On the landing of a high school stairway one day, I happened to witness the unhappy ending of a friend’s romance with one of our school’s acknowledged beauties. He had been pleading whatever case he thought he had for a while when she issued her verdict, with the haughty finality available to the beautiful young. “Forget you,” she said, and swayed off up the stairway. I imagine she did forget him, having found bigger fish to fry.
Watching various Confederate monuments pulled down, reading calls for the elimination of all sorts of books from school and college reading lists, I feel uneasy. I don’t feel uneasy because I harbor admiration for the Confederate cause, or for the racial or sexual slurs that used to be published without a second thought on anyone’s part. I feel uneasy at the enterprise of trying to erase the past, however benighted it may have been. I think “Forget you” is an unrewarding stance to take toward the past, not to mention a dangerous one.
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust serves as a fine example of statuary under assault. A pioneer of guerrilla warfare, Forrest was also a slave dealer, responsible for a revolting massacre by troops under his command, and one of the first leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. Surely not a man deserving of public honor.
But he undeniably existed. If by removing his bust we think to expunge him from the historical record, to disappear him, then we remove as well the possibility of understanding how such a man came to exist, what forces formed (or deformed) his character – forces which are clearly still in operation today, deforming other characters into similar shapes.
We do something else: we lose the possibility of understanding an extremely complex character. For the few commonly recognized facts about Forrest give a far from complete picture of the man. Greg Tucker, Tennessee Historical Society historian, offers one addition to our view of Forrest’s nature and character:
Retired Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was an outspoken advocate for the civil rights of the freedmen in postwar Tennessee.
This advocacy and his popularity with the Memphis black community were resented by some of his white contemporaries who spread false rumors to discredit the general and further their own political interests.
As president of the Selma, Marion & Memphis Railroad, he employed former slaves as construction engineers, crew foremen, train engineers and conductors. Blacks were hired as managers, as well as laborers.
When Forrest’s cavalry surrendered in May 1865, sixty-five blacks were on Forrest’s muster role, including eight in Forrest’s Escort, the general’s handpicked elite inner circle. Commenting on the performance of his black soldiers, Forrest said: ‘Finer Confederates never fought.’
Forrest detractors allege that the Confederate general was the ‘founder of the KKK.’ This is factually incorrect. The 19th century Ku Klos was founded as a fraternal organization on Dec. 24, 1865, in Pulaski by Thomas M. Jones, a Giles County judge; Frank O. McCord, publisher of the Pulaski newspaper; and four other Confederate veterans. Though not present at a Ku Klos meeting in Nashville in 1867, Forrest was elected as grand wizard of the organization.
There is no evidence that Forrest ever wore any Klan costume or ever “rode” on any Klan activity. He did, however, on Oct. 20, 1869, order that all costumes and other regalia be destroyed and that Klan activity be ended.
This was confirmed by the U. S. Congress in 1871: ‘The natural tendency of all such organizations is to violence and crime, hence it was that Gen. Forrest and other men of influence by the exercise of their moral power, induced them to disband.’ See U. S. Congressional Committee Report (June 27, 1871).
When Forrest died in 1877, Memphis newspapers reported that his funeral procession was over two miles long. The throng of mourners was estimated to include over 3,000 black citizens of Memphis.
Of course, if Forrest were to be disappeared from all libraries and all mention of him deleted from histories of the Civil War and of the antebellum and postbellum South, we would remain in ignorance of both his evil doings and of his active embrace of and by the black people who knew him first hand. And our tendency to deify or pillory others would remain unchallenged by another set of contradictory facts.
We would lose a great deal more than that if the efforts of school districts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Minnesota, Mississippi and New Jersey to remove Huckleberry Finn from their public school curricula are aped throughout the country. The most recent of these efforts, in New Jersey, is justified by its sponsors thus: “The novel’s use of a racial slur and its depictions of racist attitudes can cause students to feel upset, marginalized or humiliated and can create an uncomfortable atmosphere in the classroom.”
Well, then! All we need do is chuck that novel in the trash and our history of racist attitudes, our justifications of slavery by denying the full humanity of slaves, our pain and outrage and guilt will be erased. Of course, we’ll have to throw in a few hundred more books with it – from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Native Son to Their Eyes Were Watching God to Invisible Man to The Underground Railroad (both books by that title) to Another Country. . . . This list could go on for a long time, this list of books that contain racial slurs in the mouths of characters who would have used them or contain mention of bigotry, lynching, segregation, slavery – all those shameful aspects of our history that make people uncomfortable because they ought to be uncomfortable. If our history, like human history in general, is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, we are not likely to awake from it by pretending there was and is no nightmare.
Here is a fairly representative paragraph from Huckleberry Finn. An old doctor who has been treating Tom Sawyer’s gunshot wound addresses the men who have captured Jim and want to hang him:
“Don’t be no rougher on him than you’re obleeged to, because he ain’t a bad nigger. When I got to where I found the boy, I see I couldn’t cut the bullet out without some help, and he warn’t in no condition for me to leave, to go and get help, and he got a little worse and a little worse, and after a long time he went out of his head, and wouldn’t let me come anigh him, any more, and said if I chalked his raft he’d kill me, and no end of wild foolishness like that, and I see I couldn’t do anything at all with him; so I says, I got to have help, somehow; and the minute I says it, out crawls this nigger 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 nigger, and there I was! and there I had to stick, right straight along, all the rest of the day, and all night. It was a fix, I tell you! I had a couple of patients with the chills, and of course I’d of like to run up to town and see them, but I dasn’t, because the nigger might get away, and then I’d be to blame; and yet never a skiff come close enough for me to hail. So there I had to stick, plumb till daylight this morning; and I never see a nigger that was a better nuss [nurse] or faithfuller, and yet he was resking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too, and I see plain enough he’d been worked main hard, lately. I liked the nigger for that; I tell you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars – and kind treatment, too. I had everything I needed, and the boy was doing as well there as he would a done at home – better, maybe, because it was so quiet; but there I was, with both of ‘m on my hands; and there I had to stick, till about dawn this morning; then some men in a skiff come by, and as good luck would have it, the nigger was setting by the pallet with his head propped on his knees, sound asleep, so I motioned them in, quiet, and they slipped up on him and grabbed him and tied him before he knowed what he was about, and we never had no trouble. And the boy being in a kind of a flighty sleep, too, we muffled the oars and hitched the raft on, and towed her over very nice and quiet, and the nigger never made the least row nor said a word, from the start. He ain’t no bad nigger, gentlemen; that’s what I think about him.” (352-354)
Ten “n*****s” in one paragraph. Is the word offensive, hurtful, disgusting, vicious, dehumanizing? All of the above. Will reading it, discussing it, discomfit some students? Undoubtedly. Is the use of this word evidence that the author was a racist? Or is it evidence that he was doing his best to accurately portray American society along the banks of the Mississippi before the Civil War? It could be both, if read carelessly. That’s one very good reason for continuing to “teach” it – to encourage students against inattentive, unreflective reactions to what they read or hear.
Far from promoting racism, that paragraph perfectly illustrates the utter insanity of racism, demonstrates in the doctor’s tortured reasoning how powerlessly stupid it makes a clearly decent man who can’t see beyond his cultural conditioning, even when presented with direct, personal evidence that refutes that conditioning. It also demonstrates the evil underlying a slave economy, the monetization of human life. Trying to defend Jim from potential lynching, the best argument the doctor can find is “a nigger like that is worth a thousand dollars.” And then, devastating because thrown in as an afterthought, “and kind treatment, too.” Does Twain explain any of this to the reader? No, because he’s a story-teller, not a social psychologist. His job is to show, not to explain.
Ernest Hemingway wrote that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” That’s the sort of sweeping profundity you utter midway through the first of one drink too many, but there’s some truth in it. For any number of reasons, including its accuracy as a socio-historical document, Huckleberry Finn is a very great piece of American writing, and certainly a progenitor of many other great books, from Winesburg, Ohio to Never Come Morning to Slaughterhouse Five. Among countless others. And if our education system doesn’t preserve these treasures, even if the treasures contain horrors and shameful beliefs and actions, preserve them and help people learn to understand and value what they have to say about the horrors, the shames, and also the beauties and proud moments of our past, then who will do that job?
Ralph Ellison said, “at best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.” If we shatter our monuments, burn our books, dismiss large parts of our past as the work of devils in human form, are we not continuing to waste our experience, whatever genteel lipstick we might apply to these activities?
