The summer reading book for my seventh grade class was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. While it is a significant work of 19th century American literature, I have to admit I wondered about its place on middle school reading lists. For one thing, there’s the language, which is ranges from the dated vernacular to the inaccessibly arcane. There are the female characters, who are relegated to clucking, nagging, pouting, or simpering. Then, there is the most troubling aspect of all; the demeaning way in which African and Native Americans are depicted.
How relevant is Twain’s essentially plot-free ramble through a lovable rascal’s small town Missouri childhood? I was questioning it a great deal this summer. I was not happy about the language, most especially the n word, which is a word I won’t ever be able to say.
But this past week, something happened that made me see things differently. When Hillary Clinton spoke at the Democratic Convention, she said how unbelievable it was for her to know that her mother was born before women had the right to vote, while her daughter had been able to vote for her mother for president. This is a vast amount of ground to cover in just three generations.
In Tom Sawyer, the language, the representation of women, and its portrayal of African and Native Americans as inferior and worthless is shocking, but isn’t that a good thing? Our shock is proof of our progress. When I watched Barack Obama’s speech last night, for me, reading Tom Sawyer emphasized just how far we, as individuals and as a country, have come. I guess I realized that by examining a past that seems so foreign and benighted, we become more acutely aware of the dimensions of the great distance we have traveled. If this generation can do the work to move forward in a just and moral direction, can we change the course of history? Yes, we can.
