Based on the timeless story of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his slave Jim, this novel by the USC professor of English dramatizes the life of the slave, Jim. Down and back up the Mississippi River, Huckleberry and the runaway slave lose each other several times, only to be reunited in unlikely ways.
The author uses the delirium of a rattlesnake bite poisoning to introduce a conversation with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke about slavery and equality. The conversations are riddled with the illiterate slang of the southern negro, sometimes deliberately contrived.
Parts of the story accurately reflect the horrid reality of being a slave in the antebellum south in the 1850s-always in hiding, fearing lynching or hanging, starvation, near-drowning on makeshift rafts, and subsisting on catfish and berries. The geography can be confusing if one is not familiar with the earlier story, but such places as Jackson Island are real, and it is not really necessary to have read or recall the earlier classic.
There are some great quotes. “It is a horrible world. White people try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we go to heaven. My question is, Will they be there? If so, I may make other arrangements.”
“I ain’t never seen two fellas talk so much and say so little.”
Of Norman, a man of ambiguous colour, “He had been able to speak slave, but it was possible a crazy white man could have learned it. Then it hit me that it didn’t make any difference whether he was white or black, and what did that mean anyway.”
Jim’s intelligence, cunning and wit shines through in this telling of his story, and makes a mockery of any anti-black racism.
4.5/5
Thanks, Din.
The Passionate Reader 