Whether it be nonfiction, like Frederick Douglass' "Narrative" and Olaudah Equiano's "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano," or even neo-slave narrative literary fiction, like Ernest Gaines' "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Charles Johnson's "Middle Passage," such works are crucial to keeping this history alive.

Just as revisionists have tried to deny the Jewish Holocaust, which is well documented, American revisionist "moonlight and magnolia"-type works on the antebellum South, like "Gone with the Wind" and "The Birth of a Nation," serve to minimize or erase America's so-called original sin, or defend their glorified myth of the South. Such revisionist works remain the most famous and popular. Even some textbooks have described Africans arriving in America pre-Civil War as having relocated or immigrated to America "for a better life."

So when an open call for auditions for a stage production of "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was making the social media rounds a few months back, I was intrigued, particularly since it called for "lots of beautiful black people." To my knowledge, all the black people in Huckleberry Finn were either escaped slaves or still in bondage, so what would they be doing in this production? Singing and dancing, I imagined. I'm a huge admirer of all things Twain, so I was curious to know the specifics.