Re-envisioning Jim

• In Event: Black Lives and the Legacies of US Imperialism

Abstract

Our production of knowledge as scholars and teachers is under attack: more than half of U.S. states have passed measures designed to prevent us from teaching the hugely important role that racism has played in American history.
Right-wing ideologues, largely oblivious to Huckleberry Finn’s insistence on the centrality of racism in our nation’s past, would never ban the book because of its status as an icon in our cultural heritage. But if the book is not challenged from the right, it is often challenged from the progressive left.
At the book’s center is Jim, a shrewd and self-aware enslaved man seeking his freedom in a world determined to keep him enslaved, a man who is one of the first Black fathers in American fiction. Writing his “biography” for Yale’s “Black Lives” series required that I re-examine all that had been written about Jim over the last 140 years and question analyses that failed to do him justice. (One critic whose past comments come in for unreserved rebuke in my book is me.) It required that I re-see the story through Jim’s eyes; that I compare his speech with speech heard in minstrel shows and probe other literary sources that shaped him; that I examine the cultural work he does in American high school classrooms.
I was forced conclude that one of the first black heroes in American fiction and a character who illuminates the dynamics of racism in powerful and memorable ways, has been sold down the river. Mark Twain’s decision to tell Jim’s story through the eyes of a bigoted white child who bought into the racist stereotypes of his era, and critics’ failure to remember this fact—combined with the legacies of racism that still shape our culture to this day --have made Jim perhaps the most misunderstood character in American fiction. My goal was to give him the respect that he deserves.
While Jim in the novel Twain published in 1885 has a lot to teach us about the dynamics of racism in 19th-centry America, examining how Jim has fared in translations and films around the world has much to teach us about the relationship between racism and empire across the globe.
Writing the biography of this unique fictional character served to highlight for me how the ubiquity and staying power of racist assumptions have prevented not only every character in Twain’s novel, but also many critics over the last century, from seeing Jim for who he really was. A clear-eyed view of him can open the way for Huckleberry Finn to be a Trojan horse that can place front and center in our classrooms the history of racism that right-wing politicians want us to ignore.

Author

• Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University