The word appears 21 times.
This book is so completely offensive that the word nigger hardly matters in the context of the story... if you could call it a story... or say it has a context..
Just to give some examples: the word CUNT appears: 42 times. The word BITCH 12 times; the word WHORE 9 times; the word FAGGOT 6 times; the word SHIT 87 times; you get the idea... This is not a book for the sensitive soul.
I'm bumping the count on here by 1 because I came across the word "Nigra" which I never thought to search for before.
Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures.....
Not that Caucasians are immune: five British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And in Dead Coon County, Arkansas ["Blackest Dirt, Whitest People in the U.S.A. - Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here"] the County Coroner come down with buboes fore and aft.
P.L: "Benway is an infiltrating Western Agent."
Lt. 1: "A rampant French Jew..."
Lt. 2: "A hog-balled, black-assed Communist Jew Nigger,"
P.L.: "Shut up, you fool!"
Lt. 2: "Sorry, Chief. I am being stationed at Pigeon Hole."
They appeared in Liberia dressed in black Stetsons and red galluses:
"So I shoot that old nigger and he flop on his side one leg up in the air just a-kicking.""Yeah, but you ever burn a nigger?"
They always pacing around bidonvilles smoking huge cigars:
Since there is no sure way to detect a disguised replica (though every Divisionist has some method he considers infallible) the Divisionists are hysterically paranoid. If some citizen ventures to express a liberal opinion, another citizen invariably snarls: "What are you? Some stinking nigger's bleached-out replica?"
The causalities in barroom fights are staggering. In fact the fear of Negro-replicas - which may be blond and blue-eyed - has depopulated whole regions.
There's not a finer man in this Zone than Roy Bane ... So he said to me he says, 'Arch, you see that ol' nigger over there in the vacant lot? Well, sure as shit and taxes, he comes here every night just as regular as you can set you watch by him. Every night round eight thirty he goes over into that lot yonder and pulls himself off with steel wool ... Preachin' nigger, they tell me.'
"So that's how I come to know the hour more or less on Friday the 13th and it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes half and hour after that, I'd took some Spanish Fly in Doc;s store and it was jest beginning to work on me down by Grennel Bog on my way to Nigger town ...Well the bog makes a bend, used to be a nigger shack there ... They burned that ol' nigger over in Cunt Lick. Nigger has the aftosa and it left him stone blind .. So this white girl down from Texarkana screeches out:
"'Roy, that ol' nigger is looking at me so nasty. Land's sake I feel just dirty all over.'
"'Now, Sweet Thing, don't you fret yourself. Me an' the boys will burn him.'
"'Do it slow, Honey Face. Do it slow. He's give me a sick headache.'
"So they burned the nigger and that ol' boy took his wife and went back up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou runs the service station couldn't talk about nothing else all fall: 'These city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don't even settle up for the gasoline.'
"Well, Chester Hoot tore that nigger shack down and rebuilt it just back of his house up Blood Valley. Covered up all the windows with black cloth, and what goes on in there ain't fittin' to speak of ... Now Chesters he's got some right strange ways ... Well, it was just where the nigger used to be, right across from the old Brooks place then ...
And he plunged into an anecdote about a nigra to the hydrophobia from a cow:
"So my pappy says to me" 'Finish up your chores, son, and let's go see the mad nigger...' They had that nigger chained to the bed and he was bawling like a cow ... I soon got enough of that ol' nigger. Well, if you all will excuse me I got business in the Privy Council. He he he!"