More harm than good; surviving the N-word and its meanings.(book: 'Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word')

That Jim. Now, there's a nigger for you. Argued over ever since he first appeared, in Mark Twain's 1884 masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Nigger Jim is as dark and emotionally murky as the river that he and Huck Finn are floating on. Desperation is the oar that propels Jim and Huck's raft toward the territory where their freedom lies. Jim is a fugitive slave, and Huck, he's a white boy in all sorts of trouble: for disappearing, for trying to escape his craven Pap, and for disobeying the laws of his own race. After all, he's travelling with a nigger who had the temerity to steal away with a white person's property, which is to say himself. To make matters worse, Jim has a cunning mind. Niggers are like that -- they get a little taste of freedom and, before you know it, they want to live by the laws established by and for white men.

On the raft, with the stars above and the trees whispering in the soft air, the promise of freedom loosens Jim's tongue. Huck recounts, "Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm . . . and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them." It is telling that Jim's revelations are relayed not through direct speech but through the skein of Huck's sensibility. And maybe Huck isn't even aware of what it tells us: no matter what Huck thinks, or might choose, Jim is in his head. "Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself" -- this is a kind of marriage, in which the partners talk out loud and to themselves, influencing, shaping, and finishing one another's sentences.

But, while Huck has to acknowledge his relationship with Jim, he can distance himself in other ways. First, he can call him a "nigger" -- a word whose etymology Huck likely knows nothing about. Then he can fill the word with meaning, with the meanings he learned from his Pap: about the unconscionable lives that niggers lead; how their very presence can make a bad situation worse; and how associating with them can stain a good man's whiteness. "It was according to the old saying, 'Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell,' " Huck says. "Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm." The harm that is being done to Jim is beside the point; Pap's point of view, his voice, is all that Huck has ever known. But what his Pap didn't tell him -- and what he learns on that journey down the river -- is how a nigger can get into your conscience and weigh on it, like life itself. Huck, the paradigm of the American boy, doesn't know what manhood is until he learns to trust and love a nigger, and the nigger in himself, the part of him that lies outside the status quo, that runs toward a dream of America, in love with a freedom just out of reach. The river represents Huck's movement away from the terrible burden of racism he has inherited, and his opening up into the waters of the larger world. But he is also drowning in history, in the question of what defines him. His nigger love? A nigger loving him?

One is especially hungry for Twain's kind of transformative complexity after reading Randall Kennedy's thorny book, "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" (Pantheon; $22). Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard, sets out to define the word "nigger," and its historical and political significance, through an examination of its use over time, in song lyrics, jokes, legal cases, hate speech, movies, television, literature, and urban street life. "I have invested energy in this endeavor because nigger is a key word in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term in American politics," Kennedy tells us. "To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one's life."

Love it, live with it, or want to eradicate it ...