My Jim
A Novel
by Nancy Rawles

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 192
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 140005401X
Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Nancy Rawles is an award-winning novelist and playwright. Her novel Love Like Gumbo was the recipient of the American Book Award. She lives in Seattle.

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Q: How did the idea for My Jim emerge?

NR: For many years I have been interested in the continuing debate over whether or not to teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high schools and middle schools. As with any book we continue to teach more than a century after it was written, there are lessons in it for today. I felt it was time for a literary response to Jim. In Huckleberry Finn, we learn who Jim was and who he later became to Huck, but that’s a limited view. Who was he to his family and community? Who was he to his wife? I wanted to continue to expand the discussion of Jim. As My Jim developed, it became more of the story of Jim’s wife. In many ways, Huckleberry Finn is more about Jim than it is about Huck. And My Jim is more about Sadie, Jim’s wife, than it is about Jim.

Q: What was the biggest challenge you faced writing My Jim?

NR: My most difficult task was deciding how to tell the story. I studied many slave narratives and interviews with former slaves. I decided to take from both forms¯the harrowing, suspenseful narratives and the spare, heartbreaking oral histories¯with two important differences: Mine is a narrative that doesn’t end in escape, and it is told to an intimate as opposed to an interviewer. My Jim is a story told by Sadie, Jim’s wife, to her granddaughter by another marriage, Marianne. The two of them are making a quilt for Marianne to take with her if she decides to go west with her young love, a buffalo soldier named Chas Freeman. Because Marianne was taught her letters by her mother, who had learned in the Reconstruction schools for freedmen, and because she’s picked up additional lessons along the way, she is able to record her grandmother’s story. She makes mistakes in subject and verb agreement and her punctuation is limited, but otherwise her writing is pretty good.

Q: What are your feelings about the character of Jim and Mark Twain’s treatment of him?

NR: I believe Mark Twain wanted to make his story primarily about Jim but didn’t feel he could get away with it. So he wrote the adventures of Huck and Jim, two side-by-side stories of vulnerable and brutalized people escaping a world of man-made violence and cruelty and journeying down a wild and treacherous river. In Huckleberry Finn, when Huck finds Jim crying because he misses his family, he realizes his companion is a loving husband and father. This realization is what leads to Huck’s change of heart and turns him into an unlikely accomplice to Jim’s crime of freedom. It is this freedom that is central to My Jim, a freedom that results in the loss of family, the very loss that Jim is trying to avoid by escaping. Huckleberry Finn is a difficult book because it talks out of both sides of its mouth. I believe Mark Twain was making a strong point about Jim’s humanity at a time¯the end of Reconstruction¯when racism had reached a level of absurdity so violent and distorted that the humanity of Southern whites was a pressing international question. So Twain is making a case for Huck as well as for Jim. Ultimately, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be read many ways; I like to read it for its study of freedom and confinement.

Q: In My Jim, Sadie tells the story of her early life with Jim, revealing along the way the value of the broken objects she has carried with her from slavery to freedom. Where did you get the inspiration for these objects and for the quilt?

NR: Several years ago, I attended a symposium about slavery at the University of Washington in which one of the presenters spoke about how slaves owned so little that the little they owned became hugely important to them. The inspiration for the objects did not come to me until several months after the conference, but the conference planted the seed.

Q: What role does history play in your writing and your life?

NR: All my writing is deeply rooted in history. From a play about the 1969 assassination of Seattle civil rights leader Edwin T. Pratt to a novel about a family struggling with the legacy of the 1965 Watts riots, my books and plays are steeped in the defining events of their times and places. I believe the past informs the present. My Jim is my first work set in nineteenth-century America. It tells the story of the family left behind when Jim makes his famous run for freedom on the Mississippi River in the company of an impoverished and abused white child. It references passages from that famous story along with events that took place in Missouri before the Civil War, some of which greatly influenced the young Samuel Clemens. In writing about Jim’s story, I wanted to write about life for one family in this pre—Civil War era as well as in post-Reconstruction Louisiana. I also wanted to write about enduring love existing under the most unbearable of circumstances. Though the characters in My Jim are fictional, their stories are inspired by the true stories of countless men, women, and children held captive in a young nation whose leaders had pledged an end to tyranny.

Q: What kind of research did you do in preparation for writing My Jim?

NR: I read a lot, and in the fall of 2003 I journeyed to Hannibal, Missouri, to learn something about the world of the young Samuel Clemens and the fictional Jim. Mark Twain based his characters on people who impressed him in childhood, and Jim is no exception. A favorite storyteller on his uncle’s farm is said to be the model for Jim’s character, but the real-life model of the adolescent boy aiding a runaway slave is Bence Blankenship, the older brother of Tom Blankenship, a childhood friend of Samuel Clemens who was the inspiration for the character of Huck. Bence befriended and fed an escaped slave named Nerium Todd who was hiding on Sny Island in the Mississippi not far from Hannibal. The relationship lasted for weeks. Later, when on a fishing expedition to Sny Island, the boys stopped to play in Bird Slough and came upon the mutilated corpse of Nerium Todd in the mire. He had been hunted down and chased into the swamp by woodcutters. I think Huckleberry Finn is Twain’s fantasy about what might have been in a world more humane than the one he grew up in.

Q: What do you hope readers will get out of My Jim?

NR: My Jim is an effort to marry recent scholarship about the lives of individual slaves with a popular American myth that speaks to the core of human relationships. It is a book that I hope will shed light on the amazing ability of some individuals to continue to love and honor themselves in the face of profound dishonor and continual danger. This story repeats itself countless times every day all over the world. I took inspiration from newspaper stories and war photography as well as from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he recounts his experiences in a concentration camp. The miracle is that anyone at all can make it through horrific experiences of war and slavery and genocide with the ability to love. I am a great believer in love. I don’t see how we can transcend our cruelest history without it.



Excerpted from My Jim © Copyright 2010 by Nancy Rawles. Reprinted with permission by Three Rivers Press. All rights reserved.

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