New book tackles the legend of Jim from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"
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"Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade" by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Photo: Courtesy of Yale University Press
A new book unpacks Jim in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" — a fictional enslaved Black man who is one of the most memorable characters in American Literature.
Why it matters: For more than a century, Jim has been a source of sympathy, ridicule, anger, and protest due to the Black dialect he uses throughout the novel, but scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin says that he's been misunderstood.
The big picture: "Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade," released last month by Yale University Press, comes out amid renewed interest in the Twain character.
- Percival Everett recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, "James," which reimagines Jim from an illiterate enslaved man as often portrayed to a savvy and literate soul who has more agency.
Fishkin tells Axios she wanted to explore how we've viewed Jim throughout the decades and how he has shaped American culture.
- The text in Twain's classic hasn't changed throughout the years, "but we've changed," said Fishkin, one of the world's top Twain scholars.
Catch up quick: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" tells the story of Huck, a young, uneducated white boy, and Jim, an escaped slave, as they travel together down the Mississippi River on a raft.
- The pair must avoid mobs of slave hunters and robbers along their journey and develop a sense of care for one another.
- The book uses racist epithets of the time, and Jim speaks in a language that critics say today resembles offensive minstrel shows in the late 1800s — all of which have generated demands for the novel to be banned.
Yes, but: Fishkin says Twain was being subversive in the use of Jim's dialect and criticizing all the racist stereotypes with a humanized portrayal.
- "Jim is the smartest character in the book. It's a mistake to assume he's there to be ridiculed. In fact, he becomes a father to Huck," says Fishkin, who wrote the 1993 literature critic classic, "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voice."
- Fishkin says Jim is a complex character who is really the first Black father portrayed in American literature.
Zoom in: In her new book, Fishkin takes on the historical myths and models of Black men in post-Civil War America.
- She then gives us a rundown of the debates of Jim and the novel's use of racist language that have generated pushback from liberals and conservatives.
- Fishkin then presents the reader with an innovative exercise in one chapter, exploring what Jim would say about everything in his own dialect.
- She ends with a lesson on how some high school teachers are presenting the book today and what lessons can be learned when the book "is taught correctly."
Bottom line: Fishkin has provided us with a fascinating and nuanced deep dive into one of the most debated characters in American Literature, who continues to surface amid our modern debates about race today.
