Hear that spinning sound? That's Mark Twain, a century dead, furiously revolving in his grave.

Twain's masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is one of the books most frequently challenged in schools and libraries. When Twain first published it in 1885, the novel was criticized in part because the boy Huck was friends with a black man, the runaway slave Jim (who is far and away the book's most heroic and admirable character).

These days, the book is most often challenged because it frequently uses -- as Southerners of the time it's set, a couple of decades before the Civil War, would have done -- the "n" word.

Now, Publishers Weekly reports, NewSouth Books is preparing to publish a new combined edition of Huck and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that eliminates the offensive term, replacing it (all 219 times in Huck) with the word "slave." The editing was done by Twain scholar Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University in Alabama.

Gribben told PW, "This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind. Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century." (Twain, of course, was expressing it in the 19th century, but never mind.)

Gribben said that, as a result of leading discussions of Tom Sawyer (which uses the "n" word, but less extensively) for a Big Read program, he realized how hurtful the term was to general readers, as opposed to his university students who perhaps were provided more historical context for reading the books.
 

There's no question that the word is offensive and vicious (despite its ubiquity in contemporary music and other forms of entertainment). There's also no question Twain used it consciously, to emphasize the cruelty of the racism he witnessed growing up in the South. He used it not to express racism but to draw our attention to it and make us confront it, in Huck's world and our own. I first read Huck in the late 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, and that word hit me like a blow. Then and now, it's painful to read it over and over, but that experience teaches us something as well. The time to worry is when that word doesn't bother you.

Bowdlerizing Huck can't help but weaken its powerful impact, but I understand Gribben's good intentions. There was something else in the PW story, though, that bothered me just as much as the language change. Gribben and his publisher, Suzanne LaRosa, both laud the new, censored, combined edition of Huck and Tom Sawyer as being more suitable for "a much broader, younger, and less experienced reading audience" -- that is, children, including those in grade school.

Huck is not a children's book. Tom Sawyer is, and Twain meant it that way. But Huck is not some sunlit lazy float down the river by a couple of rapscallions, although people who do not know the book sometimes characterize it that way. Even if you excise all those "n" words, Huck is a deeply dark, unflinching look at the violence at the heart of the American experience. It is rife not only with the savagery of slavery but with murder, lynching and child abuse.

It is a brilliant book, perhaps the strongest claimant to the title of Great American Novel. But I wouldn't teach it to a grade school class unless I were hellbent on giving them nightmares. Huck requires mature and thoughtful readers, not "younger and less experienced" ones.

But maybe that sound I'm hearing isn't Twain spinning, but Twain laughing (albeit a little bitterly).  He had plenty of experience with people misunderstanding books; as he wrote in a letter in 1907, "But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me."