The Day They Came to Arrest the Book Read Online Free

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book
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asking John Wayne if he preferred his Vietnamese babies baked or fried.
    A bunch of students and faculty members tore the signs down and hustled the troublemakers outside. The principal had apologized to Mr. Wayne. But Duke—that was his nickname—standing up there so big and so calm, he said he didn’t mind those noisy students. That’s the American way, Duke said—speaking your mind even if there’s nothing in it. He got a big cheer for that.
    Looking at the wall the morning that Mr. McLean was due for his
Huckleberry Finn
appointment, it occurred to Mr. Moore that practically all the photographs were of whites. There were a couple of black ministers; the president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; a young black soprano who had won a regional competition but had then sunk like a stone; and a once and former black member of the school board. But that was about it.
    Mr. Moore was wondering whether anyone in the social studies department had a large photograph of Martin Luther King, but he dropped the idea. It would look phony—the only photograph on the wall without himself in it. Maybe he could say he’d been sick that day. No, too curious a coincidence. Well, he must invite more black speakers. There was certainly an imbalance on that wall. It would take a while to make it ten percent black, but that was a sound goal. Mr. Moore felt good at having made this affirmative-action decision.
    He looked at his watch, frowned, and wished he hadmade that decision some time ago. There was a knock at the door.
    “Yes, Rena?” Mr. Moore said.
    His secretary opened the door. “Mr. McLean to see you.”
       Carl McLean had done all of the talking, occasionally nodding to his son, first to supply a page reference, and then
Huckleberry Finn
itself—from which Mr. McLean would then read in a firm, angry voice. At least, the principal was thinking, the black parent had not seemed to pay any particular attention to the wall of photographs.
    “It is not only the profusion, the infestation of the word ‘nigger’ in this book,” Carl McLean continued. “I have shown you more than enough of that. Every time a black child sees that word, it is an insult, a profound insult. But underneath all these insults, of course, is the utterly barbarous attitude toward black people this epithet reflects. Gordon, that dialogue about the accident on the steamboat—”
    “Page one ninety-three, Dad.” Gordon handed his father the copy of
Huckleberry Finn.”
    “They are talking about an accident”—Carl McLean looked at the principal, who was raptly following his every word—“and there is this dialogue:
    “ ‘We blowed out a cylinder head.’
    “ ‘Good gracious! Anybody hurt?’
    “ ‘No’m. Killed a nigger.’
    “ ‘Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.’ ”
    The father closed the book and gave it back to his son. “Now,” Carl McLean said, “there is no question that’s the way most whites felt about blacks at the time. And if the truth be told, at the present time as well. But is that suitable material for a classroom where the young are presumably being educated to become, at long last, civilized in matters of race?”
    “Well”—Mr. Moore cleared his throat—“it’s been a long time since I read
Huckleberry Finn
myself. I guess I was about Gordon’s age”—he smiled at the student, who did not smile back—“when I had to read it for school too. I did refresh my recollection of it, to some extent, last night; and while I am no scholar in the American novel, the possibility occurs to me that Mark Twain was expressing disapproval of racial bigotry in that passage.”
    Leaning forward, Carl McLean pointed at the book in his son’s lap and then at the principal. “On that page there is not a line, not a word, of disapproval of the concept that black people are not human. Not from any of the characters. Not from the narrator, Finn. And
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