By Bill Littlefield

The fact that readers have dismissed Jim as a fool or have misunderstood Mark Twain’s intent in Huckleberry Finn reflects on our limitations.

Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Yale University Press Black Lives Series, 447 pages,$28.

Over the decades, 1884’s Huckleberry Finn has often been a prime target of American book-banners. According to the ALA, between 2010 and 2019, the novel had the distinction of being the oldest book to inspire objections and bans. The complaints have continued for various reasons. The simplest is the frequent occurrence of “the N word” in the book. Folks who don’t think the novel should be part of anybody’s high school curriculum also maintain that the characterization of Jim, Huck’s Black companion, as they drift down the Mississippi, is an insulting caricature. Book-banners insist that Jim is a stereotypical “minstrel show” Black man and go on to argue that encountering him will embarrass students of color and perhaps suggest to white students that slavery was the legitimate way to deal with a race of people inclined toward laziness and superstition and necessarily dependent on masters who could think for them and protect them. And, of course, Huckleberry Finn also provides a reminder of how happily many people in this country accepted the enslavement of Black men and women as natural and inevitable, an attitude some today would prefer to erase from the nation’s history, or at least ignore.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Jim presents a solid case for reading Mark Twain’s novel, and particularly the character of Jim, very differently. Hers is not the first voice raised  — not so much in defense as in celebration — of Jim as a thoughtful, creative, and loving character rather than “a buffoon, a minstrel clown, an embarrassment.” In short, she sees Jim as a worthy role model in a story full of fools, crooks, swindlers, drunks, murderers and, of course, racists, all of whom are white. Over the years, various writers and critics have made that case, but perhaps nobody has made it so energetically and thoroughly as Fishkin.

At the beginning of Jim, Fishkin provides a context for understanding both the era prior to the Civil War, in which the action of Huckleberry Finn takes place, and the time almost two decades after the war, when the novel was published. She establishes that Twain’s vision was not only very unusual, but courageous. Though, as a child in Missouri, he accepted the social norms of his time regarding slavery and the inferiority of Black people, the writer pretty quickly came to understand that those norms were based on myth, fear, and economics. He also came to respect the dialect spoken by Jim in Huckleberry Finn, and Fishkin painstakingly demonstrates that — though that dialect may seem child-like to casual readers — Jim’s speech is creative, poignant, and effective. To establish this point, in a chapter titled “Jim’s Version,” she provides a long account of the events in Huckleberry Finn in Jim’s voice, in part to present and celebrate the virtues of that voice, and in part to emphasize the importance of the fact that we see everything that happens in the novel only through Huck’s eyes.  Twain, who discussed in a preface to Huckleberry Finn how much care he’d taken to reproduce accurately the dialects of various characters in the novel, would have been pleased.

In the interest of inspiring more teachers to include Huckleberry Finn and a thoughtful discussion of the character of Jim on their reading lists, Fishkin provides a chapter about how well the novel has been received by students fortunate enough to have an open-minded and progressive teacher. The chapter includes not only student writing about Jim and the book, but photos of some of the students.

Rex Ingram and Mickey Rooney in 1939’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Photo: Turner Classics

Since its publication, Huckleberry Finn has been mischaracterized in various ways. Because the narrator is a young boy, some have considered it a book for boys. Since the culture in which he lived powerfully and shamefully restricted Jim’s options, some readers have regarded the character as limited and without imagination or agency. Fishkin regards this perspective as the fault of readers who have failed to see that Twain “trusted us to see through the whitewashed history of America’s racist past that was being presented as truth even at the time he wrote and has continued to be foisted on each new generation ever since.” Twain trusted us to discern how the story asserted the full and complex humanity of its major Black character. The fact that readers have dismissed Jim as a fool or misunderstood Twain’s intent reflects on our limitations. At the end of Jim, Shelley Fisher Fishkin asks, “Do we have the courage to honor that trust, to be the readers he hoped we could be? The jury is still out.”

That final point in this important and thoughtful book carries significant weight at a time when ignorance, fear, and racism have provoked people throughout this country to ban books with renewed determination. The irony is grotesque: we are creating a climate in which the subtlety and courage displayed by Twain, and other fiction writers determined to confront American cruelty and injustice, are not only disregarded, but damned.

Bill Littlefield’s most recent novel is Mercy, published by Black Rose Writing.