In the more than 40 years that I taught high school English, only one parent complained about a book, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Like most public school districts, mine has policies to address challenged materials, including a review committee that weighs the literary and educational merits with the age and maturity of students. This father, however, opted to meet with me first to make his case that Twain’s racial epithets are problematic.
I agreed they are. I added that the resolution of the book is problematic as well. After discovering runaway Jim’s humanity, Huck abdicates his own when Tom Sawyer enlists his help to imprison and torment Jim for fun.
Layered throughout the story, however, is a deep call to justice and mercy that deserves a look. I argued that my students were smart enough to make their own evaluations.
I didn’t change that father’s mind about the book, but I did change his mind about his daughter. Although I offered her an alternative assignment, her father decided to trust her. He told me he thought she would benefit more from reading the book and discussing it in my class after all.
I’ve thought about that concerned father a great deal lately as challenges to science curricula, American history, and library books are threatened with banning, burning, and even bounties on teachers across the country. I’ll leave it to future historians to determine how much of the current unrest is a result of pandemic trauma, media manipulation, astroturfing groups like Moms for Liberty, or political expediency.
What is obvious right now is the very real danger of wholesale censorship, like the investigation of public school libraries that South Carolina’s governor has ordered. Set aside the concerns about ignoring school district policies or limiting the freedom to read or invalidating the professional judgment of librarians and teachers. More baffling to me is the new rationale that books shouldn’t make children feel uncomfortable or distressed.
Literature should do just that, and in doing so, teach us how to be human. When we read a novel, we understand another’s point of view, whether we agree with it or not. We vicariously become that character, walking their path and seeing their world.
In a widely seen ad from the recent governor’s race in Virginia, a mother recounts the story of her then 17-year-old son upset when he read Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” The son found the book such hard going that he didn’t finish it. His mother complained to the school district.
“Beloved” is, in fact, disturbing. It’s supposed to be. Anyone who reads about the main character’s enslavement, abuse, violent choices, and lifelong guilt should feel empathy. Not just sympathy, but heart-shaking empathy that forces us to see someone else’s pain as real as our own.
I wish that instead of rushing to the school district to complain, that Virginia mother had taught her son the perseverance of finishing a difficult book instead of taking the easy way out. I wish she had reassured her son that his reaction to the book was proof he was learning to be kind and open and empathetic. I wish instead of rushing to protect his feelings, she had recognized them as a mark of his growing maturity, his foray into a world larger than himself.
Because that’s what books do, when we let them.
Kay McSpadden taught high school english in York, S.C. Reach her at kmcspadden@comporium.net.