BEWARE! PRECIOUS JEWELS is Politically Incorrect!

Already eyebrows have lifted because the word "nigger" appears several times in the first chapter of Precious Jewels.  I have been informed that I have committed a transgression against "political correctness" in allowing my characters to speak as they most certainly did speak in the late 1890s at the Holt home in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

A hundred years later, the Mississippi Holts still recalled the shock that rippled through the family when Carolina Pearl Holt converted to "that nigger religion" and that was the term that was still used in reference to the Seventh-Day Adventist church when I interviewed a 92-year-old distant cousin in Mississippi in the 1990's.  She was still of the opinion that her Aunt Pearl had lost her mind.

I have in my possessions the articles that were published in the Yazoo Sentinel, some of them written by my great-grandfather, Jtun Holt.  These articles, "politically correct" in their day, were full of racist rhetoric.  I have watered the narrative down considerably in order not to over-use a word that the present day "word police" are trying to abolish.  But I am against the abolition of a word just as I question the burning of books for fear of the knowledge inside them. 

It is not the word "nigger" that is evil.  It is how it has been abused.  To forbid it to be ever written is silly.

"Nigger" is simply the word "Negro" spoken with a Southern inflection, and "Negro" means "black." 

That being said, its meaning has been changed through the way it was used, just as the swastika's meaning changed from an ancient symbol of good fortune to something sinister and evil when the Nazis took it for their own.  We cannot use it nowadays for decoration because of the Nazis.  But we can write about it and show its image in the context of history, just as we can describe the ignorant ideas about the Jewish people that led to the Holocaust.

I have considered rewording the first chapter of Precious Jewels in order to omit the word "nigger", but found that it came across awkwardly and artificial.  The fact is my ancestors were racists, and so have I portrayed them in the story.  The issue of racism comes full circle in this family saga as each generation encounters it and ultimately chooses to overcome it.