Huck Finn Redux Probes Jim's Past

Advocates of public decency have a way of making themselves look foolish in the unforgiving, if often capricious, hindsight of the academy. And great works of literature have a way of offending public sensibilities. Note the many points of intersection between “banned books” lists and “great books” courses. Before Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, there is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Well before either come Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which were banned in the United States under the Comstock Law of 1873, prohibiting the sale of “lewd,” “indecent,” “filthy,” or “obscene” materials—and not without reason. Many a perspicacious frat boy has perked up during an otherwise soporific lecture on, say, “The Miller’s Tale,” in appreciative recognition of cognates which, to invoke Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum, he knows when he sees.

However quaint such censorship may seem, and however capacious our tastes may have become over the past century, we still learn at a young age that a number of our great classics were once found objectionable. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is perhaps the most famous of these. It is likely to be the first we read. And, while many of its aforementioned companions have since been let off the hook, parents and educators have continued to dispute Huckleberry Finn’s appropriateness for elementary and high school curricula. Critics may no longer find it as “trashy and vicious” as the Concord Library Committee so notoriously did (and the New York Times reported) in 1885, but many still echo the concerns about racism the NAACP first presented in the 1950s—particularly with respect to Huck’s traveling companion, the runaway slave Jim.

Nancy Rawles, who won an American Book Award for her 1998 novel, Love Like Gumbo, has built her latest book, My Jim, upon this controversial character. “Upon,” and not “about,” is the right word: Rawles takes Jim less as the subject than as the starting point of a narrative dominated by the strong-willed women who tell it. In fact, although the book jacket proclaims My Jim a “nuanced critique of the great American novel,” it makes little direct contact with Twain’s text. Miss Watson, the sister of the Widow Douglas, Huck’s adoptive mother and owner from whom Jim has fled, shows up sporadically, but the one direct reference to the eponymous rapscallion appears only on the 132nd of 161 pages. Jim himself seems more like a ghost of inspiration, a whiff of poetic afflatus, than a flesh-and-blood character, for all his occasional poignancy.

Set in 1884, the year of Huckleberry Finn’s publication, Rawles’ book relates the life of Jim’s remarkably resilient wife, Sadie Watson, a slave who works as a healer and a cook, among other things, as she passes between owners in the antebellum South. It is framed, plausibly, if not very originally, as a story Sadie tells to her granddaughter Marianne Libre, while, in the grand tradition of Penelope, Scheherazade and, more recently, Winona Ryder’s Finn Dodd, they make a kind of memory quilt.

In the brief opening segment, which Marianne narrates, we find her racked with uncertainty, despite her auspicious surname. (One wonders if the French isn’t also intended to include echoes of Latin liber, “book,” as it is presumably Marianne who has written down the tale; Sadie herself proudly proclaims, “Everything I tells you happen long ago. Me I remembers it just like morning…No need to write it down.”) Having just received a marriage proposal from a Chas Freeman, who vanishes quickly after having fulfilled this plot function, but uncertain whether she has the heart to follow him to Nebraska, where he has military duty, Marianne turns to her Nanna Sadie for advice.

The bulk of the book consists of what Marianne’s grandmother tells her. The story is knit loosely together by a number of objects Sadie possesses, loses, and, in some cases, finds again—a knife, a Congo bowl with magical healing properties, a hat dear to her Jim, a child’s tooth, a prized button. It is convincing and compelling as an oral narrative, most moving and successful where it most closely approximates direct speech (“You close your eyes and feel our love coming up behind you,” Sadie tells Marianne, “that’s all you got in this world”). Reaching from anecdotes before Sadie and Jim are born to the turmoil of the Reconstruction Era South, it has an epic quality, without feeling imposing; “historical” data float in and out of the narrative, more or less organically.

Rawles’ characters have many heartbreaking moments—particularly, it seems, where their author is least self-conscious about breaking our hearts. Sadie’s interactions with the pitiless Mas Stevens, whom she is first called upon to cure and to whom she is later sold, are far more effective than any of her more explicit sermonizing (e.g., “Whites always telling us don’t steal don’t lie don’t cheat. And here they come stealing us and lying to us and cheating us out our freedom.”) Rawles describes Sadie’s endurance through trials that seem beyond what any human could bear, and creates a character whom we can imagine bearing them. Yet one wishes, at times, that Rawles had had the confidence or the restraint to let Sadie’s suffering speak for itself.

One thing is sure: My Jim is not likely to touch off anything like the controversy its predecessor did—or, for that matter, that Alice Randall did with her 2001 book The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell’s classic. While there is historical usefulness and emotional impact in every such account of the horrors of slavery, the episodes Rawles describes are, unfortunately, relatively familiar, as are the theoretical arguments for and against the kinds of linguistic and rhetorical techniques she employs (which Richard Wright first dismissed in Zora Neale Hurston as “minstrelsy”).

Early in Twain’s novel Huck laments “how dismal regular and decent” his life with Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas has become. His complaint could serve as a harsh but not wholly inaccurate description of Rawles’ book. Rawles­—or perhaps those marketing her—seem to have failed to recognize that the moral complexities My Jim purports to expose are already present in Huck’s own narrative. While Rawles has provided a reasonably interesting supplement to Twain’s book, her “nuanced critique” articulates few moral problems that weren’t already implicit in the work of her forbearer. The agonistic endgame, the technique of recalling a predecessor’s work with the aim of unsettling or revising it, is at least as old as Ovid’s Heroides. My Jim is an effort in good faith. But if one is going to stand on—or beat about—the shoulders of a literary giant, one must be prepared for the possibility of looking small by comparison.