We all know Huck’s side of the story. But what does “Jim” have to say?
I know The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has always been controversial. I haven’t read it since high school, but I do remember that, even when I read it in high school, our class discussions around it included discussions about how racist it is, so it’s not like we weren’t aware of the issue.
With or without the racism, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn never particularly appealed to me. They were male characters written for male readers, so I only read them when I had to. In my free time I was reading Louisa May Alcott, and despite the fact that there’s a new movie adaptation of that book every few years, schools still don’t study it ’cause sexism.
But I digress.
The point is I only read Huck Finn under duress, and I wasn’t about to reread it. As it was, I was kind of on the fence about reading this book, partially because I didn’t see the point in retelling an old story when there are so many new stories you could tell, but also because I was afraid I might have to reread Huck Finn in order to fully appreciate this book.
But I saw the adaptation of American Fiction that came out last year and loved it. Then I read a short story by Percival Everett and loved it. Then this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and that was it, I was convinced.
I also had a friend who read James and really enjoyed it, so on their recommendation, I decided I should take the plunge and listen to this book on audio.
I did read the Wikipedia plot summary of Huck Finn before I started listening to this audiobook, but I don’t think it added to my appreciation of this book. All it did was prepare me for certain plot points and allow me to see some of the major points where this book diverged.
Right away the book made choices I didn’t understand, starting with Jim being able to read and write and having to hide that fact from all the white people around him. Knowing it was illegal to teach a slave to read and write I kept wondering where he would have learned to read and write. Turns out he has a history that makes it plausible that a certain white person might have taught him his letters, but I’ll get to that later.
While Twain’s book was entirely about Huck Finn and his experiences with slavery, this book, as the title suggests, is very much James’s story and deals with his experience with slavery, which is, of course, very different from Huck’s experience.
In that sense, it stands to reason that this book would diverge from Twain’s novel, not only in terms of perspective, but some pretty major plot points. For example, Twain has Jim’s owners die and free him in their will, supposedly ending all his problems.
In this book, they sold off his wife and daughter, so Jim goes off to free them, so rather than the book ending with white people freeing Jim, it ends with Jim freeing himself and his family.
Because the book is all about James and Huck having adventures together, getting separated, and finding each other again, I think Everett felt he needed to invent a reason for Jim to feel so attached to a white boy. Throughout the book, even James seems to struggle to explain why he cares for Huck.
I’ve seen other analyses in which people talk about the father-son-relationship between Jim and Huck, so I guess Everett figured he might as well make it official by inventing a relationship between Jim and a white woman he grew up with.
It explains why Jim keeps choosing Huck, even over fellow slaves at times, a choice that clearly isn’t easy for him to make, much less explain. But biology does have a way of making us do funny things.
I think that makes it all the more interesting that Jim ultimately leaves Huck to go free his wife and daughter.
Speaking of his wife and daughter, that was one thing that really irritated me about this book. There’s a whole lot of unnecessary sexual assault in this book. Yes, we know it happened in slavery, but I don’t need to hear Jim talk about how he only feels sorry for the women getting assaulted because he pictures his wife and daughter in their situation.
Isn’t it bad enough that it’s happening to a real woman who’s suffering right in front of you? Does her suffering not matter because she’s not married or related to you? Do you need to have a daughter in order to feel empathy for a woman’s suffering?
I’ve heard enough men in real life try to position themselves as champions of gender equality because they have a daughter that it makes it seem like men only learn to see women as people if they’re raising a daughter.