by BOB POOL
Students experience a raft of emotions when they float into one UCLA professor’s office.
They giggle and gush over Tom Wortham’s hundreds of glass figurines, fancy dolls, sheet music and scale models of Huck Finn.
Wortham’s shelves and file cabinets are stuffed with Mark Twain memorabilia tied to the all-American author’s best-known work, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
The retired English Department chairman insists he has no love for the knickknacks, toys and Huck-themed gadgets and artwork stacked in corners and mounted on the office’s walls.
“I always get a shudder when a bright undergraduate comes in and says, ‘Oh, how cute!’ The only thing that is allowed to be cute in the world is little children, preferably in still shots,” he says with a grin.
Wortham says he has spent thousands of dollars on what he admits is “junk” to show students how commercialism sold one of American literature’s most enduring characters down the river.
To many, the image of Huck and Jim the runaway slave floating lazily by raft down the Mississippi River depicts this nation’s escape from the grip of slavery.
Even that’s ironic, according to Wortham: “The greatest fear of a black man back then was to be sold down the river into even worse slavery at the plantations.”
A close reading of the book shows that the supposedly warm relationship between Huck and Jim has been manipulated over the last century, he said.
“Jim was an encumbrance for Huck. There’s been a great deal of romanticizing about the bond that the two of them form on the voyage down the river. But Huck never realizes slavery is wrong.”
Was Huckleberry Finn a racist?
“Yes,” Wortham said. And so was Mark Twain.
Twain used the “N-word” 206 times, according to Wortham. “Each time that word is used is calculated” by Twain for its shock value for an audience that at the time was unaccustomed to literature written in the vernacular, he said.
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(Submitted by reader)