Can Literature Come to the Rescue When History Is Under Siege? How One Novel Can Be a Trojan Horse to Engage Questions Some Politicians Don't Want Us to Ask

Under pressure from right-wing Republican politicians, more than half of US states have passed measures designed to discourage teachers from teaching their students about the role that racism has played in the United States' past and present. This article argues that teaching Mark Twain's 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the potential to let teachers to do an end run around that ban. It distills arguments I make in my 2025 book, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (Yale UP). Recognized as a cornerstone of the United States' literary heritage, this celebrated canonical novel written by a very dead, very white male author is a book that can be a Trojan Horse enabling us to open our classrooms to issues these politicians do not want discussed. However, the novel has long been challenged by progressives who charge that it bolsters the racism that it supposedly attacks. This article argues that Jim, the main Black character in the book, has been sold down the river for nearly a century and a half – unjustly demeaned, denigrated, and dismissed as "minstrel show" stereotype. Paying him the attention that he deserves opens up new ways of understanding the history of race and racism in the United States and offers distinctive insights into the challenges of representing Black intelligence, emotion, and creativity in a world that denied their existence – a challenge shouldered not only by Twain himself but also by scores of writers, Black and white, who followed.