The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Slaughterhouse Five, Of Mice and Men: Every one a literary classic, critically acclaimed over and over, and often staples of high school literature classes — and they’ve all been banned at one time or another. And now you can add the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and the silly “Captain Underpants” kids’ books to the list of books being targeted by would-be censors. Actually “would-be censors” is probably too kind; there are a lot of simpletons out there who feel that if they object to a book’s content, then by God no one should be able to read it. In fact, this spring a US district judge ordered the Harry Potter books back into general circulation in the Cedarville, Arkansas, School District after the district restricted access to the wildly popular series about the boy wizard. In Charlotte, we have our own “dirty book guy,” over-the-top conservative Martin Davis who gained notoriety (and laughs) when he disrupted County Commission meetings by reading aloud from library books about gay sex.
In response to this kind of close-minded buffoonery, the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors an annual Banned Books Week (this year, September 20-27), a celebration of our right to access books without censorship.
The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has recorded more than 7,000 book challenges since 1990. A challenge is a formal, written complaint requesting a book be removed from library shelves or school curriculum. The ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates that less than one-quarter of challenges are reported and recorded. Last year, 515 challenges were reported in the US, a number that has stayed relatively steady over the past decade. “It’s important to realize that we have the freedom to choose what we read, and how important that freedom is,” says Beverley Becker, associate director of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. “Each book that is challenged is a potentially banned book. It’s clear that there’s no agreement as to what’s acceptable, and we should be able to make that decision for ourselves.”
Rita Rouse, programming and communications director for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library, says the library sponsors something called “Freedom to Read” week, which she says is in line with idea promoted by the ALA.
“Very few books are actually banned outright,” Rouse says. “Some books may come under a challenge in which somebody objects to a book’s content and believes it’s inappropriate, but very few people actually want to take it out of the system. That’s what Freedom to Read week is all about. There’s a constitutional guarantee in the Bill of Rights of open information and open access to news and information. Americans have a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. From the parental standpoint, it’s certainly up to them to decide what’s appropriate.”
With the exception of our man Martin Davis, Rouse says the library receives very few complaints or challenges. “Once in a while a parent will say to a librarian, “I’m not sure a certain book is appropriate for my child,'” Rouse says. “It’s usually over issues of violent content. But that violent content can sometimes be in a book like Snow White.”
Frazer Dobson, buyer for Park Road Books, says the store works with the American Booksellers Association to promote Banned Books Week with various store displays.
“Obviously, we are all for intellectual freedom,” says Dobson. “We like to use it (Banned Books Week) as an opportunity to bring to people’s attention that this kind of thing still happens, and urge them to get the books so they can read them and decide for themselves. It’s really very surprising some of the things that have wound up on banned books lists over the years. Catcher in the Rye is one of the perennial favorites of book banners, and it’s on a lot of schools’ reading lists.”
Lynn Payne, community relations manager for Barnes & Noble, says that while not associated with the ALA, at their stores until the end of September they have on display a banned books table, which includes such classics as The Giver, The Grapes of Wrath, and Lord of the Flies. Payne says that concerning the issue of censorship, the company-wide position is as follows: “While we have received requests over the years to stop selling everything from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to The Living Bible, we do not feel we have the right as retailers to censor the reading tastes of the public. We follow community standards as expressed through federal, state and local legislation. Although Barnes & Noble may not personally endorse all of the books and magazines that we sell, we respect the rights of individuals to make decisions about what they buy and read.”
Local author Robert Inman, who has penned several books, including his most recent, Captain Saturday, says it’s important to separate the issue of censorship from access.
“I’m a parent, so I’m concerned about what young people have access to,” Inman says. “Public places like libraries have a responsibility to be very sensitive about the issue of access. On the other hand, I think we ought to publish everything the marketplace will publish. And then let people decide on their own whether they want to read something or not.”
Inman says handling these situations within a school system can get a little tricky. “On the one hand, it involves exposing young people to a variety of ideas. But on the other hand, you have to be sensitive to parents’ beliefs. A parent ought to be able to say, “I don’t want my child to read that,’ but I have a hard time with a parent saying “I don’t want any child to read it.’ You need to do it on a case-by-case basis. You can’t let a handful of parents dictate for everybody else.”
Here are excerpts from five often-challenged books:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four-feet-ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangled temple of thorns.
“Let’s settle this once and for all, Lo,” I told her. “For all practical purposes I am your father. In your mother’s absence I am responsible for your welfare…”
“The word is incest,” said Lo. She walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden giggle, opened the adjoining door and, after carefully peering inside with her strange smoky eyes lest she make another mistake, retired to the bathroom.
I opened the window, tore off my sweat-drenched shirt, checked the pill vial in my coat pocket.
She drifted back out. Oh, what a dreamy pet! She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then (while I stood waiting for her) she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on.
She crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent twilight eyes — for all the world like the cheapest of cheap.
For that is what nymphets imitate — while we moan and die.
Bridge To Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (1972).
Something whirled around inside Jess’ head. He opened his mouth, but it was dry and no words came out. He jerked his head from one face to the next for someone to help say hi.
Finally his father spoke, his big rough hand stroking his wife’s hair and his eyes downcast watching the motion.
“They found the Burke girl this morning down by the creek.”
“No,” he said, finding his voice. “Leslie wouldn’t drown. She could swing real good.”
“That old rope you kids been swinging on broke.”
His father went quietly and relentlessly on.
“They think she musta hit her head on something when she fell.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No.”
His father looked up. “I’m real sorry, boy.”
“No,” Jess said now. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying to me!”
He looked around again wildly for someone to agree. But they all had their heads down except May Belle, whose eyes were wide with terror.
But, Leslie, what if you die?
“No,” he said straight at May Belle. “It’s a lie. Leslie ain’t dead.” He turned sharply against the house. He ran down the gravel to the main road and then started running west away from Washington and Milsburg — and the old Perkins place. An approaching car beeped and swerved and beeped again, but he hardly noticed.
Leslie-girl friend-rope-broke-fell-you-you-you-you/
The words exploded in his head like corn against the inside of the popper.
God-dead-you-Leslie-dead-you.
He ran until he was stumbling, then passed out. But he kept on, afraid to stop, knowing somehow that running was the only thing that could keep Leslie from being dead. It was up to him. He had to keep going.
Bridge to Terabithia author Katherine Paterson is part of the Novello Festival of Reading on Thursday, October 9. For information, call 704-336-2070. A theater production of Bridge to Terabithia will be presented by Children’s Theatre of Charlotte on Friday, October 10. For information, call 704-333-8983.
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884).
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he’d GOT to be a slave, and so I’d better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things: she’d be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for leaving her, and so she’d sell him straight down the river again; and if she didn’t, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they’d make Jim feel it all the time, and so he’d feel ornery and disgraced.
And then think of ME! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling.
And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there’s One that’s always on the lookout, and ain’t a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame; but something inside of me kept saying, “There was the Sunday-school, you could a gone to it; and if you’d a done it they’d a learnt you there that people that acts as I’d been acting about that nigger goes to everlasting fire.” It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come.
Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie — I found that out. So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter — and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone.
So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway Nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, some- times storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing.
But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, “stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell” — and tore it up.
Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1969).
There in the hospital, Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in time of war: he was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that it was interesting to hear and see. He kept silent until the lights went out at night, and then, when there had been a long period of silence containing nothing to echo, he said to Rumfoord, “I was in Dresden when it was bombed. I was a prisoner of war.”
Rumfoord sighed impatiently.
“Word of honor,” said Billy Pilgrim. “Do you believe me?”
“Must we talk about it now?” said Rumfoord. He had heard. He didn’t believe.
“We don’t ever have to talk about it,” said Billy. “I just want you to know: I was there.”
Nothing more was said about Dresden that night, and Billy closed his eyes, traveled in time to a May afternoon, two days after the end of the Second World War in Europe. Billy and five other American prisoners were riding in a coffin-shaped green wagon, which they had found abandoned, complete with two horses, in a suburb of Dresden. Now they were being drawn by the clop-clop-clopping horses down narrow lanes which had been cleared through the moonlike ruins. They were going back to the slaughterhouse for souvenirs of the war. Billy was reminded of the sounds of milkmen’s horses early in the morning in Ilium, when he was a boy.
Billy sat in the back of the jiggling coffin. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring. He was happy. He was warm. There was food in the wagon, and wine — and a camera, and a stamp collection, and a stuffed owl, and a mantel clock that ran on changes in barometric pressure. The Americans had gone into empty houses in the suburb where they had been imprisoned, and they had taken these and many other things.
The owners, hearing that the Russians were coming, killing and robbing and raping and burning, had fled.
But the Russians hadn’t come yet, even two days after the war. It was peaceful in the ruins. Billy saw only one other person on the way to the slaughterhouse. It was an old man pushing a baby buggy. In the buggy were pots and cups and an umbrella frame and other things he had found.
Billy stayed in the wagon when it reached the slaughterhouse, sunning himself. The others went looking for souvenirs. Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones — to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by. If this sort of selectivity had been possible for Billy, he might have chosen as his happiest moment his sun-drenched snooze in the back of the wagon.
Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck (1937).
And then from out of Lennie’s head there came a little fat old woman. She wore thick bull’s eye glasses and she wore a huge gingham apron with pockets, and she was starched and clean. She stood in front of Lennie and put her hands on her hips, and she frowned disapprovingly at him.
And when she spoke, it was in Lennie’s voice. “I tol’ you an’ I tol’ you,” she said. “I tol’ you, “Min’ George because he’s such a nice fella an’ good to you.’ But you don’t never take no care. You do bad things.”
And Lennie answered her, “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried and tried. I couldn’t help it.”
“You never give a thought to George,” she went on in Lennie’s voice. “He been doin’ nice things for you alla time. When he got a piece of pie you always got half or more’n half. An’ if they was any ketchup, why, he’d give it all to you.”
“I know,” said Lennie miserably. “I tried, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I tried and tried.”
She interrupted him. “All the time he coulda had such a good time if it wasn’t for you. He woulda took his pay an’ raised hell in a whorehouse, and he coulda set in a pool-room an’ played snooker. But he got to take care of you.”
Lennie moaned with grief. “I know, Aunt Clara, ma’am. I’ll go right off in the hills an’ I’ll fin’ a cave an’ I’ll live there so I won’t be no more trouble to George.”
“You jus’ say that,” she said sharply. “You’re always sayin’ that, an’ you know son-of-a-bitching well you ain’t never gonna do it. You’ll jus’ stick around an’ stew the b’Jesus outa George all the time.”
Lennie said, “I might jus’ as well go away. George ain’t gonna let me tend no rabbits now.”
Aunt Clara was gone, and from out of Lennie’s head there came a gigantic rabbit. It sat on its haunches in front of him, and it waggled its ears and crinkled its nose at him. And it spoke in Lennie’s voice too.
“Tend rabbits,” it said scornfully. “You crazy bastard. You ain’t fit to lick the boots of no rabbit. You’d forget “em and let “em go hungry. That’s what you’d do. An’ then what would George think?”
“I would not forget,” Lennie said loudly.
“The hell you wouldn’,” said the rabbit. “You ain’t worth a greased jackpin to ram you into hell. Christ knows George done ever’thing he could to jack you outa the sewer, but it don’t do no good. If you think George gonna let you tend rabbits, you’re even crazier’n usual. He ain’t. He’s gonna beat hell outa you with a stick, that’s what he’s gonna do.”
Now Lennie roared belligerently, “He ain’t neither. George won’t do nothing like that. I’ve knew George since — I forget when — and he ain’t never raised his han’ to me with a stick. He’s nice to me. He ain’t gonna be mean.”
“Well, he’s sick of you,” said the rabbit. “He’s gonna beat hell outa you an’ then go away an’ leave you.”
“He won’t,” Lennie cried frantically. “He won’t do nothing like that. I know George. Me and him travels together.”
But the rabbit repeated softly over and over, “He gonna leave you, ya crazy bastard. He gonna leave ya, all alone. He gonna leave ya, crazy bastard.”
Lennie put his hands over his ears. “He ain’t, I tell ya he ain’t.” And he cried, “Oh! George — George — George!”
George came quietly out of the brush and the rabbit scuttled back into Lennie’s brain.
George said quietly, “What the hell you yellin’ about?”
Lennie got up on his knees. “You ain’t gonna leave me, are ya, George? I know you ain’t.”
George came stiffly near and sat down beside him. “No.”
“I knowed it,” Lennie cried. “You ain’t that kind.”
George was silent.
Lennie said, “George.”
“Yeah?”
“I done another bad thing.”
“It don’t make no difference,” George said, and he fell silent again.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2003.
