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It's a classic for a reason. So glad it was req reading in high school. 🙌🙌

I'm dealing with the "N" word in my face, over and over again, in the dialogue of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I'm reading it aloud to my girls, so I've become adept at skimming ahead on the page and making sure I don't ever need to expose my children to that word. I know that Mark Twain (and Harper Lee) were Southern writers who were tasked at conveying authentic dialogue between their characters, and they were both excellent at doing just that, but I've never before been had to deal with such a pervasive use of it in dialogue before, when I am the one reading the material aloud. I have discussed the general topic with both girls, letting them know that both native peoples and people of color are reduced in local dialogue by the kids in 1870s Missouri, but I still don't want to read it aloud.

So what do you say when you come to it? It’s a word my parents spoke often, and my childhood peers used it frequently without fully understanding its vile connotations. “Eenie Menie Minie Mo, catch an N-Word by his toe...��

For me it was my grandfather who spoke this way. It always twisted my intestines, when he did.
I'm reading "Injun" for "Indian," because with a character named "Injun Joe," it's hard to avoid, but when it comes to the "N" word, I'm either reading "a Black man in town" or, sometimes, I am skipping the entire passage.
Thank goodness I used to teach speed reading, because l am needing to stay several steps ahead of myself here.

Sadly, it’s a pejorative that has not died, as witnessed by a thousand recent videos in a thousand recent incidents.

There's a lot that's sad to me, about our current world.
The racial slur "chink" has been used around me my entire life, and it wasn't until I became the mother of Chinese daughters that it finally stopped being used around me, though I did have the pleasure of having a random bus driver who got in my face and asked me if I thought I was "buying a pass to Heaven by adopting my Chink daughter."
As a middle class white woman, I have suffered very little racism, personally, but the infrequent examples of it that I have endured by having a biracial family, have been enough of an eye opener to me that too many people are not out there "spreading the love."
I'm convinced that fear is behind most racism, and it's challenging to teach people to fear less and love more, especially when everything around us seems hell-bent on making us more afraid.

When I read it aloud to my kids, we used the “polite�� Southern pronunciation of the word, “negro.�� I explained that was the acceptable term, meaning black in Spanish. “Nigra�� was probably a corruption of the word “nègre”—the correct French word for black. Poor, uneducated people heard it as “nigger.�� You could probably read if you said “nigra.�� (a corruptions of the French pronunciation.) You we’re educated, or a Northerner, if you said “negro.�� The hard r sound of the n-word was always offensive. The other pronunciations depended entirely of inflection and context. Today, in English, we say “black.�� Sometimes a bit of history is helpful to explain fiction in its context.

I meant, I varied the word, depending on the speaker and intent. Negro for some speakers, nigra with attitude for some, and both for neutral speakers, depending on their character.

The grammar and spelling errors are entirely autocorrect! Were is a verb! Not we’re�� exasperating not to be able to correct these gobbled posts.

Very helpful Mary Catherine, thank you. My parents were always VERY hard on their R’s 😞

Kevin, I laughed at your description! My father was from East Texas—not an enlightened place. But he married my Yankee mom from liberal Washington State. I never heard him use the hard R in my mom’s hearing. His kin were more of the “nigra�� or “colored�� pronunciation—they frightened me when we once visited that benighted place. He did try explaining Southern racism to us very carefully. Mostly, he hated that he saw racism in the North where it was often unspoken or muttered under the breath. When he heard people here use the n-word he was shocked. He said, “I don’t think they’ve ever seen a colored person! Why are they so full of hate?�� He had many racist ideas but on an individual basis, he was far more comfortable with Black people than most Northerners, and treated them with respect—probably because he was raised to know how to be respectful in a way that most Black people appreciated, particularly those from the South. He was a poor, self educated man who grew up among racists and saw horrible things. He had hoped to leave all that behind when he chose to live in the North. He did, for the most part. His kids stretched his tolerance considerably. My first husband was African American , and he eventually coped with that. My brother’s second wife is English/Canadian but her parents were Jamaican and Nigerian. His granddaughters married a Chinese American, Ugandan, and Afro-Colombian. He managed to cope with them all, sometimes questioning, critical, or admiring their behavior, but never their color. He would defend any of them if he heard a racial slur from a stranger, though I understand he didn’t mind a few of his own when we weren’t around, but only after an ugly divorce, or following mistreatment of his kids. Some of those marriages endured; some didn’t. But even old racists can learn to be better.

I forgot the Mexican. We are a little mixed up in my family!