The Day They Came to Arrest the Book

by Nat Hentoff

  “Yup.” Baines nodded. “Very strong feminist. Thinks it essential that feminists make political alliances with blacks. One for the other side.”

  “Frank Sylvester. He’s—”

  “Chairman of the English department,” Nora Baines said. “A straight arrow. Never uses any book in his own classes that anyone would object to, but he doesn’t censor anybody else in the department. Says he’s not a policeman. A vote for us. Maybe.”

  “Why maybe?” Luke asked.

  “Because,” said Nora, “I don’t know how stiff a backbone Frank has when the heat gets put on him in public. Next.”

  “Two parents.” Deirdre looked at the list. “Evelyn Kantrow and Stanley Lomax.”

  “Kantrow,” Nora Baines said, “is a big wheel in the Republican party. Not only locally. She’s a state committeewoman. Can’t tell anything from that, though. In my experience, Democrats like to censor just as much as Republicans. Lomax is a professor of sociology at the college. And he’s black. That’s all I know about him. Except for his daughter. Eleanor Lomax is the most argumentative young woman I have ever had to teach. She drives me up the wall! But maybe that means they prize free speech at home. We’ll see. Still, he is black. Mark Professor Lomax as a very possible vote against Huck.”

  “Are you stereotyping, Nora?” Deirdre looked at the history teacher.

  “Move on” was Nora’s answer.

  “And two members from the community at large—Ben Maddox and Sandy Wicks.”

  “Maddox is an old party,” Nora Baines noted. “A lawyer. I don’t know what kind of law he practices. All kinds, I guess. We’re not a big enough town for specialists. Maddox has been around here forever. But I can’t remember his ever having had anything to do with the school. Mark his vote unknown.

  “On the other hand,” Baines went on, “Sandy Wicks should be on our side. She’s managing editor of the Daily Tribune. Good Lord, if journalists don’t understand the First Amendment, who will?”

  Deirdre looked up. “Sounds as if the committee could go either way. Oh, I found out something else. There’s a second formal complaint. About sexism in the book.”

  “Ye gods!” said Baines. “Who’s that from?”

  “One of our own.” Deirdre sighed. “A math teacher. Morgan, I think her name is.”

  “Oh, yes.” Nora Baines sniffed. “Cynthia Morgan. Kate’s in her class. A conspiracy, if you ask me. Just what are the charges?”

  “All the women in the book,” Deirdre said, “are caricatures. Sentimental, not very bright, sometimes just foolish. If they’re married, they’re subservient to their husbands. None of them shows any real independence. This kind of pervasive sexism in the book—the complaint goes on—is harmful to the self-image of every female student in the school and is also harmful to the male students because it encourages them to hold on to ignorant stereotypes of women.”

  “Humph!” Nora Baines scowled. “The women in Huckleberry Finn are no more foolish than the men in Huckleberry Finn. And the women don’t go around cheating and murdering people like most of the men do.”

  “That’s not all,” Deirdre said. “Another complaint is on its way from Parents for Moral Schools.”

  “Let me guess what’s bothering their pinched little souls,” Nora snapped. “This book is unfit for school consumption because Huck and Jim were always naked on the raft when there was no one else around.”

  “How did you ever guess?” Deirdre smiled. “But that’s just the first item in the complaint. Your friend, Huck, it goes on, is a liar and a thief. And he makes fun of religion and everything else respectable people hold dear. Also, considering that this book is being used in a school, Huck speaks very badly. His grammar is atrocious. Shall I go on?”

  “A disgrace!” Nora Baines slapped her hand on the table. “This whole thing is a disgrace. But let me tell you something.” Nora looked around at Barney and Luke. “This is going to be a very important learning experience. For all of us. Before it’s over, we’ll know who the sons and daughters of liberty are, and we’ll know who the Tories are. Including the ones who’ll be keeping their heads down so they can’t be counted—so they think. But I’ll count them, because you can’t be in the middle in this kind of fight.”

  Deirdre, somewhat troubled, looked at Nora. “You sound like Madame Defarge. You sound absolutely vengeful, as if you’re going to do something to every single person on the other side.”

  “I’m sure going to try, Deirdre,” the history teacher said. “I have no more dangerous enemies than those who want to dictate what I can teach and what I can’t teach. Who want to censor what my students can read and cannot read. Don’t you understand that it’s a matter of life and death? If I don’t get these people first, sooner or later they’re going to finish me off.”

  “You’re right, Miss Baines,” Luke said. “I can see those firemen, clear as hell, coming right into this library, and then going after books in every house in town.”

  “Oh, my,” Deirdre said softly. “I do think we’ll all be a lot more effective if we stay a lot more cool. And”—she turned to Nora Baines—“if we stay less personal. This is a principle we’re fighting for. Turning everybody on the other side into a personal enemy really goes against that principle, Nora. They have a right to think as they do. They have a right to be wrong. Come on, next thing you’ll be punching them out.”

  “The delightful vision has been in my thoughts.” Nora smiled.

  “Oh, great,” said the librarian. “That’d help us no end.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Baines laughed. “I’ll stay cool, but I’ll also be making up a list for later.”

  “I forgot something else.” Deirdre looked into the manila file she had come in with. “There’s something attached to the complaint from Parents for Moral Schools that fits right into your nineteenth-century American history course, Nora.” She found the Xerox copy of the sheet and read aloud:

  “From the March 17, 1885 Boston Transcript: ‘The Concord [Massachusetts] Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The librarian and other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.’ ”

  “ ‘The veriest trash,’ ” Nora Baines grumbled. “ ‘The veriest trash.’ See how far we’ve come in all this time.”

  XI

  In class the next morning, Nora Baines, pacing in front of her desk, was saying: “Now, Huck likes to be free, to be on his own, to just be floating down the Mississippi on the raft with Jim. Yet as much as he enjoys Jim’s company, Huck often speaks of being lonely. Jim and the river aren’t quite enough. Even though nearly every time Huck comes in contact with civilization, things turn out badly, he still needs, somehow, to be part of society. The question is whether someone like Huck can fit into society and, at the same time, stay as free as he has to be. And that brings us back to de Tocqueville—”

  “I am not going to hear any more of this.” Gordon McLean stood up. “I don’t have to stay and be forced to hear about a book that insults me and everybody who looks like me.”

  “Gordon,” Miss Baines said, “as you know, this book is now being reviewed to see if it should continue being part of this course. But until that decision is made, I am going to continue to teach it. You do not condemn a book, any more than you would a person, before there’s a trial. If you would rather not be in class when we discuss Huckleberry Finn, I will assign you another book that the two of us will work on.”

  “No,” Gordon McLean said. “I am not going to be part of this course at all until that book is gone. Gone without a trace.” He looked around the room. “Well? Am I the only on
e who feels that way?”

  Five of the other six black students rose and moved toward the door, as did three white students, including Kate.

  “Hey,” Barney turned around in his seat and called after the protesters, “for God’s sake, this is a book about two people, one white and one black, who like each other a hell of a lot and who stick by each other. Is that what you’re walking out on?”

  “And the white guy always uses the word ‘nigger’ when he talks about the black guy,” Gordon McLean said sarcastically from the door. “You know something, Barney Roth? You’re one of those whites who talk a good game about being against prejudice and all that, but it’s all talk. When the time comes to move, to do something, like walk out of this racist class, you just sit there. Talking. Talking. Well, I’ve heard enough talking. All my life, I’ve heard enough talking.”

  McLean and the eight other students left. Miss Baines rubbed her forehead, rubbed her chin, and looked at Steve Turney, a thin, bespectacled black student who remained.

  “You want to know why I didn’t go with them?” Turney said. “Simple. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m the only person I allow to make up my mind. And I want to know some more about this Huckleberry Finn before I do make up my mind. So let’s go ahead.”

  “This whole thing is about us,” Kate would begin her speech whenever she descended on a group of students. As she did during lunch hour on the day of the walkout from Nora Baines’s class. “So we ought to be there. We ought to tell that review committee we don’t want a racist, sexist book in our classes. Monday night—in the auditorium. Be there.”

  Sometimes Gordon McLean was with her. Sometimes he recruited on his own.

  “This is it,” Gordon would say. “This is your time to be counted. Which side are you on? You still thinking like slave owners and slaves, or are you going to get this damn book kicked out of here?”

  The other students, looking uncomfortable, just listened. Some said they’d be there Monday night, but few said which side they’d be on.

  Meanwhile, the organizers of the Keep Huck Finn Free campaign were getting similar responses. There was a certain amount of interest in maybe going to see the review committee in action, but not much passion, one way or another, about whether Huck ought to stay at George Mason or go back on the raft with Jim.

  “Well, look at it this way,” Luke said to Barney as they were walking across the campus. “I don’t see a bonfire around here yet. We’re that much ahead.”

  Barney shook his head gloomily. “What the hell’s the matter with them? It’s like talking to a bunch of sheep.”

  Kate was coming toward them.

  “I hear you haven’t been able to stir up the masses much either,” Barney said to her.

  “We’ve been doing all right,” Kate said coolly as she stopped in front of Barney and Luke. “The ones on our side are solid. Solid like a rock.”

  “Another way of saying they’re thick.” Luke grinned.

  “Tell your mentally underdeveloped friend”—Kate looked at Barney—“that I don’t descend to that level of conversation.”

  “Kate,” Barney said, lightly putting his hand on her arm and watching it dangle as she moved back, “if you win, where does this end? First this book. Then it’ll be another book. It’s like the Nazis.”

  “Barnaby Roth”—she pointed a finger up toward his forehead—“do you remember what that yo-yo from the ACLU said in the debate last week? That he’d allow a book in this school that said no Jews were killed by the Nazis, that there were no concentration camps, that the Holocaust never happened? Would you let that book in?”

  “Sure.” Barney nodded. “It’s like the guy from the ACLU said. The best way to deal with lies is to expose them, to get them out into the light.”

  “The best way to deal with vicious lies, my friend,” Kate said sharply, “is to not give them a chance to infect people. And that means killing them wherever you find them. Without debate. You can no more have a serious debate about whether the Holocaust ever happened than you can about whether blacks are inferior. Giving those so-called ideas the respectability of a debate helps them spread. So, if a book about the Holocaust being a fake ever came into this school, I would be leading the fight to keep it out, by any means necessary. And how a Jew, of all people, can feel differently, I don’t understand. Unless”—Kate looked away from Barney—“you’re one of those self-hating Jews.”

  “Hey”—Luke frowned—“I can see why you didn’t want to descend to my level of conversation. You go so much lower.”

  Barney said nothing because he didn’t trust his voice. He required firmness and anger from it, and he was afraid it would choke up instead.

  That afternoon, Maggie Crowley, faculty adviser to the George Mason Standard, put the sheets of manuscript on the table, arranged them into a neat pile, and looked at Barney.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “Just one part of your editorial about Huck is the matter. The rest is fine, but I don’t think you need this.” She picked up one of the sheets and read:

  “ ‘Can you imagine what would happen if George Mason himself was the principal, right now, of the school that bears his name? George Mason, the great friend of Thomas Jefferson and of free speech and press. He would be leading the battle for our right to read Huckleberry Finn.

  “ ‘But what is the principal we do have doing? Nothing. He is not leading the fight for Huck and for us. He is not doing anything. He is just sitting back waiting for the verdict to come in. But if George Mason and his friends had not spoken out in 1776, this would be a British school today, and we would never have known independence. That’s something for our principal to think about.’ ”

  “The grammar’s all right, isn’t it?” Barney asked.

  “Well,” Maggie Crowley said, “it should be: ‘If George Mason himself were the principal, right now.’ But you know what I’m talking about. You are asking for trouble, Barney.”

  “I’m not going to ask Mr. Moore to write any letter of recommendation for me to any college.”

  “He may volunteer,” Maggie said. “Mr. Moore does not like to be ridiculed. He most especially does not like to be ridiculed by one of his students. In public yet. And he does not forget such things.”

  “So what could he say”—Barney frowned—“if he wrote a letter about me? That I’m a good enough researcher to have found out that George Mason was against censorship?”

  “He could say you are a chronically disrespectful, irresponsible young man who is always spoiling for a fight with anyone in authority.” Maggie Crowley pushed her glasses down to her nose and proceeded. “His letter about you to colleges is also likely to say that if they admit this agitator—you—they will have nothing but trouble. And they will have only themselves to blame because they had been warned.”

  “Mr. Moore would do that, wouldn’t he?” Barney sighed.

  “He very well might. Do you really have to attack him? It’s the book that’s at stake. Mr. Moore is a secondary issue.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Barney muttered. “Miss Crowley, you’re trying to talk me into selling out.”

  “That’s crazy,” Maggie Crowley said. “You won’t be retreating an inch on censorship if you leave out just the part about Mr. Moore.”

  “If I do what you want, I’ll be censoring myself about him, and I’ll be doing it to benefit myself. That’s selling out.”

  “Then you can say I’m selling out too.” Maggie Crowley got up from her chair and walked to the window. “I am strongly advising you to cut out those two paragraphs for your own good—but also for my own good, and for the good of the paper. If your attack on him runs, Mr. Moore will be even more furious at me than at you because I didn’t stop you. I mean, because I didn’t persuade you to be a responsible editor, as he would put it.”

  “Responsible to whom?” Barney glowered.

  “Oh, stop it! I’m not the enemy,” Maggie Crowley said. “Look, I like do
ing this. I like working with kids—I beg your pardon, students—outside a classroom. Especially on the Standard. When I was in high school, one of my fantasies was being a star reporter, scooping everybody all over the world. This is as close as I’ll get, and I’m good at this. I’m especially good at talking a lot of stuff past Mr. Moore. There are a lot of those sessions you don’t even know about.”

  “I know about some that you didn’t win,” Barney said. “We’ve had to back down on some things.”

  “That’s right.” Maggie Crowley nodded. “But that’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen if I get booted out as adviser to the paper because I allowed this personal attack—and that’s just the way Mr. Moore’s going to take it—to go through. So which is preferable, my friend? Backing down once in a while so we can be free the rest of the time, or going too far in this editorial so that he’ll send someone in to take over from me? Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Barney? In your way of putting it, I have sold out a little every once in a while in terms of the paper. But look at what I’ve saved. Look at what we have gotten in. If I stay—and I’m quite sure I won’t if you print that attack—the paper will be a lot less free than if I don’t stay. What would you do in my place?”

  “I wouldn’t have taken the job as faculty adviser in the first place,” Barney said.

  “But somebody has to do it.”

  “It wouldn’t be me.” Barney looked past her.

  “So”—Maggie Crowley pushed her eyeglasses onto her hair again—“as a faculty member devoted to free expression, you would not be involved with the paper, leaving your hands absolutely clean, while the Standard was being censored week after week. Of what use to anyone would your purity be?”

  “Okay, okay,” Barney said. “Maybe if I was—were—you, I’d do what you’re doing. And I suppose you’re right that if those two paragraphs run, you won’t be the adviser anymore, and that’s going to be bad for the paper. But before I say what I’m going to do about those two paragraphs, I want it understood that if Mr. Moore ordered me not to print them, I’d get that ACLU lawyer and take Mr. Moore to court, and I’d win. Because this would be an absolutely clear case of prior restraint. The other times, he could argue we were being obscene or something like that. But this time, he’d be going smack against the First Amendment.”