‘My Jim’ adds slave’s insight to Huck’s story

Well over a century after it was abolished, slavery lingers in the American psyche, infuriating as it entices. Each generation seems compelled to confront the institution anew in search of modern understandings.

The latest turn in the national conversation is toward a more intimate look into the lives of slaves, led by a novel that revisits Mark Twain’s classic and racially charged tale, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

“My Jim” is the first-person story of Sadie, the wife of Huck’s traveling companion, an escaped slave. The aim of its author, Nancy Rawles, was to re-imagine Jim as more than a runaway drifting down the Mississippi River with a delinquent youth, more than the gullible victim and moral father figure to Huck that Twain portrays.

Rawles wanted to consider the familiar tale from the perspective of the family Jim left behind -- and to consider the shattered families of many slaves.

“This was an opportunity to really bring out the individuals who lived this history, to get away from thinking about them en masse and get into the personal stories,” says Rawles, whose novel is being taught in a handful of classrooms alongside Twain’s 1885 saga.

She got the idea for her critically praised story from a few pages in “Huck Finn” that detail Jim’s longing for his wife and children -- and for freedom.

More writers, historians and filmmakers are approaching slavery much like Rawles. In the tradition of Alex Haley’s 1976 novel, “Roots,” they are sketching ever-more-detailed stories of love and lost family ties.

In February, PBS aired a documentary titled “Slavery and the Making of America” that offered personal sketches of individual slaves to illustrate the outrage and anguish of Africans in the New World. And a recent book by journalist Betty DeRamus, “Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad,” offers an intimate perspective on the clandestine antislavery network.

In 2003, “Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly” provided a look at Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckly, a slave who was the first lady’s longtime seamstress and friend. Meanwhile, Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World,” an epic tale of a black Virginia family that owned slaves, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

“We’re seeing far more titles overall of both fiction and nonfiction about slavery,” said Angela Dodson, executive editor of Black Issues Book Review. “In some ways, we’re now ready as a nation to look at it more closely.”

Jean Fagan Yellin, a former English professor at Pace University in New York who spent more than 20 years researching a biography of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman, delights in the trend.

“Don’t you think this humanizes history and literature?” she asks. “Harriet Jacobs: A Life,” recently released in paperback, contains more than 250 pages of text and 100 pages of footnotes -- letters, diary entries, speeches -- documenting one slave’s life. Such work, Yellin says, “makes it clear that we can hear these voices.... This is the common people’s history.”

But as popular as slave narratives have become, Twain’s dark humor in “Huck Finn” over the years has challenged -- and turned off -- students and parents. Some blacks, offended by what they see as a demoralizing portrait of Jim and frequent use of racial slurs, have protested “Huck Finn” as a racist novel. Twain defenders, meanwhile, maintain that the author used his characters’ casual cruelty and insults to draw attention to the injustices of the Old South.

Rawles, a Seattle-based writer and amateur historian, spent months researching the personal histories of slaves, traveling to Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Mo., and reading oral histories before writing “My Jim.” The book was published in January and is in its third printing, with about 20,000 copies in print. While writing, she hoped her book would be taught alongside “Huck Finn” in classrooms.

An educator at Berkeley High School quickly fulfilled that wish. Veteran literature teacher Alan Miller heard about “My Jim” and assigned it to his 11th-grade students -- so he could “teach ‘Huck’ right,” he said. He also persuaded two colleagues on campus to include it in their classes. Berkeley High is the only school in the United States in which students study “Huck Finn” and “My Jim” together, according to Rawles’ publisher, Random House Inc. Education experts also say that Berkeley is believed to be the only high school in the nation with an African American studies department.

“ ‘Huck’ is a book that needs a great deal of context and sensitivity to Jim’s motive and Jim’s depiction,” Miller said. “It’s very easy to focus on Huck, but if you focus on Huck, you’re missing a key component of the book.”

Last month, with Rawles’ help, Miller’s students staged a dramatic reading of excerpts of “Huck Finn” and “My Jim,” for an audience of 150 classmates.

A student playing Huck read from Chapter 23 of “Huck Finn,” after Jim pines for his family: “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks do for ther’n.” Later, Jim visits Sadie and she cries, knowing he’ll soon leave. A student portraying Jim read from Rawles’ book: “She cry and it break my heart.”

The audience, rapt during the reading, cheered when it ended. Students later asked Rawles about her research and her thoughts on “Huck Finn.”

“People like to read [‘Huck Finn’] as this great adventure story, but it’s a whole lot more than that,” Rawles told the audience. “And Jim is a whole lot more than that.”

In “My Jim,” Rawles envisions many elements of “Huck Finn” through Sadie’s eyes.

Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, tries to teach Huck manners in Twain’s book. She’s more peripheral and less proper in “My Jim,” where Rawles depicts her as a woman who vies for Jim’s attention and pulls him from his family. In “Huck Finn,” Jim is portrayed as superstitious; in “My Jim,” he has powerful spiritual vision that allows him to help his family and gain the respect of whites.

Since the 1950s, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, many parents and community leaders -- particularly blacks -- have tried to remove “Huckleberry Finn” from library shelves and have sought court orders barring its use in classrooms, including in Berkeley several years ago, Miller said. Courts have consistently resisted, citing free speech issues. As recently as last year in Renton, Wash., a Seattle suburb, a black family tried unsuccessfully to have the book removed from school reading lists.

In recent years, many scholars, including Rawles, have argued that “Huck Finn” is an antislavery book that was as progressive as could be expected, given the blatant racial hostility in the United States when Twain wrote it.