We've done quite a bit between then and now, but I still wanted to say a few words about our reactions to this famous book.
Almost everyone knows the book, but just to remind you, Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, tells the story of a mischievous boy living in a small town alongside the Missouri River in 1840s USA.
In my opinion, the book deserves its reputation as one of the great classic novels. It really is a must-read (with the brain switched on). Twain has a delightful way with words that makes reading him so pleasurable. His storytelling is engaging, and his barbed social commentaries delicious (so much of what Twain wrote just drips in irony).
When choosing which books to read aloud to Mulan and Miya, I take it in turns to choose books suitable for each of them, and this book was chosen for Mulan. Miya also enjoyed it, but Twain's language can be a little complicated at times, and periodically I had to translate it into simpler words so Miya could follow what was going on in the story.
But the language in the book is catching, and even now the girls think it fun to talk of ha'nted houses or say they ain't doing something.
The three of us were laughing out loud at many of the adventures Tom got up to. His creativity for getting out of duties is amazing. His whitewashing the fence escapade, in Chapter 2, is well-known to most people, but there are many more equally inventive incidents filling the pages.
The superstitions of Tom and the other characters in the book was both eye-opening and funny. We all found it amazing how much of Tom's actions were based on his superstitious beliefs. Dead cats and midnight seemed to play important roles in the often very complex rituals that they believed in and followed.
We also laughed out loud at Tom's methods of attracting Becky, who he liked. I asked Mulan and Miya whether if a boy did those sorts of things in front of them, they would start to find the boy attractive. They doubted it!
Coincidently, just as we were reading about Tom and Becky in the cave, we read the sad real-life news about the soccer team boys lost in the cave in Thailand.
And then there is the racism.
I understand from various online articles that many commentators focus on the fact that the word "nigger" is included multiple times throughout the book. I read that this is such an issue that some people have published editions of the book which change "nigger" to "slave" and "injun" to "Indian".
Yes, offensive words are one aspect of racism.
Nonetheless, as I read the book to Mulan and Miya, I read aloud to them these words, as Twain originally wrote them. I also talked with the girls briefly about the offensiveness of these words, and their background. And, obviously, I pointed out that these words are Not Good Words To Use.
But what drew my attention more while reading was not so much these specific racist words, but rather the casual racism built into the characters' interactions. It's the sorts of things that were in there just in passing as if they were so commonly assumed by the characters that they didn't even need properly mentioning.
For example, in Chapter 6, when discussing how to cure warts, Huck says:
Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the nigger told me.
Tom then replies:
Well, what of it? They'll all lie. Leastaways all but the nigger, I don't know him. But I never see a nigger that wouldn't lie.
The casualness of this conversation is important. The boys are not even specifically discussing the people -- they are discussing curing warts, of all things. Huck bothers to take the time to fully name all the other people involved, but he doesn't give the name of the person who he was actually directly talking to. Twain has (intentionally, I think) set this up to show the dehumanised status of "the nigger", who doesn't even have a name. And finally, Tom's reaction is to just as casually dismiss the report with the negative racial stereotype, again showing that "the nigger" didn't count as an individual person, but just as a member of a group.
(The article I linked to above gives a very clear example of this in Huckleberry Finn, arguing that Twain deliberately set up the characters and story to highlight and criticise the casual acceptance of African Americans' dehumanised status. It really is worth reading this short article.)
Tom's later involvement with the character Injun Joe showed equally questionable attitudes regarding native Americans.
When these sorts of casual racist attitudes popped up while reading, I tried to draw them out, to make the casual racism obvious to the girls. I think that their being able to see these sorts of things in casual conversations is even more important than their avoiding those specific offensive words. It is about them becoming deeper readers and thinkers, not merely stopping at specific individual words.
With this in mind, if Twain did indeed seriously (or at least partly) think that Tom Sawyer is for adults exclusively, then I can see his point. Twain wrote a book filled with characters who say, with plausibility, bad and questionable things. Twain often wrote using an ironic voice, and clearly many of these questionable things were put in there intentionally by Twain (were they all put in there intentionally?). A child reading the book without further discussion may absorb uncritically the questionable stuff; open discussion is essential with this book.
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