Jenice Armstrong: Why whitewash n-word from 'Huck Finn'?

I DESPISE THE N-WORD but not so much that I think it needs to be removed from great works of literature such as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," as one publisher is doing.

The racial epithet appears a whopping 219 times in the Mark Twain classic. As a way to get more schools, particularly the ones that have banned it, to teach the historic novel, NewSouth Books has replaced the slur with the word "slave" in the edition that's coming out next month.

Somebody better call the literature police.

Those two words are not synonyms. Nope, not even close. They each mean something entirely different. Besides, tampering with Twain's epic tale of the friendship between a runaway boy and an escaped slave is equivalent to painting a hat on Mona Lisa's head. Or to putting booty shorts on Michaelangelo's David. You don't jack around with great art, even if it jars our modern-day sensibilities.

I suspect Twain's stomping around in heaven at the very concept.

Not that you can blame him.

I'm not completely unsympathetic to the folks at NewSouth, though. They're in the business of selling books, and a whole lot of schools shy away from teaching this one because of discomfort over language.

The book is banned in some districts and placed on optional-reading lists in others.

It's easier to substitute another great novel instead of having to explain the historical context for Twain's use of the n-word and risk getting parents and students all worked up.

I'll never forget how uncomfortable it made me feel when our high-school class was introduced to the book and we read passages aloud.

This was the dark ages, of course, well before the n-word had become the norm in certain forms of music, so I wasn't used to it. But I understood that the language was reflective of the pre-Civil War era and that it was how certain folks talked back then. And, sadly, continue to speak.

Still, I cringed when a friend read aloud from "Huckleberry Finn," laughing and stumbling over the unfamiliar vernacular.

But I'm not for censuring or hacking up books. Instead of teaching from a sanitized Twain, educators should just pick another classic novel altogether.

There are plenty that are equally as good and have similar themes. I've never been much a "Huckleberry Finn" fan anyway. The plot starts off interesting enough, but devolves into a whole lot of tomfoolery along the way that made my eyes glaze over, as the expression goes.