The N-Word: Still Troublesome After All These Years

The N-word appears sparingly in James, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel that reinvents the escaped slave narrative while it recycles Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a classic set in the antebellum American South where Black men and Black women, both free and enslaved, were lashed with the word “nigger.” Make no mistake about it, the word “nigger” hurt. The words, “darkies” and “Negro,” also show up in a text that aims to cast the enslaved Black man in a heroic light. “Colored” – as in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People— isn’t used in the text. Nor is the phrase “Black folk,” which W. E. B. Bu Bois popularized.

The phrase “the N-word” was popularized in the 1990s as an alternative to the word, “nigger.” The power of the N-word has depended on the identity of the person using it and on the context in which it is used. I remember that in the locker room at Huntington High School in the 1950s, Black athletes called one another “nigger.” None of the white athletes did. We knew it was wrong.

A Black person using the N-word might have had more latitude and legitimacy than a white person using the same word, though to foes of racism, the identity of the speaker didn’t matter nor did the context. For abolitionists, old and new, and in the 1850s as well as the 1960s, the N-word was always unacceptable, and objectionable.

In 2021, a Black man employed at Dunkin Donuts in Tampa, Florida, punched a white customer who had repeatedly used the N-word. The Black employee pled guilty to felony battery and was sentenced to two years of house arrest. A spokesman for the state attorney explained that “the white customer at Dunkin Donuts used possibly the most aggressive and offensive term in the English language.” Possibly?

“The N-word is what’s known as “a fighting word”— a word like “kike” or “spic” that can provoke a physical confrontation and lead to violence. In American English, there’s no term more aggressive and more offensive than the term “nigger.” It has come down to us through the ages freighted with the history of slavery and its bloody legacy.

I remember that my friend, Eric Foner said in 1952, when he was 9 and I was 10, “I’ll punch anyone in the mouth who says the word nigger.” Foner was raised in an anti-racist home. Work by the African American artist Charles White hung on the walls.

Diner table conversations explored the civil rights movement, MLK, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, a major player in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott who observed “The bus was among the first ways I realized there was a black world and a white world.” Like the bus, the N-word provides a key to unlock the prison house of racism that has chained Blacks and straight-jacketed whites.

In James, white men wear blackface, pretend to be Black men and in a traveling minstrel show entertain white audiences. James is recruited by the minstrels; he becomes a black man pretending to be a white man playing a Black man. As Everett shows, chattel slavery spawned absurdities as well as cruelties.

Mark Twain uses the N-word more than 200 times in Huck Finn. That might seem excessive; censorious librarians and some communities have thought so, and have removed Huck Finn from shelves. It’s one of the most frequently censored books in the U.S.

Twain’s 1884 novel has also influenced generations of American writers, perhaps never more so than right now, with the publication of James, an homage to Huck Finn. Hemingway surely exaggerated when he wrote in 1935 that, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” He added, “It’s the best book we’ve had.” Percival probably wouldn’t agree with Hemingway. I don’t agree, either. In the acknowledgements to James, Percival, who is African American, pays his respects to Twain’s “humor and humanity. ” He had both in great abundance and used humor and humanity to skewer and satirize.

Nearly 150 years ago, when Twain used the N-word in Huck Finn he struck a nerve that’s still vibrating.H. L. Mencken didn’t include it in his comprehensive story of the American language, but he did include the phrase “Nigger in a wood pile” which was used by Democrats in the 1850s to belittle Republican Party efforts to abolish slavery.

A cartoon from that era depicts a Black man in a cage made of rails, probably because Lincoln was once a rail splitter. Two white men stand above the incarcerated Black man. One of them says to the other, “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, for I can see ‘the Nigger’ peeping through the rails.”

Using the word “nigger” 200 times probably didn’t strike Twain as excessive. After all, he grew up as a happy white boy in a time of slavery, when the N-word was nearly as harsh a weapon as the whip, the chain and the rope. A rope left in a tree after a lynching, served as a warning, James observes,, to everyone with a black skin.

The N-word helped enforce the ironclad rules of race, class and caste. In the eyes of prosperous white people, Percival’s main character explains, “a very poor white person” is “something worse” than a Black man. A disgrace to the white race.

Everett moderates his use of the N-word. He also makes James, not Huck, the main character, and he turns Jim into James, an eloquent writer, a deep thinker and an impassioned Black rebel reminiscent of Nat Turner who led an insurrection against slavery in 1832. James calls himself “the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night.” Earlier, he says, “I hated the world that wouldn’t let me apply justice without the certain retaliation of injustice.”

In the course of his adventures on and around the muddy Mississippi, James breaks through what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the color line,” which, he explained, in The Souls of Black Folk was “the problem of the twentieth century…the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”

At one point, James seems like an ancestor of Emmett Till, the Chicago-born Black teenager who was lynched for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. At the age of 13, James explains, he “made the misstep of speaking to a young white woman who said hello.”A slip of the tongue almost makes him a corpse.

Mostly, James knows how to play dumb and how to speak the way a slave is supposed to speak to whites, deferentially. But sometimes he liberates himself from the tyranny of Black dialect and reveals his true colors.

In James, Everett makes space for James to regain the humanity that is sometimes denied him in Twain’s novel, especially when Tom Sawyer is on the scene. Huck Finn glorifies the Mississippi River, unmasks the scoundrels on its shores and honors a friendship that cuts across the color line.

Published after the end of Reconstruction, when Blacks voted and held public office, Huck Finn calls for equality between Blacks and whites, and for an end to the kind of cruel shenanigans that Tom Sawyer plays on Jim. Everett’s story takes place just before the outbreak of the American Civil War and during the war itself, which heightens the tensions of the novel. Twain’s novel takes place in the 1840s.

In James, which is broken into short, compact chapters, with short sentences and very few big words, the reader sees, hears and feels the world through the eyes, ears and skin of a literate, adult Black man who crafts his own story as an escaped enslaved African American.

“I am a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self written,” he asserts. James adds “with my pencil I write myself into being.” He also picks up a gun and uses it to settle scores and liberate the enslaved.

Some of the books that could be featured in a study of American English and that would focus on the N-word include Carl Van Vecthen’s Nigger Heaven (1926), a novel about the Harlem Renaissance. It could also include H. Brown’s Die Nigger Die, published near the height of the Black Power movement. Brown, now known as Jamil Abdullah al–Amin, meant to salvage and reinvent the N-word, He was a “nigger” in much the same way that some feminists were “witches” and “bitches” and that homosexuals and lesbians were “queer.”

Black Panther Party member, Don Cox, titled his autobiography Just Another Nigger. His publisher, Heyday, changed the title to Making Revolution: My Life in the Black Panther Party after Black bookstore owners said that they would not carry or sell the book under its original title.

A linguistic history of the N-word might conclude with President Barack Obama’s remark in a 2015 podcast that slavery “still casts a long shadow” on American life. Obama added “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, condemned the president’s use of the term. “It ought to be retired from the English language,” he said. “Put it right next to the flag, in a linguistic museum. It belongs with the flag. It belongs with the hood.” I assume he means the white hood worn by members of the KKK.

Harvard Professor, Randall Kennedy, the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002), would likely have cheered Obama when he aired his views on the N-word. Like comedian, Lenny Bruce, Professor Kennedy believed tbat the word “nigger” would lose its sting if it was used again and again openly, and thereby detoxified.

Black rappers and hip hop artists brought back the N-word big time, though they sometimes spelled it “Nigga.” One of Tupac Shakur’s best known albums is titled “Strictly 4 My N.I. G. G. A. Z.” The son of Black Panther, Afeni Shakur, Tupac explained that “Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing; niggas is the ones with gold ropes, hanging out at clubs.” Percival Everett might echo him. So would H. Rap Brown.