"I don't know," I said. "It's a little bit more of a grownup book."

It had been at least 15 years since I'd last read it, and my memories of it were pretty vague. I was kind of repeating the conventional wisdom. (Which turned out, in my view, to be questionable—huge stretches of Huckleberry Finn don't feel all that different, apart from the narrative voice, from Tom Sawyer, especially toward the end after Tom and his punctilio make their annoying return. The Duke and Dauphin, and the feuding families, complicate the book in ways that my kids needed help to understand. And then there are a few incredibly profound passages, above all the famous one in which Huck wrestles with the situational evil of absolute good as he determines to help Jim get free). But I knew—half-recollected, half-intuited—that there was some thorniness, that something in the book was going to bedevil bedtime.

We encountered the first of what must be at least 200 instances of the word "nigger" on page 6, along with Jim himself. Now I remembered!

I flipped ahead, finding the word on almost every other page, twice or three times a page. The book was lousy with it.

"Guys," I said, putting it down. "We need to talk about this."

I explained to them that because this book was written in Huck's own voice, and because in the time and place of its setting people of both races commonly referred to black people as "niggers," and because there were a number of black characters, major and minor, in the book, I was going to be obliged to say, or not to say, that word, a great many times. I explained that saying the word made me extremely uncomfortable, that it was not a word I ever used, that some black people still used it sometimes to refer to each other, but that was importantly different, and that black people I had known were just as uncomfortable using the word around white people as white people were using it around them. I told them about my childhood friend Harry, mentioned in a prior post, who when discussing the Richard Pryor album Bicentennial Nigger with me, a fellow Pryor fan but, unlike Harry, a white boy, used to refer to it by the codename "Bice."

Next I reminded them that Mark Twain was a great artist, a moral man and, furthermore, an accurate writer. I said that as a writer myself the idea of somebody taking the words I had worked so hard to get absolutely correct and spatchcocking in whatever nonsense made them comfortable made me insane. Then I asked them what they thought I ought to do, whenever I arrived at the word in the course of the next few months. I told them how I had substituted "slave" while we were reading Tom Sawyer, but that in this book the word was going to mean so vastly much more, and less, than that.

"You know what word I'm uncomfortable saying?" said my daughter, the nine-year-old. "Negro."