Jack London's Racist Plant Names

I recently assigned Call of the Wild, Jack London’s 1903 masterpiece, to a sixth grader without having recently reread it. I remembered a story about a dog who is kidnapped and survives great hardship and cruelty during the Yukon Gold Rush of the late 1890s. My Scholastic edition of the book, copyrighted in 2000, has an introduction by Avi, who describes the book as “a story of people who struggle with life at its rawest…a tale about the bonds forged by loyalty, courage, and painful work.” Nothing to worry about, right?

In chapter one, London describes two French-Canadian characters as “half-breeds” who are “swarthy.” I kept going, accustomed to racist depictions of Native American characters in literature from this period. After all, the villain in Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is “Injun Joe,” a treacherous murderer who will stop at nothing to claim his stolen treasure.

In chapter four, London introduces a dog named “Nig,” a “huge black dog, half bloodhound and half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.” I groaned. Naming a black dog with a racist insult seems pointless in a work of fiction that is not about race, suggesting that London may have at least been indifferent to the ugliness of racialized insults. I assumed that my student and I would discuss the dog’s name when we came to it in class.

I lost it, however, when I got to chapter seven. There’s a plant called a “n--head.” Really. I looked it up. Actually, I looked up synonyms to “n--head” and learned that it’s a term that’s been applied to several varieties of flowers, including coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. I also found this image on Google images:

I began to regret assigning the book at all. Racist names for plants? What kind of person looks at a plant and thinks of the n-word? Please, remind me why I don’t believe in censorship!

At this point, I realized that my problem wasn’t only with Jack London. After all, he didn’t name the plants. He simply repeated--perhaps unthinkingly--the language of his time. This sort of casual racist labelling also appears in other renowned children’s classics. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer contains the murderer “Injun Joe,” and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan calls African American children “piccaninnies” and Native Americans “redskins.”

The original version of P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins contains a chapter in which Mary Poppins takes Jane and Michael around the world in a night, and “piccaninnies” are among the children with whom they interact. Sometime during the 1960s, Travers revised the chapter by replacing children of different ethnicities with talking animals. Would Call of the Wild still be worth teaching if we renamed the dog and the plants? Would it amount to whitewashing American literature and history? If we censor racism or stop reading books that contain it, what will that teach about our history and culture?

Elizabeth Breau, Ph.D., is a private English tutor and the author of History According to SAT: A Content Guide to SAT Reading and Writing. She can be reached at elizabeth.breau@gmail.com.