Assaultive, Insulting Censorial Insensitivity

"Celeste heard about the runaway Elias as she was eating the last of her ash cakes. She did not like Elias but she, too, was happy for him. What she herself could not have she always wished for someone else, so her food went down well that morning. After he got the word, after he ate his breakfast, Moses went up and told Henry, "Master, that new nigger's in the wind."

Moses had just told Henry that Elias was gone when they heard Robbins's voice and they both went around the side of the house to the front. Robbins had awakened that morning and not remembered the encounter with Elias the night before, that he had taken Elias back to his plantation and chained him to the back porch. His cook came in and reminded him at the breakfast table.

Robbins now said to Henry, "Good mornin. Sweet good mornin. Are you and Caldonia well?" Elias, chained, stood next to Robbins, only inches from his booted foot in the stirrup.

"Yessir, Mr. Robbins, we well enough," Henry said.

"I have something of yours," Robbins said, and he kicked Elias and the slave fell to the ground. "Picked him up on the road home last night. He has a wound somewhere in his leg, but it won't kill him and it won't amount to anything if you decide to sell him off one day. Less he had a very noticeable limp." He laughed, a little joke between them, because Robbins was even less inclined those days to sell a slave and that was what he always advised Henry. He had said once, "Niggers appreciate in value, so appreciate them."

Yes, that "N" word, prominent in the narrative of a compelling novel. A new novel, relatively speaking, published in 2004. By a black author, Edward P. Jones, whose "The Known World", from which the above has been extracted for the purpose of this blog entry was a New York Times 'bestseller' and acclaimed Book of the Year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Booklist, the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, People, Publishers Weekly, San Antonio Express News and USA Today.

Furthermore described as one of the New York Times Top 25 books of the last 25 years. This is the story of slave-owning Manchester County, Virginia in the mid-1800s. This is the story of a black man who was a slave and whose father bought him from his master, after he had previously bought his own freedom, that of his wife, and finally his son. The son, grown to maturity, dismayed his parents by himself becoming a slave-owner. Under the influence of his former master, he felt owning slaves, black men, women and children just like himself, was good business.

Where is the outcry from the black community, from the oh-so-politically correct white literary and academic community? There is none. There is praise for a book consummately well imagined and written. In language congruent with its times. Although it does, intriguingly, shift on occasion to the present time when discussing historical matters of concern and note. There is no one to censor what this remarkable book portrays, what its skilled author tells us in the language of 1840 slavery.

But censors have been busy-bodying about the legendary brilliance of a writer no longer among us and thus unable to protest that one of his most remarkable books has been tampered with. Samuel Clemens wrote another amazing book, titled The Misanthrope, a book that revealed his apprehensions about human integrity, intelligence and compulsion. As Mark Twain, the incomparable author of his time, his wry observational humour and cleverly capable genius as a writer paved the way for those who followed him.

Surely he deserves better than to have one of his most familiar books, Huckleberry Finn, expurgated of its 'offensive' nomenclature of Negroes in the slave-owning American South? His admiring public, the readers who valued his description of time, place and human activity certainly deserve better. What arrogance, academic and publishing, to mar his legacy by this underhanded manipulation. An apology is due and the insult to the integrity of Mark Twain's original work overturned.

Representing a rare instance when specific and very particular copies of a book might be considered to be destined for a blazing fireplace.