The Forbidden Word. James Henry Harris
adamant about us staying put when he was at work. My mother told him about my little adventure of mischief and disobedience. I can hear her even today as she told Daddy, “Richard, James Henry walked to the store today. He knew he was supposed to stay in the yard, but he was hard headed.” Hard headedness was the name for any disobedience. My daddy was furious and, without asking any questions, ordered me to get the “strap”—or was it a “switch?”—so that I could receive my just punishment. Daddy was a big man with large wide hands and broad shoulders. He was too big and strong to whip a six year old boy. After that awful whipping, I seldom disobeyed Mother and Daddy again. But I could not figure out why such harsh punishment was rendered for such a small, insignificant infraction. In my eyes, the punishment far outweighed the crime. What could I possibly know at such a young age about America? If I didn’t know anything else, there is one thing I did know: That was the day when I was first called a nigger.
That day I learned one of life’s worst lessons—that Black people are hated by some because of the color of their skin. And my learning it so early was tragic, yet profound. To come to self-consciousness by realizing that otherness can never be escaped because of one’s dark skin slapped me squarely in the face that very day. Talk of diversity and equality is always suspect to me. It sounds like Orwellian doublespeak. Propaganda. “It just don’t seem equal if you are Black.” It might eventually come to be. So, I still refuse to be too cynical or too hopeless. Beautiful Black chocolate—colored skin, smooth as a milkshake, and yet, so hated. For what reason? I appeal to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. I appeal to the daughters of Zeus. No, I state my case to Zeus himself. I appeal to YHWH. To Elohim. To Adonai. I appeal to Moses and to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Please tell me it isn’t so. It’s an illusion. It’s a dream. An awful dream. I ask myself, Why? What drives this insanity? What propels this irrationality by the architects of Enlightenment’s rationalism and empiricism? Tell me. Please tell me. I ask Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad: Why do you use the word nigger so much? So flippantly. So cavalier-like. So wrenchingly and unashamedly. Somebody tell me. Explain it to me so that, maybe, I too can understand. Is that too much to ask for? To hope for?
There was more to think about. My mind kept vectoring toward the past. I thought of the struggles of my childhood and youth. I thought about being bullied in high school and how it did not stop me from loving school. I thought about the year I graduated and got my first job that summer in the tobacco factory. I thought of everything in a way that would help me keep my sanity. The struggles of life are not linear. Life goes up and down, back and forth in a single moment. Some days I travel for fifty-three years through mountains of memories and regrets. And some days I travel nowhere at all, just sitting in class with my mind somewhere else.
Chapter 4
During the fourth week of class, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn forced me to think long and hard about how today’s young Black people mimic his language, by using a hybrid form of the word nigger. Not even the white rapper from Detroit, Eminem, has ventured to do what Mark Twain does. Twain’s mastery of the Black Southern dialect is at least equaled by Eminem’s mastery of the Black rap and hip-hop dialect. Without visuals, Eminem would be presumed Black. The only indicator that Eminem is not Black is the fact that he never uses the word nigger in any of his rap music because he grew up in the ghetto. As a white rapper, he understands that this racial epithet is completely off-limits for whites. This is reverse irony. It is true that Eminem sounds and acts Black, but in America and the world, he is not Black. He is still white and he has the skin color, the money, and the recognition to prove it. Acting and sounding Black, even wearing a hoodie, like Trayvon Martin, have never spelled death for a white person in America.
I must confess that the course professor and I were about the same age with similar backgrounds in the humanities. So, I was always over-interpreting and hyper-analyzing almost every word that Mark Twain used. I had an insatible hunger for understanding the text in my own way. I was expressing and working out my own feelings of tension and strife as I read the words spilling from Twain’s pen.
A few years ago, I tagged along with my wife to the World Reading Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica. As I was waiting for her to come out of a seminar session, I struck up a conversation with a young man who was also accompanying his wife. I had told him that I was writing a book on my experience with the word nigger as used by Mark Twain and in Black culture, especially in hip-hop. He was a former marine who lived and worked in Baltimore.
“Anthony Brown, age forty-one,” he said to me as he extended his hand in a brotherhood shake. He was fifteen years younger than me. A random meeting in Central America between two Black men from the United States, in a Reading Conference hotel lobby surrounded by people from all over the world: teachers, school principals, college reading professors, authors, and literacy coaches. After talking about the difference in complexion of Costa Ricans who come from the Caribbean side and those on the Pacific and inland part of the country, we began to talk about hip-hop and its use of the forbidden word nigger.
“So, what do you think about how rap and hip-hop have globalized the word nigger?” I asked.
“Hip-hop defines itself on its own terms. It has almost become messageless,” he said.
“You think so?” I intoned.
“Well, let’s face it. The people who greenlight the movement are not Black. They are the movers and shakers of the record industry. Those who fund the movement are California and New York business people. Corporate America.”
“OK. That’s true.”
“It’s what sells. The beat, the misogyny. This type of stuff.”
“What about the word nigger? And, allowing this word to be used in song after song?” I asked.
“It’s more complicated than what people say. Black folk had the audacity to try to turn the meaning of the word upside down. That says something.”
“Yeah. But what about the history of the word? As a vile racial epithet or the essence or symbol of white supremacy.”
“That’s the complication. Most Blacks in the U.S. know what it meant. But those in other countries have no real connection to it, other than through rap and hip-hop music and language.”
“That’s the danger,” I said. “That’s a problem with Black folk calling themselves niggaz. The history cannot be undone. And it cannot be explained fully to those who don’t know.”
I began to think more about it, as we stepped out of the grand lobby into the hot sun and went our separate ways.
A couple of years earlier while sitting in the baggage claim area of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, I overheard two Black and two Latino youths talking about their lives. Their language was unfiltered and laced with profanity and the cavalier use of the word nigger or its hybrid, nigga. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was confused and surprised because they used the word so freely in referring to each other as well as to others who were the subject of their conversation. And, unlike me, they didn’t care who heard them.
“Nigger, don’t be so goddamn stingy with those chips.”
“Come on nigger, you just a greedy ass mutha fucka.”
“Nigger, you can kiss my Black ass.”
I realized that this demotic language usage by Blacks in the presence of whites and Latinos is a new reality embedded in popular culture, and young African Americans and other minorities have a different understanding of the forbidden word than I do. I didn’t think the word should be used by non-Blacks, and especially whites, in the presence of Blacks, because I interpret that as racist and colonialist. But what do I know? Who am I to judge? Nevertheless, the use of the word nigger or nigga has taken on overtones that have fused a connection or disconnection between persons of different races and cultures. While the usage has been fused, the meaning is still unclear when used by Japanese, Chinese, French, Germans, Algerians, Egyptians, and others who have not had the common experience of oppression like African Americans—an experience rooted in American chattel slavery. To some, this doesn’t matter. But, to me, it matters a lot because