St. Ann’s School goes off book

This article is one of the winning submissions from the first annual New York Post Scholars Contest, presented by Command Education.

In December of 2019, English teacher Mike Donohue lugged a stack of teal-and-white AMSCO editions of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” up from the sub-basement book storage room to his classroom on the 9th floor. He was preparing to hand the books out to his 7th grade class after winter break, as he had for any years.

However, he was soon called in for a meeting with Head of School Vince Tompkins. As Tompkins recalled, he “had significant concerns about ‘Huck Finn’ being taught in middle school,” and thus had decided to take it out of classrooms. Tompkins asked Donohue to teach something else. Donohue did, substituting “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.

For decades, “Huckleberry Finn” was a staple of the middle school experience at Saint Ann’s. It was curricular—required reading—for all 7th-graders until June of 2009. As recently as the 2018-19 school year, all five sections of 7th grade English included “Huck” on their reading lists.

But the novel is now officially prohibited in middle school classes.

In 2019, according to multiple reports, a group of high school students spoke to a senior administrator, then the head of the middle school, about their traumatic experiences reading “Huck Finn” in middle school. The senior administrator then shared her concerns with Tompkins, and then, later that year, Tompkins officially pulled the book out of the curriculum. This was the first time that Saint Ann’s had prohibited a piece of literature from classrooms.

A CONTROVERSIAL BOOK

The Mark Twain novel, first published in 1884 and widely considered an American classic, is a satire of the age of American slavery. Huckleberry, a white boy on the Missouri frontier, is brutally abused by his father and decides to run away. He meets Jim, a Black man escaping enslavement, and together they flee on a raft down the Mississippi River. Huck’s environment has conditioned him to believe that his relationship with Jim will send him to Hell, but eventually he breaks his constraints, trusting that nothing as honest as his friendship with Jim could ever be sinful. Twain often attacks the hypocrisy of white 19th-century America: Huck is harmed by a man his society tells him will protect him—his father—and is protected by Jim, the man whom white society treats as not fully human.

The novel has been banned in various schools and libraries across the country since its release. The Concord (New Hampshire) Public Library banned it in 1885, a mere year after publication. In 1957, the New York Board of Education dropped it from the city’s elementary and junior high school textbook lists.

Much of the controversy surrounding “Huck Finn” concerns its frequent use of the n-word; it shows up 219 times in the text. But there are additional objections to the book. Some argue that the novel’s divisive ending—Huck falls back under the influence of Tom Sawyer, who plays crude jokes that endanger Jim’s life—reduces Jim to a mere stereotype. Jim essentially transforms into a toy for Huck and Tom to play with. Others object to the novel because Jim’s story gets put secondary to Huck’s. Jim is also depicted as ignorant, and the novel makes fun of his superstition and gullibility, so that even Twain’s attempts to depict Jim sympathetically get drowned out by the inane comedy at Jim’s expense.

The counterview is that “Huck Finn” is a deep look into the world of slavery from someone who was able to observe it in real time, albeit from an outsider’s perspective.

A SEVENTH GRADE STAPLE

Despite—or because of—the novel’s controversial nature, it was a standard text going back 40 years. Looking back now, some teachers express regret. Dean of Faculty Melissa Kantor, a white woman who taught “Huck” for many years, now calls it “rabidly racist.” She didn’t feel that way when she taught it, though. “I don’t think I taught it well,” she says. “I was not smart about, or aware of, those aspects [the racial complexities] of the text.”

Kantor recalls going through a particularly knotty passage with students who simply did not understand what the passage meant: “I remember thinking at the time, I am teaching this book poorly. My students do not know what is going on.”

Some English teachers, however, remember the novel’s impact on classrooms as positive. Jane Avrich, who is white and has taught at Saint Ann’s since 1990, said that her students “appreciated the historical context of the book; they understood that they were learning about problematic attitudes in the rural South of the nineteenth century.”

An anonymous Black English teacher who taught “Huck Finn” at his previous school, argued that the book was necessary and important. However, he said it depended immensely on curricular context. “I wouldn’t teach it again if this is the only exposure to black males that students see,” he voiced. “Teach it, but it cannot be the only book that you read that year that has a black male in it. It has to have other things surrounding it. It cannot be a stand-alone text.”

Donohue, who taught “Huck” regularly for more than twenty years starting in 1997 and is white, said the book helped bring complex ideas about race into class discussion. He said, “What we thought we were doing was confronting something very ugly and disturbing about the American past.” He went on, “Looking back on it, I still think that was happening … but I’m willing to accept that [the teaching of ‘Huck’] wasn’t happening the way we thought it was happening.”

Tompkins added, “We need to be very thoughtful on what have students read coming up to that point. Are their encounters with the place of race in American history and society mostly encounters with white authors?” He emphasized that “context really matters.”

“We as a school,” Tompkins also wanted to point out, “had not moved quickly enough to establish norms and expectations that should apply in every classroom.” He said that the school “left that, as so many other things, to teacher discretion,” which may have caused issues in how teachers approached the novel.

THE STUDENT PERSPECTIVE

The Ram spoke to several Black juniors and seniors who studied the book when they were in 7th grade.  J.U., now a junior, who was among the last cohorts to read “Huck,” said, “Our conversations in class were super awkward.” She said that her teacher “didn’t really know how to talk about Jim and him being a runaway slave so we spent a lot of time talking about Huck instead.” She felt that as a Black student, she was forced to take on too much responsibility. “Whenever the topic of race came up, the whole class would be silent and as one of the only Black kids in class, I felt like I needed to say something even if I didn’t want to, just to break the silence.”

Senior I.C. agreed. She said, “I felt like there was a spotlight on me to answer [as a Black woman] because other people were scared to talk about [‘Huck’].”

Having had awkward discussions with “Huck” was something many students noted. B.R., a senior, said, “I don’t know if 7th grade is the best grade to read it—maybe [older]. The conversations would be a lot better.” Junior A.P. added on, “Looking back…I don’t think everyone absorbed the right information from it.” 

S.B., a junior, said, “We were talking about Huck Finn’s perspective more than Jim’s even though Jim’s thoughts could have been used to deepen our understanding of the life of an enslaved person and the relationship between the two.” She said that “there were times in which [another student] would make a comment that questioned the morality and humanity of Black people and it wouldn’t get addressed.” She said that “the way we analyzed Jim as a character was surface and could have been more in-depth.”

However, many students still said that despite some qualms with the reading of the novel, they still found it a learning experience. J.W., a senior, said, “It was the right time to be reading it. I remember it being a valuable experience.” B.R said that “it’s a book that should definitely be read.” K.N., a junior, said that in spite of the novel’s difficulty, her “teacher did a very good job in teaching it.”

‘A COP OUT’?

Still, many Black students, even if they didn’t have a completely positive experience reading “Huck Finn” in 7th grade, didn’t like the removal of the novel from the curriculum. J.W called the school’s decision “a cop-out, an easy choice.” She said that “many books are going to have difficult subject matter. It’s quite easy to ban one completely because you feel like it’s not being taught well.”

K.N. echoed her, saying, “It feels like a rip off. You realize that you don’t know how to teach it, so [you] just get rid of the controversy.” Instead of solving issues, she said, the school would rather remove them all together. “The normal Saint Ann’s way is just brushing past [issues].” K.N. said that we need to not shy away from “Huck Finn,” emphasizing that “it’s an important book.”

A.P. added that “just because [some books are] uncomfortable doesn’t mean you get rid of them.” A suggestion that many voiced was to, as B.R. phrased it, “have workshops for teachers” on how to best tackle the teaching of “Huck Finn.” K.N. said, “What the school needs to do is implement some kind of teaching strategy for books with heavy topics and racial slurs.”

She said making certain topics in “Huck” mandatory to cover was essential. The alternative, J.W. argued, could be a teacher hypothetically “butchering the way of handling difficult texts, [which] could be quite traumatizing.” J. M., a sophomore who never got to read “Huck” in a classroom, said that the school was leaving large gaps in students’ education for little real reason. She said, “Saint Ann’s has to understand that 7th-graders can conceptualize what racism is … 7th graders are fully capable of reading ‘Huck Finn.’”

THE FUTURE OF HUCK

“Huck Finn” might not be completely off the table for future classes, and Tompkins insisted that the novel has not been “banned.” The library still stocks the book, and Head of the English Department Liz Fodaski mentioned that “there has been discussion of bringing it up to a higher grade level,” where students might be able to better understand the novel’s complexities.

Tompkins followed her, saying, “Is its best place in an elective in high school? These are questions that are actively being considered.” While “Huck Finn” might never return for middle schoolers, there remains the possibility of its joining high school classrooms. As J.M. said, “This is a book that we want to learn about.”

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An 11th-grader at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, Purohit writes for her school newspaper and intends to pursue literature and journalism.