End of Summer Reading

My grandson, much like many 16-year-olds, I suspect, didn’t start attacking his summer reading list until the last possible minute, just before the start of school. I found him with his nose in a book called James, by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as told from the perspective of Jim. At dinner, I asked him what he thought of the book. I had just finished a Twain biography and an anthology of his works. 

“Well, I didn’t like the N word used throughout the book,” he said. 

“But the book mirrors the time and place in which it was written,” I said, “when raw bigotry was common. Taking out or changing that word would hide the true ugliness of the racism of that time.”

“Yes, but I just don’t like seeing it in print like this, shouted out on the page,” he said. 

It was a valid point and an honest reaction. Old memories began to stir, from the time I worked in my father’s parking lot. My father had several black employees, and I remember confronting him about the way he referred to them. He didn’t use the N word, but the Yiddish word, shvartser, which means, literally, black person. His generation didn’t see the term as offensive, simply a descriptive word, but somehow it felt wrong to me to identify people by the color of their skin. There were very few times in my youth when I stood up to my father, especially during those years he towered over me. I told him, eye to eye, but looking up, that the word shvartser was inappropriate and insulting to the men who worked so hard for him. These men all had first and last names, and he should use them. 

“But they are black, aren’t they?” he responded.

To my father’s credit, he never again used it in my presence. Did I change his mind? I went away to college in 1958, and I have no way of knowing what kind of terminology he used after that, but I would like to think that I did.