By Erin Texeira, AP
BERKELEY, California (AP)--Well over a century after it was abolished, slavery lingers in the American psyche, infuriating as it entices. Each generation seems compelled to confront the institution anew in search of modern understandings.
The latest turn in the national conversation is toward a more intimate look into the lives of slaves, led by a novel that revisits Mark Twain's classic and racially charged tale, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
"My Jim" is the first-person story of Sadie, the wife of Huck's enslaved traveling companion. The aim of its author, Nancy Rawles, was to reimagine Jim as more than a runaway drifting down the Mississippi River with a delinquent youth, more than the gullible victim and moral father figure to Huck that Twain portrays. Rawles wanted to consider the familiar tale from the perspective of the family Jim left behind--and to consider the shattered families of many slaves.
"This was an opportunity to really bring out the individuals who lived this history, to get away from thinking about them en masse and get into the personal stories," says Rawles, whose novel already is being taught in a handful of high school classrooms alongside Twain's 1885 saga.
She got the idea for her critically praised story from a few pages in "Huck Finn" that detail Jim's longing for his wife and children--and for freedom.
More writers, historians and filmmakers are approaching slavery much like Rawles. In the tradition of Alex Haley's 1976 novel, "Roots," they are sketching ever-more detailed stories of love and lost family ties.
"We're seeing far more titles overall of both fiction and nonfiction about slavery," said Angela Dodson, executive editor of Black Issues Book Review. "In some ways, we're now ready as a nation to look at it more closely."
Jean Fagan Yellin, a former English professor at Pace University in New York who researched a biography of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman, for more than 20 years, delights in the trend.
"Don't you think this humanizes history and literature?" she asks. "Harriet Jacobs: A Life," released in paperback last month, contains more than 250 pages of text and 100 pages of footnotes--letters, diary entries, speeches--documenting one slave's life. Such work, Yellin says, "makes it clear that we can hear these voices... This is the common people's history."
But as popular as slave narratives have become, Twain's dark humor in "Huck Finn," over the years, has challenged--and turned off--students and parents. Some blacks, offended by what they see as a demoralizing portrait of Jim and frequent use of racial slurs, have protested "Huck Finn" as a racist novel. Twain defenders, meanwhile, maintain that the author used his characters' casual cruelty and insults to draw attention to the injustices of the Old South.
Rawles, a Seattle-based writer and amateur historian, spent months researching the personal histories of slaves, traveling to Twain's home town of Hannibal, Missouri, and reading oral histories, before writing "My Jim." While writing, she hoped her book would be taught alongside "Huck Finn" in classrooms.
An educator at Berkeley High School quickly fulfilled that wish. Veteran literature teacher Alan Miller heard about "My Jim" and was delighted to assign it to his 11th-grade students--so he could "teach 'Huck' right," he said. He also persuaded two colleagues on campus to include it in their classes. Berkeley High is the only school in the United States in which students study "Huck Finn" and "My Jim" together, according to Rawles' publisher, Random House, Inc. Education experts also say that Berkeley is believed to be the only high school in the nation with an African American studies department.
"'Huck' is a book that needs a great deal of context and sensitivity to Jim's motive and Jim's depiction," Miller said. "It's very easy to focus on Huck, but if you focus on Huck you're missing a key component of the book."
Earlier this month, with Rawles' help, Miller's students staged a dramatic reading of excerpts of "Huck Finn" and "My Jim," woven together for an audience of 150 classmates.
A student playing Huck read from Chapter 23 of "Huck Finn," after Jim pines for his family: "I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks do for ther'n." Later, Jim visits Sadie and she cries, knowing he'll soon leave again. A student portraying Jim read from Rawles' book: "She cry and it break my heart."
The audience, rapt during the reading, cheered when it ended. Students later asked Rawles about her research and her thoughts on "Huck Finn."
"People like to read ('Huck Finn') as this great adventure story, but it's a whole lot more than that," Rawles told the audience. "And Jim is a whole lot more than that."
In "My Jim," Rawles envisions many elements of "Huck Finn" through Sadie's eyes.
Jim's owner, Miss Watson, tries to teach Huck manners in Twain's book. She's more peripheral and less proper in "My Jim," where Rawles depicts her as a woman who vies for Jim's attention and pulls him from his family. In "Huck Finn," Jim is portrayed as superstitious; in "My Jim," he has powerful spiritual vision that allows him to help his family and gain the respect of whites.
The books contrast sharply in their handling of "nigger," an offensive term used by Twain more than 200 times in "Huck Finn" to refer to blacks. In "My Jim," Sadie uses the word only when referring to slaves.
Since the 1950s, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, many parents and community leaders--particularly blacks--have tried to evict the book from library shelves and seek court orders barring its use in classrooms, including in Berkeley several years ago, Miller said. Courts have consistently resisted, citing free speech issues. As recently as last year in Renton, Washington, a Seattle suburb, a black family tried unsuccessfully to have the book removed from school reading lists.
Published in 1885, "Huck Finn" was an instant hit with critics and readers, although some found it vulgar and offensive, and unsuitable for young readers because of Huck's poor grammar and bad manners. The objection of New York's Brooklyn Public Library: "Huck not only itched but scratched, and... he said 'sweat' when he should have said 'perspiration."' The public library in Concord, Massachusetts, removed it from shelves in 1885. "People just thought it was in bad taste," says Leslie Wilson, Concord's library archivist. By 1892, it was back.
Such opposition has made it one of the most challenged books in American literature, said Carol Brey-Casiano, president of the American Library Association, who was happy to learn about "My Jim."
"It provides an alternate point of view, that Jim was a real person, he had hopes and dreams like everyone else," she said. "This is an opportunity to look historically at some of the attitudes in our nation."
Black Issues' Dodson agreed. "I didn't think 'Huck Finn' was a bad book, but I do see it ('My Jim') basically as filling out the story, making him more human."
