Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the author of the book Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade. Her other books include Writing America. She is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.
Q: What inspired you to write Jim, and did your views about the character change at all as you researched the book?
A: My life was turned upside down about three years ago when I got a call from my old friend former neighbor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Skip Gates said he was editing a new biography on a “Black Lives” series for Yale University Press with David Blight and Jacqueline Goldsby wanted me to do a book for it.
What did he have in mind? He wanted me to write a biography of Jim in Huckleberry Finn. How do you write a biography of a fictional character? I asked. Anyway you like was his response. It was too intriguing to say no.
Also, I knew that I had to write this book. I owed it to Jim. Why? Because I owed my career to him. Let me explain. As a junior in high school I was assigned to write a paper on how Mark Twain used irony to attack racism in Huckleberry Finn. It was the most interesting paper I’d ever been asked to write. And it was writing that paper that started me on the path that led to a career in literature and American studies.
I was convinced from the first time I read the book that Jim was a smart, self-aware and deeply admirable man hemmed in on all sides by a morally bankrupt society that gave him the same rights as his mistress’s cows and chickens.
Indeed, he was the real hero of the book. Huck doesn’t see him that way. But I knew that Twain did. And indeed the whole point of the book as I understood it was to challenge the legitimacy of a society that behaved that way.
But sadly, over the last 140 years, more often than not, critics have failed to see Jim for who he was, viewing him instead as someone Twain was making fun of--a character who embodied stereotypes drawn from minstrelsy, who was a very limited comic foil to the white child who was the hero of the book.
As I worked on this book, any doubts, I may have had about Twain’s success in portraying Jim as a genuinely admirable figure dissolved.
My understanding of Jim’s character was shaped not only by my immersion in critical traditions that I had encountered previously (but explored now in greater depth), but also by learning what actors who had portrayed Jim on stage and screen believed about who he was.
These actors became my unexpected tutors as I worked on this book (for example, Archie Moore, who played Jim in 1960, said “he is not an educated man, but he uses his head to accomplish what he needs.”)
Also instructive were the talented high school students I got to know at Seton Hall Preparatory School in New Jersey—students of the gifted teacher John Pascal. These students showed greater insight into Jim than many of the critics over the last 140 years.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Huck and Jim?
A: Perhaps Ron Richardson, who played Jim on Broadway in 1985, said it best: “Jim has to have survival techniques, teaching Huck the lessons of life without letting him know he’s being taught. He has to be shrewd enough to realize his life is up to the whims of two white boys.”
Jim gives Huck the love, care, and guidance that he never received from his alcoholic and abusive father. He teaches him emotional intelligence and has the courage to rebuke him when he requires correction – this is despite the fact that Jim can receive 39 lashes for just directing insulting language towards a white person. He is the parent Huck desperately needs but never had.
Q: What do you think of Percival Everett’s novel James, and how do you see it relating to your own book?
A: Everett’s James and Twain’s Jim behave the way they do for the same reasons. They are motivated by the same goals in life: freedom for themselves and their family.
Notwithstanding the serious plot changes (and back stories) that Everett introduces, the two characters have more in common than not. And although they sound very different – that is, Everett’s James is literate and self-educated, and holds conversations with John Locke and Montaigne in his dreams – their characters are not all that different.
Everett’s novel came out when mine was in production. I had already written “Jim’s Version” – my own interpretive experiment in retailing the story through Jim’s eyes in his dialect. Our two experiments are analogous.
The difference is that I did not think I needed to make Jim literate or well-read in order to establish him as a character whom Twain respected and meant the reader to respect. I thought this could be conveyed in the language Twain gave him -- that is, in his own voice.
Q: As a Twain scholar, what do you think Twain was trying to say by creating the character of Jim?
A: Jim is the first fully-drawn Black father in American fiction. He is also a shrewd and perceptive enslaved human being seeking his freedom in a world determined to keep him enslaved.
I argue in this book that Mark Twain crafted Jim as an enormously admirable man whose movements and behavior are enormously constrained by his status as an enslaved person in a society that not only deprives him of all of his human rights, but that doesn’t even view him as human.
Huck fails to see his society for the moral cesspool that it is—much as Sam Clemens had not condemned the world of his childhood when he himself was a child.
But by the time Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, his understanding of that world had changed. His travels and his marriage into the abolitionist Langdon family helped spark his growing awareness of what was wrong with a world in which people who thought of themselves as upstanding, God-fearing citizens could support and benefit with impunity from an indefensible status quo.
Although Huckleberry Finn is supposedly narrated by a boy who, like young Sam Clemens, did not question the justice of the world in which he lived, the novel was written not by Huck but by a Mark Twain who, by 1885, was ready to challenge norms that he had accepted as a child.
Jim is the vehicle through which Mark Twain mounts a critique of a morally bankrupt society that treats the most admirable character in it as if he were a disposable piece of property—as someone who doesn’t matter—due to the color of his skin.
Twain would later name the concept that is at the book’s core “the lie of silent assertion”—that is, the “silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people are interested…and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”
The persistence of racism in American society today makes this concept – and this book – more important and relevant than ever. The “Black Lives Matter” movement felt the need to remind Americans that Black lives did matter—a point that was necessary to make because Black people are still often treated as if they are disposable and unimportant by society and by the authorities charged with protecting them.
As long as Black people are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated or be killed by police in arbitrary and unnecessary confrontations; as long as they as Black students get disciplined much more harshly in elementary and secondary schools than white students; as long as the there is a stark wage and employment gap between white and Black—Americans still need to be reminded of that “lie of silent assertion,” the silent assertion that there is nothing wrong here.
There is something wrong here. Twain was onto that. It is still wrong. That’s why we still need to hear his message.
Twain’s larger subject in Huckleberry Finn is American society’s failure to recognize how dramatically it is betraying, every day, the ideals of equality on which it was founded.
Huckleberry Finn evokes – perhaps as only a work of art can – both the boldness of founding a nation on the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the brazen hypocrisy that allowed those ideals to be violated so fully from the start.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the persistence of racism in our world has fostered a myopia that has prevented many – including myself – from recognizing Jim’s full humanity until now. Grappling with who Jim is and why he is treated the way he is, this novel can be an important first step towards moving beyond our myopia.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am returning to the project that I put on a back burner to write this book. It is a book entitled “Mark Twain Tonight!”: How Hal Holbrook made Mark Twain a Social Critic for Our Time.
If the book I just completed is a biography of a literary character, the book I am working on now is a biography of what is probably the longest-running one-man show in theatre history.
Holbrook was a remarkable actor and the story of what he achieved by performing his show for more decades than Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain is totally fascinating! Stay tuned….
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There is now an audiobook of Jim: the Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, that I hope many of your readers will have the chance to encounter.
It is narrated by a truly gifted Grammy-nominated actor and producer named Alvin Richardson, who coproduced it with me. He makes Jim’s voice – as well as my voice and Twain’s voice and the voice of all of the other characters – come alive brilliantly.
It is especially exciting to hear him read the portion of the book in which Jim retails the entire story in his own voice. I highly recommend it! (It is available on Audible or Amazon.)
For more on all of these issues, go to https://ShelleyFisherFishkin.com
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Shelley Fisher Fishkin.
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