Recently, there has been much ado about nothing, in my opinion, concerning the “N” word and Mark Twain’s classic, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Because that certain ugly word is used over 200 times in the novel, it is the fourth most banned book in the U.S.  And some politically correct-minded publishers, outraged African Americans, and a host of others want to exchange one dirty word, “nigger,” for another dirty word, “slave.”  Is this the come up? 

Why change the “N” word now? Who cares? You cannot retroactively re-write the heart of a nation. Let alone the time period they lived in. Mark Twain’s Adventure’s of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. As a writer who has devised characters with some truly offensive and perhaps mind-numbing beliefs, I am totally against censorship of an artist’s work.  I suggest if something is not your taste, spit it out.  Take a bite of something else.  I’m inclined to agree with Mark Twain when he said: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

For “Hamlet’s Soliloquy” alone, I could forgive some of those “N” words. Almost. “When churchyards yawn in customary suits of solemn blackness”?  This skit is hilarious! Looky here:

To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great natures’ second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of….

For Huck’s take on the “interior decorations” of the dead girl’s room on “the farm in Arkansaw,” I could forgive all. Perhaps. Looky here:

“There was some [pictures] that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before; blacker, mostly, than is common.

One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the arm-pits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said “Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.”

Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.”

There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing-wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket and underneath the picture it said “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas.”

These was all nice pictures, I reckon , but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little, they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard.

Shoot, it’s too late to try to clean this skit up now. Put lipstick on the ugly?  What for?  Sanitize the past?  How?  Cover shame with a band aid?  The band aid’s not big enough people.  What are your thoughts?