BOOK REVIEW

Educational Print and Outreach Department.  _Huck Finn Coursepack._:
Includes video documentary:  _Born to Trouble:  Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_, 90 minutes; _Huck Finn in Context:  A Teaching Guide_, 40 pp., 8-1/2"
x 11", and companion readings approved for classroom use, 259 pp., 8-1/2" x
11".  WGBH Educational Foundation, 2000.  $8.75 plus $4.75 shipping and
handling (total:  $13.50).  No ISBN.

Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from the
TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions that
benefit the Mark Twain Project.  Please visit
<http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb>.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

David Barber <[log in to unmask]
University of Idaho

 Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be
 published or redistributed in any medium without permission.

This "coursepack"--video documentary, teaching guide, and companion
readings--is aimed primarily at high-school teachers and students, but any
teacher of _Huckleberry Finn_ at any level can profit from purchasing it, as
can any teacher who deals with American slavery or African American history
in general.  Although WGBH gave permission to those who taped the
documentary, when it was first aired January 26, 2000, to show it in
classrooms for one year, it will soon be necessary to own the documentary in
order to show it legally.  And the bonuses are worth even more than the
central item.  The teaching guide is full of useful information and ideas,
and the set of companion readings, approved for reproduction for classroom
use [no worries about publishers' permissions and fees], include many
valuable items for teaching _Huck_ and American race relations generally.

The Enid, Oklahoma, school board paid a great compliment, sight unseen, to
the documentary _Huck Finn:  Born to Trouble_ when in early January of this
year it tabled its decision on retaining or removing Twain's novel from its
high-school curriculum, until after the film aired on January 26.
Subsequently they retained the book and, according to Jim Zwick, "voted to
provide special training on the novel to teachers and to examine other books
that might be added to the curriculum to make it more culturally diverse."1
Evidently the documentary and the teaching guide, which was also available
at the time, influenced the board in a constructive way. The documentary
explores the racial controversies regarding Twain's novel and presents the
conflict between school authorities in Tempe, Arizona, and Kathy Monteiro, a
parent who sued to have the book removed from her daughter's high school.
It describes a case that ended in frustration and community division.  The
teaching guide, on the other hand,  describes how to do it right, how to
handle a challenge to the school curriculum:  the example of Cherry Hill,
New Jersey, where African American parents' challenges to teaching _Huck_
to high-school students generated a constructive dialogue involving the
entire community.

Although the documentary's evident impact in the Enid case is a genuine
success story, for teachers and students it is the least successful and
useful of the three items in the package because it is flawed in two major
ways:  format and lack of balance.  In the ever-more-tiresome style of
talking heads superimposed on frozen images, the documentary piles up
sound-bites:  highly discussible observations which normally are NOT then
subjected to discussion.  If there is an articulated response, it may come
twenty minutes later (or earlier) in someone else's uncontested observation.
Occasionally a sequence will develop a single issue, the most successful
being the students' observations, in Nancy Methelis's class at the Boston
Latin School, on the use of the word "nigger."  But even in this sequence,
the discussants are not talking to each other; they don't know what the
others have said and so their comments do not build on each other.

Another difficulty of format, also a matter of balance, involves the film's
interweaving of four different plot lines:  (1) the events of the novel, (2)
its writing/publication/reception history, (3) Twain's biography, and (4)
the protest at McClintock High School in Tempe by Kathy Monteiro and her
daughter.   Ever-present to interpret the first three plots are the
documentary's scholarly guns:  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Jocelyn
Chadwick-Joshua, David Bradley, and James Miller.  Like Ms. Methelis's
children, they are not talking to each other, though since they all take
similar positions in favor of teaching _Huck_, perhaps it doesn't matter
much.  (James Miller is the most moderate voice, but when in a couple of
places  he begins to articulate what looks like a dissenting view, he gets
cut off.  Discussing the book's Phelps farm sequence, he says, "The ending
is complicated."  Now what scholar would _stop_ at such a sentence?  But
within half a second we are zoomed over to David Bradley as he unfolds HIS
view of the ending.  One wonders about the editor's sense of the issues and
what unused material lies on the electronic cutting room floor.)

So Twain and Huck-the-character and _Huck_-the-novel all have their
sympathetic interpreters.  But who is interpreting Kathy Monteiro, the only
significant voice for the opposition?  She is paired against both the
scholars and against Mark Twain  himself.  It's hideously unfair.  Where is
the scholar/educator to develop her complaints about the classroom use of
"nigger," or her questions about the preparation of the teachers who teach
_Huck_?  Where is the legal expert to evaluate the claims of the First
Amendment _vs._ the Fourteenth Amendment in this case?

It's not that the filmmakers are unsympathetic to Monteiro.  On the
contrary, she emerges as the heroine of the piece, the one who feels the
pain and carries the burden, while the visiting scholars are merely sideline
observers.  The problem is simply that she needs help to articulate her
case!  At some point the makers of the documentary appear to have realized
this, and they ran out--literally, it seems, into the streets, where these
scenes are shot--to interview two vehement critics of Huck:  Julius Lester
and John Wallace.  Each of these got to utter--out in the street, on a cold
day--_one sentence_.  (No time and no soft lighting in elegant rooms for the
bad guys!)  Here is a rough breakdown of the amount of talk time enjoyed by
the various commentators:

        Shelley Fisher Fishkin                          8 minutes
        Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua                   6 minutes
        David Bradley                                        9 minutes
        James Miller                                           5 minutes
        Kathy Monteiro                                  10 minutes
        Julius Lester                                          7 seconds
        John Wallace                                       11 seconds.

Nevertheless, a teacher willing to spend the time to isolate useful segments
of the documentary can get much that is stimulating and usable from it.
More valuable is "_Huck Finn_ in Context:  A Teaching Guide"--though the two
are best seen not as contrasting but as complementary.  Set against the
film's portrayal of the Tempe conflict, a portrayal which concludes with
Kathy Monteiro in tears at the police station, is the experience at Cherry
Hill, in which African American protests against the teaching of _Huck_ were
resolved constructively by the joint efforts of administrators, parents,
students, and teachers.  After telling the story of this community epic, the
teaching guide lays out a revised version of the curriculum which teachers
at Cherry Hill East High School, in consultation with professors from
Villanova University, developed.  This curriculum has two main features.
First, it assumes a specific interpretation that puts Jim at the novel's
center and sees him very positively, not weak or passive but heroic.  In
addition to his moral decency and his caring for Huck, Jim is a resister;
students are led to see Jim's "'wearing a mask' . . . [as] a valid form of
rebellion" (14) against slavery.  The second feature of the Cherry Hill
curriculum is the strong emphasis on historical context:  American slavery,
African American history, even African cultures before enslavement.  Central
to this strategy is the pairing of _Huck_ with a slave narrative; Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Jacobs are recommended.

The Cherry Hill curriculum, as revised by the staff at WGBH, includes direct
discussion of the "N-word," the element of stereotype in Jim's portrayal,
Huck's character  development, and the novel as satire.  With a primary
focus on high-school students, but including much that can enhance study at
the college level, the guide indicates how to use selections from the
companion readings, articulates as many discussion questions as one could
use, and gives long and inventive lists of activities for helping students
respond to Twain's novel through discussing, writing, and acting out.  The
guide concludes with a highly usable bibliography of resources.

It is this inspirational Cherry Hill model that the educators and
administrators in Enid were evidently following.  In both cases the focus of
the solution was to provide for students a cultural context within which
they could understand Twain's novel so that the book's demonstrable power to
hurt young readers would be nullified and its power to provide insight into
American race relations would be amplified.  The companion readings are
valuable tools to this end.  Though they are specifically companions to the
Cherry Hill/WGBH curriculum that is detailed in the teaching guide, a
teacher need not be following that curriculum to make good use of some or
all of the readings, which can be divided into three basic types:

DISCUSSIONS of _Huckleberry Finn_ WITH AN EMPHASIS ON
RACE-RELATED ISSUES:

Peaches Henry, "The Struggle for Tolerance:  Race and Censorship in
_Huckleberry Finn_

Claudia Johnson, ed., "Unfit for Children:  Censorship and Race"

James Cox, "A Hard Book to Take"

Toni Morrison, "Introduction" [to _Huckleberry Finn_ in the Oxford 1997
edition]

David L. Smith, "Huck, Jim and American Racial Discourse"

Michael J. Hoffman, "Huck's Ironic Circle"

Leo Marx, "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and _Huckleberry Finn_.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS ON SLAVERY AND RACE RELATIONS:

Winthrop Jordan, "First Impressions" [Europeans' first impressions of
Africans]

Thomas Powell, "The Subject of Racism"

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Slave Women

William Dudley, ed., "Foreword," "Introduction," and "A Founding
Father's View on Race" [includes Jefferson's extensive
characterization of "the blacks" and his exchange with the
African American astronomer Benjamin Banneker]

Steven Mintz, "Introduction" and "Conditions of Life" [a superb and
comprehensive history of American slavery which will probably answer any
questions about slavery that your students may have]

Dorothy Salem, "Slave Resistance."

POEMS ON RACIAL ISSUES:

Paul Laurence Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask" and "Sympathy"

Langston Hughes, "Minstrel Man,"

Frances W. Harper, "The Slave Auction"

Claude McKay, "If We Must Die"

Margaret Walker, "For My People."

Coming as they do with full permission to reproduce, these are spectacular
hands-on resources for classroom use.

One final note.  The national NCTE convention last November in Denver
included two powerful sessions organized by WGBH and several of those who
were involved in the Cherry Hill controversy and developed its _Huck Finn_
curriculum.  These sessions effectively filled out the information in the
teacher's guide and gave faces to its narrative.  An equally impressive
session at the convention, on censorship in general, was moderated by Judy
Blume.  I don't believe that Twain or _Huck_  was ever mentioned, but at the
end of the session Joan Berlin, executive director of National Coalition
Against Censorship, read an excerpt from a recent court case which she found
very encouraging, whereupon Judy Blume jumped up and exclaimed:  "Yes, we
should all have this! it should be on all our bulletin boards!"

And she's right!  This was the ruling of the Ninth U. S. Circuit Court of
Appeals on Kathy Monteiro's suit against the Tempe school district in
October, 1998.2  This decision, mentioned but treated cursorily at the end
of _Huck Finn:  Born to Trouble_ and in the teacher's guide (5), is another
magnificent resource for any teacher or student who wants to examine
censorship and the use of controversial materials in schools. Written by
Justice Stephen Reinhardt, the opinion is a compassionate and (despite the
legalese) eloquent attempt to balance the competing claims of the First and
the Fourteenth Amendments.  This court decision may be the most valuable
item not included in the companion readings or the teaching guide's resource
lists, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in censorship issues.

1_Mark Twain_.  About.com.  24 Apr. 2000. <http://marktwain.about.
  com/arts/marktwain/library/weekly/ aa000425a.htm

2  Monteiro v Tempe High 9715511. U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
    19 Oct. 1998 [decision filed].   http://caselaw.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/
    getcase.pl?court=9th&navby=docket&no=9715511