My Jim (12 page)

A CONVERSATION WITH NANCY RAWLES

How did the idea for
My Jim
emerge?

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.

What was the biggest challenge you faced writing
My Jim
?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

READER’S GROUP GUIDE

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

Written in the great literary tradition of novels of American slavery, from
Beloved
to
The Known World, My Jim
is a moving recasting of one of the most controversial characters in American literature,
Huckleberry Finn
’s Jim. His story is told through the eyes of his wife, Sadie Watkins, who mines her memory for the tale of the unquenchable love of her life. Faced with the prospect of being sold away from her and their children, Jim escapes down the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck, and Sadie is suddenly alone. Worried about her children, convinced her husband is dead, reviled as a witch, and punished for Jim’s escape, Sadie’s will and her enduring love for her husband animate her life and see her through to freedom.

This guide is designed to help direct your reading group’s discussion of Nancy Rawles’s powerful, eloquent novel.

FOR DISCUSSION

Have you read
Huckleberry Finn
? How does
My Jim
alter your interpretation of that classic’s themes and attitudes? Is Sadie’s Jim the same man as Huck’s?

After a fever, Jim becomes a “seer” who is able to predict the future. Do you believe he could really do this, or was there some other explanation for his accuracy? How did his ability to “see” help him and his fellow slaves?

Throughout the novel, small items—a button, a bowl, a knife—take on totemic significance. Discuss what each item meant to Sadie, and why such things became so important. Which one do you think was most important to her? Is there a similarly significant item in your own life?

The colloquial language in
My Jim
is reflective of a slave woman’s scant education, and at times challenging to understand. How did this affect your reading of the novel? In what ways are Marianne’s sections different from Sadie’s? Would it have been as successful if it had been written in standard English?

Discuss the Mississippi River’s power in the lives of slaves. How does it serve as a metaphor? What did it mean to Sadie, and to Jim?

Throughout the novel, superstitions and religion are treated with nearly equal reverence. Why do you think that is?

Marianne Libre has a choice—to leave with Chas, or to stay with Sadie. Why does she have such a difficult time making a decision? On page 14, Sadie says to her, “You scared to love cause you scared to lose.” How did Sadie’s experience with Jim enable her to understand that so clearly?

What function do the Marianne sections serve to the novel? How might it have been different if it were purely Sadie’s voice?

On page 17 Sadie says to Marianne, “Cant lets you go off to no prairie less you got your family with you.” Discuss the significance of the memory quilt Sadie and Marianne sew.

Where did Sadie find pleasure in her life? Was it real pleasure?

For slaves, the definition of “family” was by necessity different from what free people considered it. Who was Sadie’s family? What about her children? Jim?

Why didn’t Jim try to take Sadie with him when he ran? What were her feelings about him leaving? How would you have felt to be left behind in slavery?

How does this novel compare to other slave accounts you may have read, both fictional and nonfiction? What does it remind you of?

How does reading
My Jim
affect your thinking about race relations today?

Although the novel is entitled
My Jim,
is it really Jim’s story?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My Jim
was a difficult book to write. Fortunately I had much help from spirits, angels, scholars, and artists.

MY SPIRITS

My first debt is to my ancestors, to the ones who endured and the ones who did not, to the ones who wrought good and the ones who did not. As a writer, I am grateful for their stories, even the painful ones.

In order to find an approach to writing this novel, I revisited the nineteenth-century slave narratives by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, Olauduh Equiano, William and Ellen Craft, and Harriet Jacobs and scoured the histories of former slaves recorded by artists, writers, photographers, and social scientists in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, a group of scholars that included Zora Neale Hurston. In addition to those who lived these stories and brought them to the light, I owe a debt to historians such as Arna Bontemps who would not let them die. I came to love these penultimate American stories due to the passion of teachers who insisted I read them.

I join those around the world who seek to end the brutal practice of holding bodies captive, starving spirits, and stealing labor. I honor past, present, and future guardians of human rights for recording, publishing, and broadcasting the worst of human deeds and for working so passionately to bring an end to them. From Sojourner Truth and Henry Highland Garnett to Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses, from Tecumseh and Adario to César Chavez and Dolores Huerta, from Anti-Slavery International and the American Friends Service Committee to Human Rights Watch and Médecins sans Frontières, I take my inspiration.

MY ANGELS

I doubt this project would have succeeded without the tremendous support I received from angels at every step along the way.

For her infectious belief in my creative endeavors, Robin Rawles is without peer. If not for her, I would not be.

My Jim
could not have been conceived without the loving kindness of Martine and Nadine Pierre-Louis, who gave of their considerable wisdom and talents. Thank you to Nadine for her help with lyrics and her ideas for the presentation of the book.

For her support and enthusiasm the whole way through, I thank Marla Durden. Our meetings sustained me through difficult times and joyous ones as well.

If not for the love and generosity of Sheila Arthur, I don’t know that
My Jim
would have seen the light of day. From crucial help with research and organization to project development and documentation, at no stage did I lack for brilliant and insightful companionship.

Writing partner Barbara Thomas helped me, as always, to put my work in context and to rethink my life as an artist.

Tim Noonan is an angel for many. I am blessed that he occasionally visits me, as I am grateful for the faith of all the Noonans.

Cheryl Alexander lent her invaluable support, superior knowledge, and enduring friendship.

Lois Finzel donated her compassion and intelligence, along with her tremendous integrity.

For lending her poet’s eye, keen mind, and open heart, I am ever grateful to Kathryn Ritchie, who convinced me that the difference between red and maroon is no trivial matter and that I need to recheck my facts and mind my words for the many readers more learned than I.

Thank you to writer and teacher Linda Brown for reading an early draft of
My Jim
and for sending me her spirited comments, especially
“My Jim
better be
Our Jim.”

For their early and enthusiastic support for the idea of
My
Jim,
I am indebted to Jim Baum, Kathy Lusher, Karen McFarland, Amanda Mecke, Dave Mosley, and Jane Schwab.

For important and timely support as the project developed, I thank Anna Balint, Kay Dendy, Nancy Emery, Lisa Montgomery, Patricia Picou-Green, Niki Riley, and Dee Thierry.

Thank you to Lorine Huffman for her memories of tobacco farming and to Whittnee Chen for putting me in touch with her beloved Great, not to mention her fabulous book club.

Joyce and Clay Dennison, Nicki Edson, and Anne Mulherkar provided me with opportunities to talk to important people about important things. The thoughtful and inquisitive gathering of writers and readers at Allied Arts in Yakima did much to encourage and challenge me, as did the Conversations on Race Book Club at St. Thérèse Catholic Church in Seattle and the students, teachers, and staff of the Powerful Writers Program.

Carmen Ufret-Vincenty, Leah Bui, Laurie Rostad, and their families helped me tend to my most important work. I am hugely indebted, especially to the Santana family. Life is made richer by Maple. Thank you to all the angels who hang around that place.

Dr. Allen-Agbro and Dr. Pierre-Louis tended to body and spirit during a vulnerable time. I am enormously grateful to the two of them and to all the doctors who shared their deep wisdom about the essence of words and beings: Christine Coe, Anne Ganley, Cathy Johnson, Jason LaChance, Frank Lioe, Jennifer Melville, Libby Parsinen, Marion Winniers, and Joseph Zimmer.

As always, I have been greatly aided in my efforts by the love of the Rawles and Domingue families in Los Angeles, the Rawls of Chicago, and the Pierre-Louis and Guenneguez families in Seattle. They bolstered me at just the right moments, as did longtime friends Teri Lewis, Kayoko Miyagi, Mary Ellen O’Connell, and Maureen Sweeney. A special note of thanks goes to my community of artists and friends on Lopez and Waldron Islands and in Yakima and Bellingham.

MY SCHOLARS

Information about slavery, past and present, is readily available from the Library of Congress, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New Press, PBS, NPR, HBO, BBC, the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Museums, university presses, children’s books, and everywhere you look.

New scholarship emerging about the lives of individual American slaves makes it possible to trace names and stories that had been hidden from view. In May 2002, two months after I got the idea for
My Jim,
I was fortunate enough to attend a conference on slavery at the University of Washington. I owe a debt of gratitude to Stephanie Camp and to all the brilliant historians who presented there.

I would have been lacking in confidence without the support of historian Sharla M. Fett, whose book
Working Cures:
Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
was of enormous help to me. Her belief in
My Jim
lifted me, and I am most grateful for her thoughtful reading of the manuscript.

I wanted
My Jim
to follow history as closely as fictionally possible. Along the way, I was inspired and educated by the works of many exceptional scholars. Works by historians Sterling Stuckey, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Quintard Taylor, Andrew Ward, Ted Tunnell, and Ron Powers were especially important to me.

I am grateful to Alan Miller and Leorah Abouav-Zilberman at Berkeley High School for their willingness to teach
My Jim
to their students. I am awed by all the preparation and scholarship involved in their work.

It was by presenting notes and sketches of
My Jim
to Sue Broder’s students at John Muir in Seattle that I came to realize how the stories of slaves engage the minds and hearts of children everywhere. To those brave students and all the others who have taught me so much about life over the years, I hope this book can begin to repay you.

To the first scholars in my life, Ann Marie and Manfred Rawles, I owe a tremendous love of knowledge and an unwavering faith in my own opinions, which some would say is unwarranted. Of course, they would be wrong.

Of all the wonderful scholars who have influenced me on my writer’s journey, Evaline Kruse was the foremost. I also acknowledge the exquisite influence of Steve Carter, C. Bernard Jackson, Linda Walsh Jenkins, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Freddy Paine.

MY ARTISTS

Tina Hoggatt read the first draft of
My Jim
and offered her criticism and support. For her brilliant vision of the art for
My Jim,
I am ever in her debt.
My Jim
was conceived as an illustrated book but I had no power to make that happen. It was Tina who made the quilt a reality. She could not have done so without the accomplished hands of Nancy Gibson, Ann Milliam, and Cynthia Milliam. Thank you to Jim Watkins and Carl Beck for leading us to their genius. Thanks to Marilyn McCormick for sharing her expertise and to Bernetta Branch for imagining the beautiful backing and working to bring it all together.

This project owes a debt to the master quilters of Gees Bend, Alabama, whose work helped me envision a grand-mother telling her granddaughter a story as they shared the intimacy of quiltmaking. At the time I was completing the first draft of
My Jim,
the Whitney Museum’s marvelous exhibition “The Quilts of Gees Bend” was sending art lovers across the country into states of ecstatic discovery. I benefited greatly from the stories of love and art that have come to us from these remarkable women.

Visual artists Alicia Galindo, Daniel Minter, Lyn McCracken, John Mifsud, Maureen O’Neill, Kim Powell, Sudeshna Sengupta, Jim Smith, Barbara Earl Thomas, and Inye Wokoma blessed me with their amazing creations. Thank you to Maureen for her magnanimous spirit, which guided me to Cathy and Jim. A special note of thanks to Hugh Kenny. Love and thanks to Monica Spooner-Jordan for her faith and prayers and for bringing us Sadie.

While writing
My Jim,
the rhythms of traditional American music were in my ears. Original music found its way into the studio through the grace of Edree Allen-Agbro, Scott Bartlett, Carlene Brown, Mark Broyard, Dennis Cahill, Robert Louis Cooper, Felicia Loud, Ellen Finn, Hilliard Greene, Charles Hiestand, Julie Mainstone, Stephen Michael Newby, Venise Jones-Poole, Cathy Sims, Larry Sims, and Laura Wall.

Thank you to Carletta Carrington Wilson for sharing with us her powerfully evocative poem, “Alphabet of the Captured.” A special thank you to Nadine and Veronica for their thoughtful interview.

My strong feeling that
My Jim
needed actors to bring it to life was heard, received, and fulfilled by Valerie Curtis-Newton, who I consider to be one of the finest talents in American theater. I was fortunate to have the enthusiastic support of all those involved with the Hansberry Project at ACT Theatre in Seattle. I am particularly grateful for the dynamism that Vivian Phillips and Susan Trapnell bring to their every endeavor.

Important project support came from Artist Trust, the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, Jack Straw Productions, the Seattle Office of Cultural Resources, and the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. Elliott Bay Book Company lent hands and hearts to this effort, as did Book It Repertory Theatre and Langston Hughes Cultural Arts Center. I am grateful to everyone who helped me get the word out.

When care is taken with books, authors, and ideas, publishing pays tribute to its origins in the book arts. I am most grateful to Crown Publishers for taking on this project. I acknowledge all the people who worked on My Jim, especially Christopher Jackson. His elegant goodness, his knowledge of history and literature, his mile-a-minute brain were all I could have asked for. Much gratitude is owed to Genoveva Llosa for trying to keep track of Chris and for helping to shepherd this manuscript through production.

Victoria Sanders of Victoria Sanders & Associates was my guide from the beginning. I thank her and Di Ann for their enthusiasm, savoir-faire, and continuing belief in all things good. Thanks to Imani Wilson for lending her considerable influence during those crucial early days and to Benee Knauer for sorting us all out.

Continuous blessings to all the good folks who helped me in Hannibal, especially Richard and Diane Hammon of the Stone School Inn Bed & Breakfast. Richard’s sourdough pancakes and enthusiasm for local history were a rare treat.

Lastly, I am indebted to Samuel Clemens, without whom this work would have been unthinkable.

Nancy Rawles, July 2004