New book tackles the legend of Jim from Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"

A new book unpacks Jim in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" — a fictional enslaved Black man who is one of the most memorable characters in American Literature. Why it matters: For more than a century, Jim has been a source of sympathy, ridicule, anger, and protest due to the Black dialect he uses throughout the novel, but scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin says that he's been misunderstood.The big picture: "Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade," released last month by Yale University Press, comes out amid renewed interest in the Twain character. Percival Everett recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, "James," which reimagines Jim from an illiterate enslaved man as often portrayed to a savvy and literate soul who has more agency. Fishkin tells Axios she wanted to explore how we've viewed Jim throughout the decades and how he has shaped American culture.The text in Twain's classic hasn't changed throughout the years, "but we've changed," said Fishkin, one of the world's top Twain scholars.Catch up quick: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" tells the story of Huck, a young, uneducated white boy, and Jim, an escaped slave, as they travel together down the Mississippi River on a raft.The pair must avoid mobs of slave hunters and robbers along their journey and develop a sense of care for one another.The book uses racist epithets of the time, and Jim speaks in a language that critics say today resembles offensive minstrel shows in the late 1800s — all of which have generated demands for the novel to be banned.Yes, but: Fishkin says Twain was being subversive in the use of Jim's dialect and criticizing all the racist stereotypes with a humanized portrayal."Jim is the smartest character in the book. It's a mistake to assume he's there to be ridiculed. In fact, he becomes a father to Huck," says Fishkin, who wrote the 1993 literature critic classic, "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voice."Fishkin says Jim is a complex character who is really the first Black father portrayed in American literature. Zoom in: In her new book, Fishkin takes on the historical myths and models of Black men in post-Civil War America.She then gives us a rundown of the debates of Jim and the novel's use of racist language that have generated pushback from liberals and conservatives.Fishkin then presents the reader with an innovative exercise in one chapter, exploring what Jim would say about everything in his own dialect. She ends with a lesson on how some high school teachers are presenting the book today and what lessons can be learned when the book "is taught correctly."Bottom line: Fishkin has provided us with a fascinating and nuanced deep dive into one of the most debated characters in American Literature, who continues to surface amid our modern debates about race today.

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