If you don’t mind, I’ll take my Mark Twain the way I take my coffee, my whiskey and my history: straight.

I give Allen Gribben, professor of English at Auburn University in Montgomery, credit for good intentions. He detests the “N” word. He doesn’t like to hear it spoken in his presence, and he doesn’t like to see it in print. So he thinks he’s doing Mark Twain a favor by sanitizing the text of his “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” substituting the word “slave” for the “N” word more than 200 times throughout the book.

I beg to differ. Mark Twain wrote in the 19th century, when the country was still trying to come to grips with what it euphemistically called the “late unpleasantness.” He set his novel in the antebellum South, where slavery was accepted, and usually defended as justifiable and right. In that day and time, the “N” word was used as a matter of course to describe the slaves. It was the word Negro modified by Southern pronunciation habits.

The “N” word was still commonly used when I was a youth, and normally its connotation was condescension, not hatred. It grew from the general attitude among genteel whites that the black race was to be respected but not regarded as equal to the white race. It’s the attitude you see reflected in movies made prior to Brown v. Board of Education. The attitude has since been discredited by the accomplishments of gifted African-Americans who have penetrated nearly all areas of national life, even rising to positions of president, secretary of state and members of Congress. Today’s movies no longer portray African-Americans as saintly but humble. They’re presented as regular humans, some good, some bad, some smart, some dumb, some noble, some corrupt.

When Huckleberry Finn used the “N” word in his everyday conversation, he was simply reflecting the language and values of the mid-19th century. Mark Twain took this opportunity to shine a light on those attitudes. To edit him in retrospect is to distort that light and present a misleading picture of the 19th century.

That century, like every century before and since, had its beauty and its ugliness. In the United States, one of its ugliest aspects was the institution of slavery, practiced in nearly half the states. The War Between the States put an end to slavery, but its odor lingered in the form of a century of legally enforced, second-class citizenship. In that atmosphere, racial hatred flourished and the “N” word became a symbol of that hatred.

Immediately after the war, the effort to sanitize it began — an effort to remove from the Confederate cause any stigma that might arise from the defense of slavery. Mark Twain didn’t buy into this effort to sanitize.

When Twain wrote of the slave era prior to the War Between the States, he used the tool of irony. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was an exquisite exercise in irony in which Twain showed the reader how ridiculous the popular attitudes of the time were.

I’m a big fan of irony and use it often in my writing, though not nearly with the power and skill of Mark Twain. I’ve found, though, that when you use it, you run the risk that some literal-minded readers are going to misconstrue you. That’s happened with Twain. Many people who read his novel today read it from a 21st-century perspective and condemn him for using racist language. The solution is not to edit Twain but to educate those who would read him.

Twain had to use racist language to point the finger of ridicule at the practice of slavery. For instance, there’s an episode in which Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is told about a steamboat accident.

“Gracious! Anybody hurt?” she asks.

“No’m. Killed a n——,” comes the answer.

It’s an effective way of showing the popular attitude of the time toward black people as chattel property. “Killed a slave” doesn’t quite do the job.

Huck Finn is depicted as a friend of the slave Jim. As a child of a slave-holding society, his conscience bothers him as he helps Jim escape from slavery and embark on a raft ride down the Mississippi. Yet, he does his best to aid his friend in the escape. He even lies to save Jim from being captured by slave hunters. And when Jim is finally betrayed by a couple of con artists who insinuate their way onto the raft, Huck plots to free him.

Twain describes episodes in which Jim is shown to be at least the intellectual equal of his white companion, though Jim keeps deferring to the boy because, after all, Huck is white, and in that age whites expected deference from blacks.

Twain’s language is vital in conveying his picture of 19th-century attitudes. We shouldn’t blink at those attitudes. We should accept them as what they were and not try to soften them to what we wish they had been. The 20th-century warning of George Santayana still applies: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

So let Mark Twain’s language stand as it was written. Give the same courtesy to Stephen Foster, James Ryder Randall (“Maryland, my Maryland”), James Bland (“Carry me back to old Virginia”) and Joel Chandler Harris and his stories of Uncle Remus.

If we’re to pretend that racism never blackened the image of America, let’s extend the pretense to the Holocaust, to the Spanish Inquisition, to the excesses of the Crusades, and to all other blotches on human history that we’d prefer not to acknowledge.

But better yet, let’s not pretend. Let’s acknowledge history and learn from it. Let Mark Twain tell it as it was.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or by e-mail at: WadesDixieco@AOL.com.