Should you buy an original edition as a gift for a child? If done with care and paying attention to the unintended lessons a child might learn from it.
The book is indeed a treasure as to the tales; and as to presenting rural southern life with its social stratifications stemming from slavery. However, that slavery-culture made liberal use of the N word, even though "negro" itself is also used; and the C word for "colored," and all the rest in the further stories and proverbs, part of the oppression-subservience of the plantation, as well as gradations that people use about each other in any group or town life. America.
Choice: You can teach your children about that, or you can avoid their seeing the words at all. In favor of the words is that they make so clear how gradations and labels affect how people see themselves, what the life was like, and Joel Chandler Harris presents it so well. Can children understand that context? Or will this exposure just reinforce Jim Crow. Find more about Jim Crow at //www.jimcrowhistory.org/.
Probably in later editions, like contemporary now, those now-offensive terms are redacted - and that in itself is a shame in a different way, because redacting essential parts of a narrative alters our understanding of what life was like in Remus' time. The characters lived and died under the burden of those terms, used by themselves as to each other, and by the other groups in the society as to them.
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