Rewriting Mark Twain, Recovering (Un)hegemonic Black Voices: Nancy Rawles’s My Jim

Abstract

Mark Twain scholarship has extensively discussed race from the (failed) inter-racial friendship between Huck and Jim to racial injustice to white privileges since the publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884. Although it is often neglected by Twain scholars, I argue that Twain’s narratological tactic of intentionally avoiding direct references to legal and political issues of the antebellum South with regards to slave capital and the slave trade is to be under criticism. The black voice, whether it is Jim or other almost non-existent black characters, is too often unseen and unheard in his story. Twain’s controversial rendition of Jim and his neglect of other black voices is thus problematic, especially when they are once created within the story. While he focuses more critically on his socio-cultural sketch of the antebellum South through the lens of a naïve young white narrator, Twain almost forgets that he once created one interesting black character, Jim, only showing him randomly to the readers during Huck’s journey on the Mississippi. As a critical response to Twain’s neglect, Nancy Rawles imaginatively rewrites Jim’s story and critically responds to Twain’s fragmentary portrayal of Jim and other black characters in her 2005 novel, My Jim. Taking the form of Jim’s wife’s telling her life to her granddaughter, Rawles de-hegemonizes the single voice of Huckleberry Finn and has once the marginalized African American (female) characters speak out their stories. In doing so, Rawles attempts to historicize African American slave history from the perspective of those who survived slavery without running away.