am sorry, and I'm trying to do better.