I've been tracking this thread in silence for a few days while I nurse a nasty cold. This has given me some time to think, and now I clear my throat for a comment: My take on this subject may differ because I may be one of the very few white guys on this listserv who has been called a nigger. The first time was when I worked as a teenager with some black men in a carpet warehouse. They all called each other "nigger" with affection (and to make the white office workers uncomfortable), and after they'd razzed me a few weeks to see what kind of kid I was, they signalled my acceptance into the group and honored me by calling me a nigger too. It was used casually and affectionately during everyday work, but we also had great fun calling each other niggers in front of the white office staff, who just didn't get it. The next time I was called a nigger was about ten years ago when as fire commissioner I was reorganizing the department and rewrote the 1950s style by-laws and added grievance procedures. The word was used by an anonymous caller about 2 AM, without a trace of affection. And I should make full disclosure that growing up on Houston's south side in the 1950s and early 1960s, I used the word myself, casually, without being aware of its power to hurt. So did my friends, until we were 10 or 12 years old. Most of lit out for the territory not long after. I read HF to my daughter (uncensored) when she was 7 or 8, and explained that this was how people talked in those days, and explained the attitudes it reflected. Her mother and I never used the word, nor did her playmates, and my daughter turned out just fine. I live now in a Wealthy White West Austin neighborhood and none of my neighbors use the word either, but I can assure you that a good many of them are as venal a racist as you could ever hope to encounter. But they are well-mannered racists, and they would object loudly to the use of the word in HF, or elsewhere. There are two issues raised by reading HF to children. If it's your own child, you are the best judge of how to explain it. I imagine black parents explain it a bit differently than white parents. And perhaps it gets more complicated if your children are not the same race as the parent who reads the book. If you are teaching the book (to other people's children) then you must be even more careful. If you are teaching it to a class of children of various racial backgrounds, your job is enormously complicated, and you should be aware of the hurt some children will feel. No amount of explaining will make it hurt any less. I've read most of the early reviews of HF in Lou Budd's excellent collection of contemporary reviews of Twain's works, and I recall at least one review that mentions the Concord banning and how misguided it was because the Concord authorities must have assumed in error it was a book for children. I don't recall any of the reviews expressing concern over the use of the word "nigger." And I recall only a handful of the reviews that seemed to have some faint grasp of the irony that runs beneath the surface of every episode in the novel, and none at all that really understood the book in any way approaching the modern sense of understanding. Times have changed haven't they? Now most people understand the irony. It took 100+ years of irony in modern American literature, but it finally sunk in. But others get hung up on the word "nigger" --sometimes because they ignore the irony, and sometimes for much better and valid reasons. Before reading HF to a child (any kid under 15, your own or somebody else's) I'd suggest looking through James Leonard's book, MAKING MARK TWAIN WORK IN THE CLASSROOM, and also reading some of essays by black scholars who recall having the book read in a classroom when they were a child seated among white kids. Pardon the disjointed structure of my comments. This was done under the influence of several very good cold remedies. Kevin Mac Donnell Austin TX